Page 64 of Slashed Bonds

The face isn’t empty. It’s load-bearing.

Cash learned his version in a family that raised him to be a portrait and punished him when he moved. Niko learned his in rink corridors, at fifteen, from men who called him a freak with his father standing right there.

Three men who went quiet for three reasons and found each other.

And now a fourth, standing at the far end of the bench, who went quiet for a reason I don’t know yet.

Yet.

Hell, even the dog fits.

He’s on the other side of the bench, being loved on by half the second line, with Greenie’s stick pinned under one paw and the blade chewed to a fringe. He took it off the rack while Greenie was filming, and nobody stopped him, because nobody wanted to be the one who tried.

Eighty pounds of something between a husky and a bear. One eye blue. One eye brown, with an X carved through it that healed white.

Heterochromia.

The word floats up from somewhere. And behind it, unbidden, Nikolai’s eyes, which do a thing in certain light that I’ve never mentioned to him. One reads a shade darker than the other when the arena lights come up. Barely. You’d have to be looking.

I’m always looking.

It’s not affection. I want that clear. It’s inventory.

I know that Niko’s cycle runs twenty-three days, and that on day nineteen he stops sleeping and starts photographing things, and that on day twenty-two he texts a masked woman and disappears for a night, and that on day twenty-three he’s the best goaltender in the country again.

I know Cash sleeps four hours on game nights, six after a loss, and reads statistics until two in the morning in glasses he’d rather die than be seen in.

I know which of Greenie’s chirps are affection and which are fear.

I know my own numbers too.

The dosage that keeps me level. The dosage that turns me into something that answers to my name and isn’t me. I know the difference to the milligram, and I know Cash keeps the bottle in his room, not mine, and I’ve never once asked him to give it back.

The Niko arrangement keeps me off the higher number. That’s the truth Cash turns a blind eye to. It isn’t romance. It’s structural.

So when I say I’m looking at the Omega, I mean I’m building a file.

She stood off-square to the lobby door. She flinched when Nik reached behind him and covered it by moving faster. Her scent contracts under threat rather than expanding. She wiped her lipstick before she skated. She favors her right leg on the first three strides and then stops favoring it, which means the leg works but the memory of it not working is still in there.

And her arms.

Four ridges each.

Same angle. Same length. A pattern.

I know a pattern when I see one. Someone measured those.

The dog looks at me across the bench, and I look at the dog.

I get the distinct impression we’ve each filed the other under later.

Greenie’s on his feet, retrieving his phone from where it skidded, checking the screen instead of his skull.

“Did that record? Tell me that recorded.”

“Nobody’s going to see it,” Cash says. “We don’t have anyone to cut it.”

That’s true, and it’s a sore spot.