Page 255 of Slashed Bonds

“Pilates girls don’t play around.” Maddie’s recovered enough to wipe her chin. “It’s borderline scary. They’ve got a group chat. There’s a hierarchy.”

“You’re a pilates girl.” I lift my head off my knee enough to give her a look.

She shrugs. Pink sports bra, pink shorts, pink scrunchie, a pink water bottle with her initials on it.

“Yeah. No regrets. I also bought three new matching sets this week, since apparently the twins love my flexibility.”

“Naturally they do,” Viper says, with an eye roll so complete I hear it.

Maddie giggles. Because she knows exactly what Viper’s referring to, and so do I, and so does Valerie, and the room’s abruptly full of women who’ve all seen the same clip of two identical defensemen carrying one pink Omega up a staircase like a trophy they’d won jointly.

Eight weeks. Eight weeks ago I had a door with four locks and a dog, and now I’m on a mat on the third floor of a gym a man built for me, hungover, aching in places that have names, being bullied by three women I’d die for.

I put my face back on my knee.

Getting here was its own event.

I’d come down the stairs at nine in Cassian’s hoodie with my hair in a knot and a green spider on my arm, and Maddie had been at the counter with a mug in both hands and Knox at her feet, and she’d looked at the spider and then at my neck and then at my face and said nothing for a full three seconds, which for Maddie is a filibuster.

“Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You said it with your eyebrows.”

“My eyebrows are concerned citizens.” She’d pushed a mug at me. Black, angry coffee. “Eat something. Val’s class is at eleven and she doesn’t believe in mercy.”

Knox had put his whole head in my lap and looked up at me with the X over his eye and the expression of a dog who’d spent a night alone in a house with a woman who feeds him out of nerves, and I’d fed him a piece of toast under the table, and Maddie had seen, and said nothing about that either.

Cassian had come down twenty minutes later. Showered, hoodie on, glasses off, and he’d kissed the top of my head and poured a coffee and sat down across from Killian, who’d been waiting at the end of the table with a phone that wasn’t his face-down in front of him, and I’d taken Knox and left them to it.

With coffee. Sitting down. I didn’t want to see his face when he read the second thread. I saw it anyway, through the window, from the drive. I’m going to see it for a while.

We’re on the third floor. The Omega wing of Volkov Athletic, the one with the wide shallow stairs and the slate shower I have opinions about, and this room’s at the end of it, past the gloves rack. Mirrors on two walls. Six chrome poles bolted floor to ceiling. A floor so clean I can see the ceiling lights in it. And a smell I’m learning to love, which is the smell of a room where only Omegas sweat. Nothing sharp in it. No Alpha musk going sour at the edges. Something cleaner, sweeter, a hundred different scents that don’t fight.

He built this. For a woman he didn’t have a name for. And now there are four women In It and three of them are mine.

Valerie had made us each try one spin before she’d let us stretch. To see what she was working with, she said. Maddie went first and did a thing on the pole that made Valerie’s eyebrows go up, because naturally the pilates girl has pole in her somewhere, and Viper went second and climbed it like a woman climbing out of a well, no grace, all grip, and got to the top and looked down at us like she’d been waiting there for years.

Then me.

“You’ve got a hockey grip,” Valerie said, before I’d touched the chrome. “Everyone who skates does. You hold a stick like it owes you money and then you wonder why your forearms die on a pole. Loosen the top hand. The pole’s not going anywhere. It’s bolted to a building a man owns.”

“Grip high. Hook the outside leg. Let the floor go.”

I gripped high. I hooked. I let the floor go, and the pole took me around once, slow, and the room went by in the mirror, and I understood something on the way around that I hadn’t understood from the ground.

It’s an edge. It’s the same thing. You commit your weight to a point and you trust the point and you let the rotation carry the moment. I did this on one blade in slush in front of ten thousand people and it’s the same muscle.

I came off it grinning. Valerie looked at me for a long second and said, “Who taught you to spin?” and I said, “A pond,” and she said, “That’s not an answer,” and I said, “It’s the one I’ve got,” and she let it go, and I knew she’d filed it beside Cassian’s question and Killian’s, in the growing pile of people who’d like to know.

My legs are a problem.

Not only from last night. I’d like that on record. Yesterday was two hours on the ice before any of it, Cassian running the power play for the first time with me on the half-wall and Dubois in the bumper and Killian at the point, the five of us learning a shape we’ve never had to learn because we’ve never had a power play worth building. Forty reps of the same cycle. Low to high, high to the bumper, bumper to me on the wall for the one-timer, and by rep thirty my legs had stopped asking questions and started filing complaints.

Then Dubois and I spent twenty minutes on a thing that isn’t on any whiteboard.

Him coming through the left circle on his way to the hash marks. Me on the dot. A stick blade, low, drifting a half inch too wide on the way past, finding a left glove and tapping it. Clumsy. A winger not watching where his stick goes. Twenty times, with Okonkwo standing in for a man who flinches, and by the end Okonkwo was flinching too and didn’t have an old break to blame it on.