Page 94 of Slashed Bonds

The lawyers are a Vane resource. They come with the name, the way the trust does and the expectations did, and I’ve spent three years using them for exactly the things my father would have forbidden if he’d known. He doesn’t know. He stopped asking what I do with the family’s money the same week I stopped being the son he’d built.

Some things you inherit. Some things you take with you when you leave.

Born twenty-three years ago in a town I’ve never heard of. Youth hockey from six. National program by fifteen, captaining her age group by sixteen, the kind of trajectory that ends in a professional contract and a highlight package. Then, five years ago, a competitive integrity ruling. Anomalous designation panel. An unlisted pheromonal modulator. Three lines, no signature, permanent ineligibility for national-tier play.

That same week, her family.

Detained under a fraud investigation that was never charged and never closed. Her mother listed as whereabouts unconfirmed. Two minors placed in protective care. A house fire on a street called Alder Row, cause undetermined, total loss.

And she vanishes.

Not into a program, not into a hospital I can find.

She’s nowhere for four years, and then she’s on Sully’s money-game roster at a barn in the county under a name that isn’t a name.

Here’s what the record doesn’t have.

It doesn’t have who filed the integrity complaint. It doesn’t have who initiated the fraud investigation. It doesn’t have why a family gets detained and a house burns in the same week a nineteen-year-old prodigy fails a designation panel she’d passed eleven times before.

And it doesn’t have a pack.

That’s the gap I keep putting my thumb in.

A national-tier Omega at seventeen, eighteen, bonded early to travel with her team, because that’s what they do to Omegas in that program and everyone knows it.

She’d have had one.

It’d be on a registry.

And there’s nothing.

Nothing on a registry means somebody had it removed. Removal takes signatures.

I’ve got one lead.

Pulled off a five-year-old tournament photo where she’s on a bench with four men in matching jackets, and the jackets are from a program that plays in our division, and I’ve had our lawyer put a name to the program.

Hellsing Ross.

The photo’s on my phone. I’ve looked at it more than I’ve looked at the text.

She’s on the end of the bench with her helmet in her lap and a braid over one shoulder. She’s laughing at something the man beside her said. Not the smirk. Not the wall.

An open-mouthed, eyes-shut, whole-face laugh, the kind you can’t fake and can’t take back.

I didn’t recognize her.

That’s the truth.

I had to check the roster caption twice.

Whoever that girl was, she’s not the woman on the track. Somebody took that laugh out of her the way you’d take a tooth.

The four men in the jackets are looking at the camera.

All of them. Good posture, good teeth, the easy chins of boys who’ve been told since birth that the room was theirs.

One of them has his hand on the back of her neck.