Page 77 of Slashed Bonds

The dispute, if you can call it that, is between two parties.

On one side: Greenie and his pack. Two rooms open on the third floor of Viper House, a spare bunk, a couch they’d offer with a straight face.

On the other: me. Cash. Killian. The whole second floor, with the room at the end of the hall that’s been empty since we moved in and that Cash has kept clean for four years without ever saying why.

We weren’t going to lose this.

Viper House is a converted carriage house behind the athletics complex, three floors of stone and oak that the university gave the hockey program when it ran out of dorms willing to take us.

Twenty-two men. One kitchen.

Rules posted on the fridge that nobody reads and one rule nobody needs posted, which is that the second floor belongs to the three of us.

Four rooms up there.

Three occupied.

The fourth is at the end of the hall, facing the trees, and it’s been empty since move-in freshman year. Cash keeps it. Not locked. Clean. He goes in on Sundays with a cloth and the vacuum and he comes out and he doesn’t talk about it, and Killian and I have never once asked, because there are questions you don’t ask a man who keeps a room ready for something he’s never named.

I know what it’s for. I’ve always known. We all did. We never had anyone to put in it.

Now there’s an Omega in my arm and a dog sitting on her boot, the room at the end of the hall has a purpose, and Cash is leaning on the wall across from me with his arms folded, pretending he isn’t thinking the same thing.

Because it would become a war, and I don’t lose wars when I have my eyes on the grand prize.

Right now, the grand prize is standing in my arms, smelling of black cherry and cold, with her hair still wet from the shower and a split lip she hasn’t bothered to ice.

The dog is sitting on her boot.

He’s been there since she came out of the showers. Eighty pounds of black and cream with a hockey stick chewed to a stub between his paws, and he’s watching the hallway the way I watch a crease, and every few seconds his eyes come up to me.

Not hostile. Not friendly, either.

Assessing.

He fell asleep in the locker room.

I’ve done my research on that dog. Two years of a woman who wouldn’t tell me her name, and the one thing she gave me was his, and I’ve been buying his loyalty in treats.

He has, so far, accepted every treat and given me nothing in return.

Respect. He’s got a system. I can work with a system.

My Mori.

I shouldn’t call her that. I’m aware. I’ve been aware for about six hours, ever since Roz said the name out loud at center ice and I felt it go into me like a puck into mesh.

Morrigan Vesper Crowe.

Three names. I’ve had one for two and a half years, and it wasn’t even hers, it was one I gave her. Now I’ve got the real thing.

But fuck it.

She was mine first.

I was the first to undress her. That’s not a boast. That’s a record I’d defend in a courtroom. The first to take her out of the leather and the lace, inch by inch, strap by strap, laying kisses along skin she’d been told for years was ruined. The first to put my mouth on the ridges of those forearms and feel her go rigid and then, slowly, not.

She doesn’t know what she looks like. That’s the truth I’ve been sitting on for two years.