Page 296 of Slashed Bonds

“The league called,” I say. Pink voice. Bouncy. “My paperwork went through. I’m official. Confirmed Omega for Blackridge for the pro season.”

His face does the thing. Lights up from the bottom like a sign.

“Maddie. That’s⁠—“

“There’s a catch.”

“There’s always a catch.”

“They need a registered packship on the file. The new rules. Omega can’t be rostered without an Alpha attachment on paper.” I take the plate out of his hands. Hold his gaze over it. “So I told them my Alphas would call Monday.”

He goes still.

“Your…”

“You, Ansel, Aurel.” I lick frosting off my fingers. “Unless one of you’s got a better offer. Do you have a better offer, Jude?”

Jude Greenwich swallows. His throat moves. The twentieth freckle shows, and he’s not laughing, so I was wrong about that one, it shows when he’s afraid, too.

“We haven’t, you’ve never said⁠—“

“I’m saying.”

“We’ve not even—Maddie, you’ve never let any of us⁠—“

“I have a particular way of doing things.” I hand him back the plate. “The paperwork first. The rest after. Monday, Dana at the registrar’s office. Bring the twins. Wear the suit from the gala. Don’t wear it like you lost a bet.”

I pat his chest. Twice. Go past him up the stairs toward the party and feel him stand there on the landing behind me breathing like a man who’s been hit by a bus made of cotton candy.

Boys. Good ones.

Big, soft, fast, with hands that pass the puck wherever I’ll be before I get there, and a thing in their eyes when they look at me that I’ve never seen pointed at me in my life.

I’m going to take such good care of them.

I’m going to ruin them so gently they’ll thank me.

* * *

Mori opens the shoes last.

I watch her do it from across the room with a plastic cup of pink punch in my hand, Viper’s camera going quietly beside me. Mori on the lounge with the box in her lap. The dog’s chin on her knee. Nikolai on the arm of the lounge with his hand in her hair. Cassian and Killian on the floor in front of her with the crib finished behind them, finally, listing a half inch to the left. She peels the pink paper off with her nails, lifts the lid, and stops.

Her face does a thing I’ll keep.

Not the flat look. Not the blade. The face of a woman who was told at twenty-one by a man with a drug and a syringe that she’d never hold a thing this small, and is holding a thing this small, two of them, black felt with white bellies and crooked orange beaks.

“Maddie,” she says.

“They’re socks with ambition.”

“They’re penguins.”

“Tiny flightless birds,” I say, “for a tiny flightless person.”

She looks across the room at me. Over the heads. Through the balloons. And nods, once, the way she nodded at me from the ice the night I took the draw, a nod that says I see you, I see what you are, I’ve chosen not to say it, and I lift my cup to her like a toast.

Then I take my bag off the squat rack and go up.