Page 281 of Slashed Bonds

Hellsing Ross is across from us.

Theo on the dot. Where I’d have been facing him if the rule hadn’t come down. Breathing through his nose, I notice, with a jaw that’s been clenched since a ballroom, and his eyes aren’t on me. They’re on the tunnel. On a door nobody’s come out of yet.

Rhys and Dorian on the wings. Silas in the far net, deep, already dropped a touch in his stance like he’s expecting a shot before the anthem.

And in front of Theo, at the dot, with a referee beside her holding the puck, is Naomi.

In a jersey. Hellsing Ross white, number 1, with a helmet that’s been painted to match her blowout and a stick she’s holding like a parasol. She’s grinning. The grin from Meg’s. The one she wore walking across a hockey store toward a woman holding the gloves she’d wanted.

She read the paper too. She’s standing on a dot with a grin on her face the morning after her father’s name went in the business pages, and the grin says she thinks she’s won something. The grin says she thinks the Omega who was supposed to face her got cold feet.

The chatter’s chaotic. The whole building’s waiting for our Omega to come out of the tunnel, and the longer the door stays shut the louder it gets, a sound building on itself the way a wave does before it finds the wall.

The ref lifts a hand. Opens his mouth.

And our Omega skates onto the ice.

Fast.

Faster than Mori. I see that before I see anything else, because speed is the first thing I read on a body, and this body comes out of the tunnel and across the blue line at a pace that makes the sound in the building change pitch. Low. Compact. Blades biting in a rhythm I don’t know. Some of the crowd’s noticed. I can hear the noticing, a ripple going up the lower bowl as people who’ve watched the spin on their phones two million times look at this skater and see a different engine.

She reaches the dot across from Naomi in what feels like a blink.

And stops.

A hockey stop. The loud kind. Both blades sideways with the whole weight behind them, and a wave of ice comes up off the sheet in a white sheet of its own and goes directly into Naomi Vance’s face.

Naomi splutters.

Spits. Blinks. Ice in her lashes and down the neck of her jersey, and a sound comes out of the skater across from her that I know. Not Mori’s. A giggle. High, bright, caught in the nose.

I know that laugh. I’ve heard it in my kitchen every morning for seven weeks.

I don’t have to confirm it. Jude confirms it for all of us, from the bench, in a voice that carries over twelve thousand people because he’s never once in his life known how to be quiet.

“MADDIE? What the FUCK are you doing on the ice?”

She smirks.

Lifts the front of her helmet with a gloved hand, and under it is a pink-haired Omega with her eyes lined black and a wink aimed at the bench like a puck.

“I’m the Blackridge Vipers’ new Omega for the remainder of the season, baby.” Loud enough for the glass. “So get used to it. You know I love me some spotlight.”

The people who heard it lose their minds.

Surprise, excitement, the lower bowl going up like a wave hitting the wall at last, and the people who didn’t hear it are losing their minds at the people who did, and in the middle of it all an Omega nobody’s seen on a sheet of ice in her life gets down over a dot like she was born on it.

Roz. Roz filed her this morning. The paperwork went in with the review, in the same email, and nobody at the league read past the first page because the first page said Vance. She’s been on our roster for eleven hours and nobody knew but Roz and Maddie and, I’d bet my father’s money, Viper.

She played wing in the east until she was seventeen. Mean. She hid it. She’s not hiding it.

Her stick’s neon pink.

I’d like that on record. A stick so pink it reads as a light source under the Civic’s lamps, taped in pink, with a pink scrunchie around the knob where other players put a cap. The league’s said nothing. The ref’s looked at it twice and said nothing. Either it’s within regulation or nobody in a striped shirt has the spine to tell a woman in that position that it isn’t.

Naomi’s recovered enough to huff.

“You’re going to be losers either way.” She wipes her face with the back of a glove. “Now that your coward bestie’s out of commission. What happened? She get cold feet?”