Page 158 of Slashed Bonds

The staff had the drains going on the floor below. I could hear the pumps through the boards, that and the drip from every head in the ceiling, and Knox somewhere down the corridor investigating a building he’d decided belonged to him. And in the middle of all of it a woman in borrowed red gloves was learning, in real time, how to hurt a man on purpose instead of by accident.

I’ve never been prouder of anything I’ve taught.

Round four was ugly. Mine. I let the Switch show a quarter inch, because she’d asked for real and I wanted to see what she’d do with real, and she met it. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t step back. Caught my wrist on a swing that would’ve put a lesser woman through the ropes and turned it, used it, put her hip under mine and drove up, and I was airborne for a half second that felt like a full one.

“Who taught you that?”

“A pond.” Breathing hard. “I was eleven.”

Her father. The forehead kiss. The man she doesn’t name.

I didn’t ask. I went again.

Round five she put me down.

I’d like to say I let her. I’d like that to be true for the sake of the man in me who’s going to stand in a crease tonight and be the last line between Ashford and a scoreboard, and it isn’t true. She took the spot I was going to be in. She arrived there a half second before I did, with her weight low and her shoulder set, and I hit her like a man hitting a wall he’d been told was a curtain.

Then I was on my back.

Looking at a ceiling full of dead sprinkler heads, with my ribs singing and my jaw humming and the whole wet building going quiet around the sound of her breathing.

And she’s sitting on me.

Astride my hips, in triumph, breathless, smelling far too delicious for the good of my heart, with her gloves still on. Dark red, the pair from the Omega wing’s rack, the pair I bought in that color two years ago without ever admitting to myself why, and they’ve done a number on me.

Three to the ribs that I’ll feel in the crease tonight. One to the jaw I didn’t see.

She looks down at me.

Hair stuck to her face in black and red ropes. Lips bruised from mine. Tank soaked through, chest heaving, an absolute array of a mess from the crown of her head to the gloves on her fists, and…

Fuck. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful in my life.

I’ve accepted it. The fate. I’m a goner for this woman, and I was a goner before I had her name, and the name made it worse. But lying here with her weight on me and her scent coming down on my face in waves, I don’t think I’m going to last the morning without being inside her.

She grins.

Teeth. The piercing in her lip catching the light as the grin spreads, the lip ring I’ve turned with my tongue in the dark more times than I could count, now in daylight, now mine to look at.

“Ready to declare defeat?”

I chuckle. It hurts my ribs.

“I was ready to be dead five rounds ago.” I let my head fall back on the mat. “But go off, Queen.”

She makes a sound.

A snicker. Small, bright, caught in her nose, the cutest noise I’ve ever heard a human make, and it does something to my chest that isn’t about her weight.

Is this what she was like? Before. The good-girl version of this. Giddy, with a braid, on a bench, laughing at something a boy said.

I’d give a season to have seen it. I’d give a season to be the reason it’s back.

Tonight’s a game. First real one, not a scrimmage, not a money game at Hollow Creek against men who think a puck’s a weapon. Ashford, under their lights, on their bad ice, with a Beta in net who gives you the top of the frame and a crowd that’s going to say the word Omega like it’s a slur. Her name on a sheet for the first time in five years.

And she’s going to walk out of a tunnel into that with red lipstick under a mask and a check I taught her this morning in her hips.

My pre-game is ruined. The ritual’s shot. I’m supposed to eat the same thing I ate before the last win and lace left-right-left and not touch anyone’s stick until I’ve touched my own posts, and instead I’ve been thrown by an Omega five times before eight in the morning and I’m lying in a puddle thinking about tapping her blade before the anthem.