Page 1 of Slashed Bonds

Prologue: Already Dead

~MORRIGAN~

Two lines.

The first one is faint enough to argue with.

The second one isn’t.

I sit on the closed lid of a toilet in the visitors’ washroom of Halbrook Arena, holding a strip of plastic that rearranged my entire future in under three minutes.

Three minutes.

A penalty kill lasts longer than that.

I’ve killed off five-on-threes with a separated shoulder and skated off laughing.

This took less time than a minor.

The fluorescent tube above the mirror hums at a pitch that lives behind my molars. Somebody left a haze of gardenia perfume against the tile, sweet and thick and expensive, and my body reads it as a threat.

Everything today is a threat.

My hands won’t hold still. That’s the part I can’t forgive. A man paid to write about hands once called mine the quietest in the women’s national program. These hands have taken draws against Alphas forty pounds heavier and won them clean.

Now they shake like they belong to somebody else.

I press my thumb over the result window as though covering it might make it negotiate.

It doesn’t.

Six weeks. Maybe seven.

Late September, after we beat Kingsmere in overtime and all four of them carried me off the ice on their shoulders like a trophy. I was so stupidly, thoroughly loved that night I’d have signed anything anyone put in front of me.

I did sign something, as it turns out.

I stand. My knees hold, which is a surprise.

The cupboard under the sink has extra hand towels and a dented tin of ice melt somebody shelved in the wrong decade. I set the test behind the tin, careful, gentle, as though it’s sleeping.

Then I slide the door shut on it.

The mirror hands me back a girl with tears sliding down both cheeks and no expression whatsoever to go with them.

My face hasn’t caught up to my eyes.

It’s the strangest thing to witness. I watch myself cry like weather through a window.

Eighteen years old. Hair the color of wet ink, scraped back tight enough to ache, because that ache is mine and I decide it. Mouth swelling where I’ve been chewing on it. Skin gone the shade of arena lighting.

Both forearms wrapped elbow to wrist in gauze the clinic changed this morning with a briskness that told me exactly how many questions they planned to ask.

None. They planned to ask none.

Under the wrapping, four long diagonals across each arm. Deep enough that the doctor said the word tendon twice while looking at my chart instead of my face.

They itch as they knit. They pull when I flex.