Page 293 of Slashed Bonds

His scream goes over the rail with him.

It goes down, and down, and then it stops, and what stops it is a sound I’ve heard before, from the inside, a crack with a wet thing in the middle of it, bone meeting stone from twenty feet, and then the quiet.

An eerie blanket of it. Over the office, the balcony, the river. Knox at the rail with his front paws on the stone, looking down, panting, then turning to look at me with the X over his eye and his tongue out like he’s asking whether that was good.

Good boy. The best boy. Come here.

He comes.

I stand there with my hand on his head and three men behind me and a thing in my stomach that’s six weeks along, and I breathe the river air that’s come in through the open door, and I let the quiet sit.

Vengeance is always bittersweet, just like how rejection sometimes…is a sign of protection.

Epilogue: Rises From The Ashes

~MADDIE~

"IGOT YOU MATCHING PEGUIN SHOES SO YOUR PREGNANT ASS CAN WADDLE BACK AND FORTH FROM THE WASHROOM WHEN YOU'RE TWINKLING PEEING EVERY FIVE SECONDS!"

"And this is how you're losing friends," Viper concludes while Mori is rolling her eyes looking like she's about to make sure I catch these fucking hands.

The penguin shoes fit in my palm.

Both of them. Side by side, soles touching, black felt bodies with white felt bellies and two orange beaks that somebody in a factory sewed on crooked, which is the part I love most. Size zero. Made for a foot that doesn’t exist yet. I’ve been holding them for four minutes by the clock over the kitchenette and I’ve not put them down because if I put them down the twins will find them and the twins have already lost the cake knife.

Penguins. Tiny flightless birds for a tiny flightless person.

“You’re staring at shoes again,” Viper says.

“They’re perfect shoes.”

“They’re socks with ambition.”

She lifts the camera anyway. Not at the shoes. At the lounge across the room, the green velvet one, where the guest of honor is asleep with her mouth open and one hand on the hill of her stomach and an eighty-pound dog across her ankles like a draft stopper. The shutter goes. Soft. Viper’s got the mechanical click turned off because she says the sound wakes pregnant women and sleeping dogs and she doesn’t want to find out which is worse.

Mori doesn’t stir.

Six and a half months of her. The black hair longer now, past her shoulders, the piercing in her lip the same but the face around it gone softer in a way she’d stab you for pointing out. Her cardigan’s Nikolai’s. Her socks are Killian’s, gray wool, pulled up over leggings. The monarch on the back of her left hand sits on the hill of her stomach and rides it when she breathes.

The third floor of Volkov Athletic has never looked like this and I’ve done it on purpose. Pink streamers from the pipe conduits. White balloons tied to the squat rack. A banner the twins hung on the diagonal that says WELCOME TINY VIPER in letters I cut out myself at two in the morning, because nobody sells a banner for a baby whose parents don’t know the sex, and we don’t know the sex, and we don’t know the sex for one reason.

“Hey.” I cross to the lounge. Crouch. Set a penguin on the hill. It wobbles. Knox lifts his head, notes me, lowers it. “Hey. Malice. Wake up for one second. I have a question for our niece.”

One eye opens. Gray-blue, flat as a rink.

“Not a niece.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Neither do you.”

“I would know,” I say, “if somebody had let the ultrasound lady finish her sentence.”

The other eye opens. There it is. The thing under the softness, the blade in the velvet, the look that went down a flight of stairs five years ago and came back up as something that walks into a woman’s office and leaves her a wheelchair for a souvenir.

“I’m going to tell this story one more time,” Mori says, to the ceiling, “and then I’m going to put it on a card and hand the card to people. We went in. Four of us. She put the gel on. She found the heartbeat, which, by the way, was the sound of my life rearranging itself in real time, and nobody in that room cared, because Nikolai asked whether the machine could see which way it was facing and Cassian said it doesn’t matter which way it’s facing and Nikolai said it matters to the goalie, and Cassian said it’s not a goalie, and Nikolai said how would you know, you’ve never been in net in your life, and the next thing I know there’s a tech with a lanyard asking two grown men to leave a medical facility.”

“And Killian?”