Page 246 of Slashed Bonds

“What did he say to you.”

“That they don’t claim me. That they never wanted me. That I’d never have been picked.” I say it the way Theo said it, flat, so Cassian hears the register. “And I asked him if he’d said that while he was coming in me.”

Something at the corner of his mouth. Not a smirk. A thing a smirk would be if it were a weapon.

“And what did you say to him. After.”

“Tick tock, Buttercup.”

A long breath out through his nose.

“I told him his time was coming. I told him when we put them in the ground he’d wish he’d burned the hut with me in it. And then I told him we don’t play to win.” I find his eyes. “We play to ruin. I said it to his face, Cassian, and I watched him look over my shoulder for his boys and not find them.”

“Killian’s boys.”

“Dox’s. Killian’s. The phone’s in his jacket. He’ll show you with coffee, he said, because you should be sitting down.”

Cassian’s hand starts moving in my hair again. Slower.

“Seven days,” he says.

“Seven days.”

Seven days to a neutral sheet at the Civic downtown, twelve thousand seats, a building neither of us has skated in, which Roz says is the point. Six days to a gala in a hotel ballroom where a woman with green contacts is going to wait for ink to dry on a marriage certificate and then set a room on fire. And somewhere in those seven days, a kid with a cereal bowl is going to get the thing that passes for justice in this conference, which is a phone with his name in it in the right hands.

Cassian’s hands. With coffee. Sitting down.

“He’s going to come to that dot angry.”

“He’s going to come to that dot breathing through his mouth, and you’re going to have the puck on Dubois’s stick before his lungs are full.” I touch the four letters. “And on the far side, Dorian’s going to slide, and I’m going to be standing where he was going. And the building’s going to hear it.”

“And then?”

“And then Killian does whatever Killian’s been drawing in that notebook for a week that he thinks nobody’s seen.”

That gets a sound out of him. Almost a laugh.

“He thinks nobody’s seen.”

“He thinks a lot of things. He thinks melatonin gummies are a reasonable solution to a jealous goalie.”

Nikolai makes a sound.

From the far side. A word, in Russian, slurred and furious even asleep, and his cuffed hand comes up an inch and takes Killian’s with it, and Killian’s face tucks harder into his shoulder without waking, and the hand goes back down.

Whatever that word was, it had Killian’s name in it. I’m going to learn Russian. I’ve decided. Lessard can put it on the chart.

“He’s not wrong,” Cassian says, and looks past me at the cuffs, and the almost-laugh becomes one.

That gets the smirk out of him. The real one, the one that happens at the corner of his mouth and doesn’t go anywhere else, and his hand keeps moving through my hair like a brush working through silk, patient, from the root to the end and back.

Nobody’s brushed my hair since my mother. I’m not going to say that out loud. I’m going to lie here and let it happen.

“You went to the dot yesterday,” I say. “Roz told Maddie. Six in the morning, a bucket of pucks, a hundred drops.”

“A hundred and twenty.”

“And?”