Page 45 of Slashed Bonds

The scent of bergamot and leather arrives behind me. Close. Heat at my back, where I never let anyone stand, and I’m so wrecked I don’t even flinch.

“Looks like Knox found his Daddy,” he whispers in delight.

A sinister tone of delight. The kind that tells me I’m either about to be eaten alive or thrown to the wolves.

And being thrown to the wolves would have been the better option…

CHAPTER 5

Good Fucking Boy

~CASSIAN~

Isee the connection in under a second.

That’s my job. Faceoffs are decided before the puck drops, by who read the linesman’s hand first, and I’ve spent my whole life reading hands.

So when the Omega who looked me dead in the eye on the concrete and told me to wait in line stops in the middle of our lobby like she’s been shot, and her eyes lock on my goaltender, I don’t need a replay.

They know each other.

That’s the first read.

The second arrives right behind it, in the way her spine goes rigid and then, a heartbeat later, starts to give. In the way Niko’s scent flips from clean ice to something hot enough to fog the trophy case.

They’ve fucked.

That’s the problem. Not the woman. Not the badassery she’s projecting at me like an energy shot to the sternum, which I’d be lying if I said didn’t land.

The problem is who she’s looking at.

Niko is the best player on this team.

I’m the captain and proud of it, but I can admit Niko is the epiphany of this entire team. I’ll say it out loud, and I’ll say it in a room with cameras. Not because he defends that net like his life depends on it, though he does, and not because he’s built a style of goaltending so arrogant it should be illegal, though he has.

It’s because the moment the puck drops, he locks in.

I’ve watched him take a shot to the mask at ninety miles an hour, spit blood onto the ice, and reset without blinking. Watched him track a puck through four bodies in a scramble and get a pad on it while everyone else in the building was still looking for it. He does not get rattled. He does not get tired. He does not get bored, which for Niko is the real miracle, since Niko gets bored of oxygen.

There is one thing on this earth capable of turning him into a stupid mess of emotional wreckage.

Women.

Or there would be, if a single one of them had ever held his attention long enough to do damage.

His attention span isn’t in hell.

It’s below hell, past the crust and the mantle, somewhere down in the magma where the lava is, and even the lava would struggle to find it.

Except for one addiction.

Two years running.

Malice.

That’s the only thing I know about her. A name that isn’t a name. A masked woman he fucks at the Underground to keep the feral part of him from eating the rest.

Typical for us, if I’m being honest. Hockey pumps so much adrenaline into a body that it has to go somewhere afterward, and it goes one of two places.