Page 47 of Slashed Bonds

One. In our own end, on my backhand, against a kid I’d beaten eleven times that night, because my hands and legs were done and the linesman dropped it a quarter second early. The puck goes back to their point. The shot comes through a screen Killian was a half stride from clearing.

Niko never saw it.

Fifty-two of fifty-three, and the season ended on the one that mattered, on a faceoff I should have won in my sleep.

I’ve watched the tape more times than I’ve watched anything in my life.

So when Roz came to me in June and said she was going to find somebody who could take draws when I couldn’t, somebody who’d win the ones I’d lose, I told her to go find a unicorn and stopped listening.

And she went and drove three hours each way to some barn for eleven weeks.

Roz’s favorite pick. Standing in my lobby. Kissing my goaltender.

Which is the part that’s going to keep me up tonight, if the rest of it doesn’t.

Because I saw her on the concrete before I saw her face. Saw the way she’d angled herself to the door. Not square to it, the way people stand when they’re waiting to go in, but off to the side, one shoulder toward the wall, so that whatever came out would have to turn to find her.

A player’s habit. A goalie’s habit, if I’m being precise. You never stand square to the thing that’s about to come at you.

Then the door opened, and she moved before it finished opening, and she was already out of the lane by the time the sponsor hit the ground.

Nobody taught her that on a rink.

I’m going to need to renegotiate my opinion of Roz.

The scent in the lobby is changing.

Hers first. I’d catalogued it on the concrete, because that’s a habit that’s won me faceoffs. Black cherry, dark enough to taste. Crushed plum. Jasmine underneath, the kind that only opens at night. And running through the whole thing, a cold thread that has no business in an Omega’s scent and belongs there anyway.

Winter. She smells like a rink at closing time.

Now that scent is contracting. Pulling inward, tighter and tighter, away from the air, like a hand closing on a coin.

I’ve never seen an Omega do that.

They broadcast. That’s the whole design. Fear leaks, want leaks, an Omega in distress is a smoke signal you can read from the parking lot.

Hers goes silent.

Somebody taught her to do that. Or something did.

And Niko is moving.

The dog slides out of his grasp, distracted by the trophy case, floor polish, or the fact that he’s a dog, and Niko crosses the eight feet between himself and this woman without looking away from her face, and I’ve seen that walk once before.

He walks like that in the last minute of a one-goal game. Toward the puck. As though the rest of the building has been removed for his convenience.

Then he kisses her.

Not a greeting. Not a hello. He takes her face in both hands, pads still strapped to his legs, and kisses her like his life depends on it, which, given the man’s chemistry, it might. That fucker and his bipolar biology could well be fighting for control of the steering wheel right now.

She tenses.

Full body. Every line of her locks, the way an animal locks when a hand comes down from above and it hasn’t decided yet whether to bite.

She wasn’t expecting his dramatics. Nobody ever is.

Then it goes.