Page 95 of Slashed Bonds

I’ve looked at that hand for a long time.

Because I know what I saw in the lobby.

I saw an Omega who’d sooner elbow a man in the jaw than let one stand behind her. I saw her scent go silent the moment a hand came near her throat. I saw a tattoo the size of my palm over the exact spot that hand is resting on in a photograph five years old.

A person doesn’t cover a place on their body with that much ink because it healed well.

Whatever happened, it happened there.

At the back of her neck.

And a boy with good teeth who had his hand on it in a tournament photo, smiling at a camera, is probably responsible for whatever destroyed the smiling girl in that photo.

I’m not going to tell her I’ve seen it.

Not yet.

There’s a difference between having a lead and having the right to say it out loud, and I’ve spent enough years on the wrong side of men who confused the two.

We play them in November.

I know them as a team. Everybody in the division does.

Big, rich, patient, a program that plays a suffocating 2-3 forecheck and wins games four-to-one by boring the other side into mistakes. They’ve been the class of the conference for five years. Their captain’s a center named Ross who reads the ice almost as well as I do and hits considerably harder, and I’ve drawn against him nine times and gone four and five.

They’ve never been to a national final.

Five years at the top of the division and never once through. That’s a program with something missing.

I forward the text to the lawyer with two words: trace it.

She’ll have a carrier and a tower by noon, and if the number’s a burner, she’ll have where the burner was bought.

Then I screenshot it and put it in a folder I’ve named, with a lack of imagination I’d criticize in anyone else, Mori.

I haven’t told anyone.

I haven’t told her.

There’s a version of this where I’m wrong, and I’ve handed a woman a nightmare for nothing, and there’s a version where I’m right, she already knows, and both versions are hers to open.

Roz texted at six.

One line, forwarded from the liaison’s office: Incident during scrimmage involving player #22. Documented. Pending review.

Teller’s arm. Documented.

A conduct file with my name on it and a woman with a clipboard deciding whether a captain who breaks a teammate’s arm for cross-checking an Omega from behind is a captain a tournament can afford.

Yes. He is. That’s the whole point of him.

I didn’t reply.

Roz didn’t expect one.

My phone buzzes.

I pull it out, and it’s a notification I don’t recognize.