Page 2 of Slashed Bonds

They’re the reason I haven’t been allowed to shower in three days.

That’s the humiliation nobody warns you about.

Not the ruined career. Not the burning house.

This one sits underneath all of it, small and constant and mine.

I stink.

Not to anyone else. Betas would need to be standing close. But I can smell myself, and an Omega’s own scent souring is its own private torture. Like hearing a recording of your voice and hating it, except the recording is your body, and the body won’t stop broadcasting.

Black cherry. Crushed plum. Night jasmine, with smoked vanilla underneath it.

That’s mine.

That’s what my mother said the house smelled like when I came in from practice with frost still in my hair.

Now the cherry has turned toward the edge of rot. The jasmine has curdled. Underneath it all sits wet copper and antiseptic and a fear I can’t scrub off, because scrubbing takes water, and water takes arms that aren’t held together with thread.

I breathe in through my nose. Four count. Out slow through my teeth.

Coach Renaud taught me that at eleven, back when I was small enough that the older girls used to run me into the boards to hear the sound it made.

Breathe before the whistle. Not after.

After is too late. After is when the game already has you.

Fifteen minutes. A quick meeting. Then I make a plan.

Because there’s always a plan.

Down two in the third, you don’t play the scoreboard. You play the next shift, then the one after it, and the arithmetic sorts itself out when you refuse to stop working.

I’ve believed that since I was six years old and my father laced my skates in a parking lot at minus twenty, because the pipes at Sheldrake Community Centre had frozen and the season didn’t care.

My father.

The lump arrives with the efficiency of a slapshot.

I swallow around it. I don’t follow the thought where it wants to go.

That thought has no floor.

Here’s the ledger as of eleven forty this morning, which is when the world ended and then had the discourtesy to keep going.

My mother’s whereabouts are listed as unconfirmed. That’s the word they used. Unconfirmed. A word for weather systems and rumors, not for a woman who alphabetizes her spice rack.

Wren is fourteen. Corbin is eleven. Both have been taken into what the letter calls protective transfer, pending placement in a secure residence.

Allegedly.

That word does a great deal of heavy lifting for four syllables.

And my father is⁠—

Breathe before the whistle.

I lost my roster spot at nine this morning.