Page 38 of Slashed Bonds

Four years of it. Four years of quiet blacklisting dressed up as scheduling conflicts, of tournament brackets that mysteriously had no room, of a program with three of the best players in the country being told to wait its turn while worse teams filled better slots.

Because we’re a problem.

Because Killian has a file. Because I once climbed the glass. Because Cash said something to a broadcaster that was accurate and unforgivable in equal measure.

And now the numbers have gone bad for them, and the ratings have gotten far worse, and a committee that couldn’t spell our name in April has sent a letter offering us a qualifying berth with conditions attached and a deadline that’s insulting.

Desperation. Summoning the worst of the worst.

They want monsters in the building because monsters sell tickets.

Works for me.

They should be careful what they let through the door.

Every string leads the same direction.

Straight to a masked woman with scarred arms and a scent like winter, who wants vengeance so badly it comes off her skin, and who has no idea I’ve already decided to hand it to her.

Let the games begin.

CHAPTER 4

Thrown To The Wolves

~MORRIGAN~

Today is not a good day.

I feel like shit, which is the baseline, but this particular flavor of shit is new, and I’ve decided it proves something.

PTSD is real. Congratulations to everyone involved.

The strange part is the giddiness riding underneath it. My stomach is turning itself inside out, my palms are wet inside my gloves, and some deranged corner of my brain is delighted, because nausea this specific means I still care.

Nobody gets nervous about a thing they’ve stopped loving.

So the fact that I’m standing in a parking lot fighting the urge to be sick means I still adore this sport. It means I love the idea of vengeance enough that walking toward the thing from my nightmares makes my body want to empty itself onto the asphalt.

The blissful joy of trauma. Truly a gift.

Knox sits on my boot and growls.

Low, steady, aimed at nothing in particular, because he can smell that I feel wrong and has decided the building is responsible. He’s been like this since we got out of the truck. Hackles up. Ears flat. The occasional glance up at me, as though checking whether I’ve come to my senses yet.

“It’s a rink,” I tell him. “You like rinks.”

The growl doesn’t stop.

Reasonable. I don’t like this one either.

Blackridge Arena rises out of the tree line like something a defense contractor designed and then abandoned. Black steel, black glass, angular in a way that seems to be picking a fight with the sky. Three stories of it. The viper insignia lit up in violet along the roofline, coiled, fanged, and expensive. The whole thing gleams under floodlights with the wet look of a car nobody’s allowed to touch.

Every arena I’ve ever loved was ugly.

Sheldrake had a leak over section C that froze into a stalactite every January. Hollow Creek is a barn with a compressor problem. Halbrook had carpet in the corridors the color of a nosebleed, and I’d give a kidney to skate there again.

This place looks like it eats programs like those for lunch.