Page 289 of Slashed Bonds

I don’t turn the chair.

I’m facing the window. The long one, floor to ceiling, with the balcony beyond it and the river beyond that, gone to pewter under a sky that can’t decide. Gray carpet under my boots with a pattern in it like water. A desk at my back that’s too big for anyone who isn’t trying to prove something.

Her desk. Her chair. Her carpet. My deed.

Eight days. That’s how long it’s been since a woman in a white jersey left the Civic between six men in skates, and in eight days the thing Viper called a symphony has played itself through a building, a league, a family, and a county, one timestamped movement at a time.

I’ve been in bed for most of it. Lessard’s orders, Cassian’s enforcement. A beanbag, a dog, a bowl of something within arm’s reach, and three men rotating through the room like a line change. I watched the final get scheduled from under a comforter. Blackridge, by default, against a program from the north I’ve never seen play, in three weeks, at the Civic, with a pink-haired Omega taking the opening draw and the twins on the first line and twenty-one names on a sheet with a space kept beside them for a boy with a cereal bowl.

And us in the stands. The four of us. In hoodies, with a dog, watching the thing we built skate without us. I thought that would hurt. It doesn’t. It’s the opposite of hurt and I don’t have the word yet.

Today I got out of bed. Today I put on boots and a black coat and got in a truck, because today a man was going to walk into this office looking for his wife, and the three men in the truck with me had decided, without a vote, that I’d be the one in her chair.

The lobby fountain’s running. I’d heard it from the front door, the same sound it made when I was seventeen and being walked to a sponsorship talk with a hand on my shoulder, and I’d stopped on the marble and looked at it. Somebody had put a stainless-steel dog bowl on the fountain’s rim, full, with KNOX engraved on the side in a font I recognized from a fridge shelf.

Maddie. She said she’d do it. I said I wasn’t ruling it out. She took that as a yes, because Maddie takes everything as a yes.

Knox had drunk from it on the way in, with the water of a two-story building’s fountain running behind him, and then he’d followed me up the brass stairs and lain down behind the desk at my feet, and he’s there now, under the chair, breathing, waiting, the way he waited at the top of a staircase in a gym for a sound to come up from below.

“Dorian and Silas got arrested.” He’s pacing. I can hear the carpet take him, left, right, the turn at the bookcase. “This morning. At the fucking rink. In front of the second unit. They’re going to put a warrant out on me any fucking minute. Rhys took a deal, that spineless fuck, Rhys walked into a room with a lawyer on Tuesday and hasn’t come out, and everything he knows is in a file now with my name on every page.”

A sound. Something small, a paperweight maybe, hitting the wall.

“Our companies all collapsed. All of them. In one week. The fund, the holdings, my father’s, Dorian’s father’s, the whole table. And the leaks won’t stop. Every morning there’s a new one. Every morning a different paper has a different document and every document has a timestamp.”

Viper’s timestamps. She does love a timestamp.

“I made backups.” He’s breathing like a man who’s run up a staircase, which he has. “Of everything. Edited, clean, proof I wasn’t in the room, proof I was at the rink, proof I was anywhere but where I was. Stored in three places. My house. The warehouse. The penthouse. Three places, Naomi, three, and today is the fucking day all three of them are in FLAMES.”

He stops.

I hear him stop. The carpet goes quiet, and the breathing doesn’t, and I can picture him without turning, because I’ve seen him stop like this in a kitchen on Alder Row when a thing had gone wrong that he couldn’t make go right by raising his voice. Both hands going through his hair. The jaw working.

Three fires. One morning. Somebody with a notebook full of addresses and routes decided that a man who burns a shed should learn what it’s like to lose three.

I didn’t ask who. I’ll never ask who. There are things a woman carrying a child doesn’t need to know the mechanics of, and there’s a man in my house who reads walls and finds the one that’ll come down, and I’ve decided to let that be enough.

He’d come home at four this morning smelling of nothing. That was the tell. Killian always smells of something, iron, cold, pine, smoke from a balcony, and this morning he’d come up the stairs and into the bed and put his arm over my ribs and he’d smelled of soap and nothing else, scrubbed to the skin, and I’d put my hand over his on my stomach and said nothing and he’d said nothing and we’d slept.

The shed had a chair under the handle. His three places had alarms, cameras, men. It didn’t matter. It never matters, to a man who’s decided which wall.

“Our careers are finished.”

Lower now. The pacing starts again, slower.

“Blacklisted. The league sent the letter this morning, all four of us, every program in the conference and the two above it. Even if I prove I’m innocent, even if every charge gets thrown out, I can’t be on a rink again. Any rink. Not a beer league. Hockey is my LIFE.” His voice cracks on the word and he hates that it cracks, I can hear him hate it. “They can’t reject me like this. After everything I’ve done. Everything I achieved for them. I was a prodigy at nine, Naomi. Nine. I was on a sheet before I could spell my name and they want to slash every connection I’ve got and throw me out like I never signed a thing?”

Slash. He used the word slash. He stood in a room and watched them do it to my arms and he’s using the word for a letter from the league.

“CONTRACTS!” The paperweight’s gone, so it’s something else this time, and this time it finds the vase on the credenza by the door, the tall one, Murano, and the vase goes to pieces on the gray carpet with a sound like ice giving under a skate. “I had CONTRACTS. And those assholes on the team, the ones I carried for four years, they bonded up like a fucking family the second the letter came and not one of them is going to stand up and say a word for me. Not one.”

The two men at the desk don’t flinch.

I’d like that noted. Two men in dark suits with earpieces, standing on either side of a desk that isn’t theirs with their hands folded in front of them, and a vase explodes ten feet from them and neither one blinks. They’re not the same two. The two from five years ago are in a file now too, with Rhys’s name on the deal that put them there. These are Dox’s. They came with the building, in a sense. They came with the deed and the hard drive and the three men who’d stood behind a woman in a dark green dress at a gala, and they stand the way those three stood, like furniture that could kill you.

“It can’t end like this.”

The pacing’s stopped again. He’s closer to the desk now. I can smell him from here, amber cologne gone stale, the hallway smell, and under it sweat and smoke, actual smoke, from a house or a warehouse or a penthouse.