Page 59 of Slashed Bonds

I look at the wreckage bouncing around my boots and put it together. That whole display was a display. The real hardware is in a vault somewhere, in deposit boxes, in a room with a lock, so that when one of these men loses his shit, and it’s clear that’s a when, the things that matter don’t get destroyed.

They planned for this. Somebody sat in a meeting and planned for the goalie.

He does a U-turn.

Comes stomping back toward me, fists bloodied, glass in his knuckles, face like weather.

And the captain is between us.

I didn’t see him move. One second he’s on his knees by the wreckage and the next he’s a wall, back to me, chest to Nikolai, and he’s growling.

Oh. That’s new.

It comes up from somewhere under his sternum, low, continuous, a sound I’ve only ever heard from Alphas who’d stopped pretending to be men for a minute. And his scent goes with it. The charred cedar thickens. The bergamot sharpens to something like ozone. Underneath, from nowhere, a warm roll of amber that wasn’t in it outside on the concrete.

Protective. That’s what his protective smells like.

I file it in the same place I filed his scar and the way he looked at the moth on my throat, and I don’t look at what’s in the file, because the file is getting full and I’ve been in this building for eleven minutes.

It surprises both of them.

I can see it.

Nikolai flinches. The tall one, still picking himself up off the floor, flinches too, and they look at the captain like they haven’t heard that sound come out of him in a long, long time.

“You can punch anything here,” the captain says. Slow. Dangerous. Each word set down separately. “But her. Calm it.” A pause the length of a heartbeat. “NOW.”

The silence after that is almost awkward.

Almost.

Nothing’s awkward for me anymore. Awkward requires a level of concern for other people’s comfort that I lost somewhere around the second floor. Which is why I lean out from behind the captain’s shoulder and add, into the quiet…

“And when you’re done cooling your jets, I’d like a proper welcome kiss.”

All three of them look at me.

Three different faces, three different degrees of disbelief.

And then Knox barks.

One bark, pure triumph, like he’s been waiting all night for someone to say the magic word.

He tackles me.

“Fuck!”

Because Knox forgets. He forgets he’s eighty pounds. He forgets he was sold to me as a lap dog and became a small wolf. He hits me at the hip, all joy and no brakes, and my legs do the thing they do, the thing the surgeon warned me about in that voice they use, and they fold.

Traitors. Five years of rehab and they fold for a dog.

I hit the stone on my ass with a dog on top of me and glass crunching under my palms.

There’s a specific humiliation to it that I’m not going to be able to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived it.

Five years ago I was the fastest skater on any sheet I stepped onto. I could go from a standstill to full stride in three pushes. Coaches used a word for it that I’m not going to repeat, because it’ll sound like bragging, and because the word died on a loading dock behind Halbrook Arena.

Now my legs work. That’s the miracle, and I’m grateful for it every morning in a way that makes my throat hurt.