Page 130 of Slashed Bonds

She didn’t skate. She said one of us had to stay on the ground so the other one had somewhere to land.

She’d have liked Mori. I know that the way I know a pass is coming. She’d have taken one look at the arms and the moth and the dog with the X through its eye, and she’d have made a sign.

She was sixteen. They were a pack from a program two towns over, and they’d decided, the way packs like that decide, and by the time anyone in our house knew there was a thing to know, there were two lines on a test and a girl who’d stopped laughing at dinner.

I’m not going to say the rest. Not on a path, not in my own head. There’s a room in me where it lives and the door is closed and I check the lock every night on my rounds.

What I’ll say is this. The last thing she asked me was whether I’d still come to her games. She didn’t have games. I said yes anyway.

Six feet under. With a child none of us ever got to hold. A child made out of hate and opportunity, by a pack who decided an Omega in a system that never wanted her was theirs to take, and in the end she was the one without breath.

She carried the shame. All of it. The mockery, the laughter, the taunts in a school hallway from boys who’d been told their whole lives that the room was theirs. She feared for her life. She feared for the life inside her, a life she didn’t choose, made of the worst thing that ever happened to her, and she carried both fears alone because she’d decided the rest of us shouldn’t have to.

And the pack that did it walked free.

For a while.

Until my father used every resource the name had ever accumulated to put them in the ground, one at a time, with enough time between each that the last one understood what was coming.

I was seventeen. I stopped being the son he’d built that year. He never once asked why.

The first game after, I scored four. Against a program that had nothing to do with any of it, in front of a crowd that had read the news and come to see what I’d do. I didn’t celebrate. Not once. I put the puck in the net four times and skated back to center with my face doing nothing, and a broadcaster asked me afterward whether the goals were for her, and I told him what I thought of his question in language that got me my first letter from the committee.

That’s when the tattoos started. That’s when the headphones stopped coming off. That’s when I found a track called Love Psychosis in a bad month and played it until the flame in the basement of me stopped guttering.

And that’s when I learned what a scoreboard is for. It’s a place to put something that has nowhere else to go.

And here I am. On a path. At a crossroads.

Looking at a woman I’ve known for less than a week and understanding, with the same certainty I’d feel about a puck about to drop, that I’d burn the world for her.

I’d do worse than my father ever did. And I’d use the same money to do it.

The money.

It arrives all at once, the way the good reads do.

My father’s foundation. The one he doesn’t talk about. The one the lawyers handle, that moves money to Omegas who’ve been the victim of a crime the system won’t name, quietly, no questions, no strings. Hospital bills. Recovery. A place to live. He started it the year after my sister, and he’s never once said her name in connection with it, and he’s never once needed to.

Five years ago, a nineteen-year-old Omega was dropped at a district hospital with no name, three quarters dead. Forty-one hours later, somebody had her moved to the best facility in the region and paid for a neurosurgeon.

A pack signed off. It has to be a pack.

My father is a pack of one, on paper, with a foundation and two lawyers and a daughter in the ground.

I’d bet the name. I’d bet everything with the name on it. She was one of his. One of the ones he’s notified about and pays for and never meets, because meeting them would mean looking at a face that isn’t hers.

And now I get to put my hands on that face.

The foundation’s lawyers are in a city four hours from here. The same city my father lives in. The same city where, three days ago, Killian told me a transfer to our accounts had been routed through a trust with a registered agent he wouldn’t name yet.

He knows. He’s holding it. He’s waiting to see if I get there myself.

I’ve gotten there. On a path, on my knees, with the answer in front of me shaking so hard her teeth are clicking.

My father’s been paying for her for five years. And this week he started paying for us. And he did it the day after Roz put her name on a roster, which means he’s been watching this program the whole time, waiting for the day one of his Omegas walked into his son’s building.

Patience. He’s got it. I don’t. That’s the whole difference between us and it always has been.