Page 73 of Slashed Bonds

The Trinity.

I’m the slashed Omega. That’s my file. Maddie ignites rivalry. She walks into a room and finds the fault line and puts her thumb on it, smiling, and lets everyone else do the shaking.

And Viper.

Viper is a tarantula. Slow. Patient. Venom in the veins and no interest in using it until the moment is perfect. She sits in the middle of a web she’s been spinning for years, and the web is for one purpose, which is catching anyone who tries to hurt one of us a second time.

She’s the reason I sleep at night. Some nights.

The rest of the roster’s names will take time. Twenty-two of them, and I got maybe nine tonight, but they’re all distinct, in the way of men who’ve been through something.

They wear it. That’s what I noticed. Ink up their necks and down their arms. Scars that aren’t from hockey, sitting next to scars that are. Wounds that deserve a minute of acknowledgment, and I’ll give them that minute, later, when I’ve earned the right to ask.

Which might be why this feels the way it feels.

Nobody looked at my arms tonight.

Not once. Not the way people look. Not the sideways glance and the quick correction, the flick of eyes and the studied nothing that follows. On this bench, in this room, four ridges of scar tissue across each forearm read as standard issue. A membership card.

Okonkwo has a burn up the inside of one arm, shiny and pink, that he doesn’t cover. Dubois is missing the top of his left ear. Pruitt, the kid in the backup net, has a line of small round scars along his collarbone that I recognized, and looked away from, and will not ask about.

Cash has the scar on his throat. Killian has something under the band at his neck that the band is there to cover. Nikolai has the whole map of his skin, which isn’t a scar, and which the world treats like one.

A locker room of receipts.

My slashed defects aren’t defects here.

It’s almost as if I’m carrying a badge. In my own way. Nobody demands the story. Nobody asks what happened. They see it, and they see that I wear it with the same silent pride they wear theirs, and that’s the whole conversation.

That’s the way I like it.

And then there’s the man who’s been observing me for the last eleven minutes like I’m a work of art he’s been permitted to stand near.

Nikolai.

He’s in the locker room with me.

Apparently that’s standard under this new arrangement, now that I’ve been officially accepted onto the roster. Roz pointed at a stall, told me it was mine, and told Nikolai he was on Malice duty until she said otherwise, and neither of them consulted me.

Figures.

He’s sitting on the bench across from my stall in a black hoodie, pads off, hair wet from his own shower, elbows on his knees, watching me undress with the same expression he wore watching Pruitt’s glove hand tonight.

Studying. Filing. Waiting.

Knox is asleep in the corner. That happened somewhere in hour three, when he decided the bench wasn’t going anywhere and neither was I, and he put himself down on a stack of towels behind the equipment rack and stopped watching the door.

He stopped watching the door.

Five years, and I can count on one hand the number of rooms he’s done that in. This one has twenty-two Alphas walking in and out of it and a goaltender sitting four feet from me.

I’m going to think about that later. I’m going to think about all of this later when I’m privileged the space and silence needed to review everything that occurred today.

The tryout wasn’t only successful.

It was a declaration.

I’d wondered if I still carried an ounce of skill ever since the incident.