Page 176 of Slashed Bonds

A lounge. A long low thing in dark green velvet under the window, where there’d been a bare wall two nights ago. And a fridge beside the closet, humming, with a shelf inside labeled KNOX in Killian’s square handwriting. And a lamp. And a rug, under the lounge, soft enough that I stood on it in bare feet for a full minute trying to understand who in this house kept buying me furniture while I wasn’t looking.

All three of them. Nobody’s checking with me. Nobody’s checking with each other. The room’s being built around me the way a nest is built, one twig at a time, by birds who don’t discuss it.

Cassian came up to tell me the bus was in forty. I sat down on the lounge to put my socks on. He sat down beside me to wait.

And I woke up with my face in his hoodie and his arm around me and Knox asleep against my legs, and the light had moved across the floor, and I hadn’t dreamed about a small hand or a window or anything at all.

I don’t nap. I haven’t slept in daylight since Bellwether, where sleeping in daylight meant you’d given up. I don’t curl into people. Those are facts about me the way my blood type is a fact, and both of them were wrong this afternoon on a green velvet lounge in a room I didn’t furnish.

File it. Diagnose it later. There’s a Beta in the far net who needs my attention more than my nervous system does.

Now we’re on the ice.

A line. One unit, the way we skated out, the way we’ve been skating for ten days, and I look at the crowd through the X’s over my eyes and I take inventory.

Glee, in the lower bowl. Pure. Girls my age and younger who’ve been watching a pink-haired Omega’s phone for three days and have decided we’re theirs, screaming our numbers before they know our faces. I don’t know what to do with being somebody’s. I let them.

Money, higher up. Men in the corners with their arms crossed and their phones out, not for pictures. The ones who came to Hollow Creek. The ones who put a hundred on whether the Omega would last the period and are here to put more. Waiting for us to be the joke the introduction promised.

Let them bet. Let them bet heavy.

And the ones in between. The ones who came to watch a train wreck, who’ve heard the word rejects and taken it at face value, who are already composing what they’ll say at work tomorrow about the circus that came to Ashford.

I look at them. I grin behind the mask, where nobody can see it, with the red on my mouth that nobody can see either.

Then the memory comes.

It always does. You can’t stand on a blue line under lights with a building losing its mind and not have it come, and I’d braced for it, and the bracing does nothing.

The last time.

Halbrook Arena, a conference final, a crowd like this one. Not as loud. Not as female. But full, lit, mine, and I’d stood on a blue line with a braid down my back and looked up into the stands and found them. My father in the third row with his arms crossed because he never clapped, he said clapping was for people who didn’t know what they were looking at. My mother beside him with her hands over her mouth. Wren, who was nine, standing on her seat so she could see. Corbin on my father’s shoulders with his whole fist in the air.

Proud. All four of them. Of me. Of a decade of five a.m. drives and taped sticks and a girl who’d been told what Omegas could and couldn’t do and had done it anyway.

And three weeks later a boardroom. And a window. And a fire on Alder Row. And a new name for all of them in a town I’m not told.

None of them are here.

I knew that. I’ve known it for five years. It shouldn’t pull, and it pulls, a hook under the sternum, because the stands are full and not one face in them has my eyes. Wren’s fourteen now. She’d be the age I was when a boy named Theo first said he’d heard about me. Corbin’s eleven. He wouldn’t remember the fist in the air. He’d have been told, by someone, carefully, who his sister was and what she did to them.

If they knew I was back on the ice tonight. If someone sent them a clip from Maddie’s phone. Would they want to be associated with me? Would my father uncross his arms?

I don’t know.

I don’t know, and I’m standing on Ashford’s blue line in a glowing mask with a building full of strangers who’ve decided I matter, and the four people who used to matter are a courthouse name and two photographs a year through a lawyer.

Not now.

I tuck it. I’ve had five years of practice tucking, and I’m good at it, and I fold the whole thing, the third row and the fist and the hands over the mouth, and I put it in the place behind my ribs where it lives and I close the door on it.

Because this isn’t the time to be emotional. This is game time.

And we’re not here to make a statement. The statement’s made. The masks made it, the socials made it, twenty-two rejects on a blue line in somebody else’s house made it, and a statement without a win is a costume.

We’re here to win. We’re here to prove the introduction wrong in the only language a scoreboard speaks.

The music shifts.