Page 269 of Slashed Bonds

It was. It is. It’s standing in a parking lot being idiotic about a seagull.

Wow.

So this is what it’s like to have a sense of community.

CHAPTER 42

Eyes On The Prize

~MORRIGAN~

“Morrigan! Are you excited for the semifinals?”

“Blackridge Vipers! Look here!”

“Can we get an exclusive? Thirty seconds! Captain, over here!”

We walk the carpet the way we’d skate onto a sheet.

That’s the only way I know how to do it. Locked in. Chin level. Eyes on a point at the far end of the room that nobody else can see, with the lights going off on both sides of me like a building being shelled and a hundred voices wanting a piece of my face. Game night. Except the ice is a red runner down the middle of a hotel ballroom and the crowd’s in black tie and the reporters are the kind who’d never been in a rink before a pink-haired Omega put a hip check on their feeds.

Fake. Half of them. The other half want to be the first to ask me about the doping and get it on tape. Smile for neither.

I don’t smile. I give the cameras what I give a goalie, which is a face that doesn’t tell them where the shot’s going.

The dress is the story. I knew it would be.

Not the black one. The black one’s on its hanger in my room with the tag still on it, because on Monday night Maddie came into my room with her phone held out like a summons and a video playing on it of a woman in a studio in a city I’ve never been to, an Omega, building a gown from bolt to body in six minutes of cuts. A series. The kind that goes viral between a Tuesday and a Wednesday. And the gown in the video was dark red.

My red. The shade on my mouth before every game. The lipstick under the mask. She’d built the whole dress around a color she’d seen in a clip of my face.

Maddie didn’t have to argue. I had nothing to lose and a color to answer to, and the designer had already sent it, overnight, with a note in handwriting I couldn’t read and a lipstick in the box that matched the dress exactly.

So I’m in it. Dark red, floor-length, fitted through the body, with a back that’s there this time but open from the shoulder blades down in a long V, and the fabric moves like water that’s been told to behave. The monarch on my left hand is healed enough to show. The two small ones on my finger are still settling. I let them show too.

Every lens in this room is on a gown an Omega made for an Omega, and the woman wearing it was a druggie in a headline five years ago. Let them write that.

We’re here to be seen.

That’s the whole brief, laid out by Roz on the bus in a voice that didn’t invite amendments. Walk the carpet. Sip something. Stand near the right people while she and Halloran work the room for sponsors and the three programs that have asked about putting their players on our roster if we make the final. Be charming for ninety minutes. Then leave.

An hour and a half of present, and then home, and then sleep, because tomorrow night there’s a neutral sheet downtown with twelve thousand seats around it and four men on the other side of a dot.

I sip.

A mocktail, in a wine glass, the color of the dress. Pomegranate and something bitter under it, and the bartender had looked at the four of us ordering virgin everything with the expression of a man watching a hockey team turn down free alcohol and deciding he’d misheard.

Val’s orders. No alcohol for a week after the chair. The ink and the drink don’t like each other, she’d said, wiping down the machine. You’ll go wild. Not fun wild. Seagull wild.

We’d found that out in a parking lot with energy drinks, which in hindsight was stupid as fuck, because there’s a reason Nikolai’s serve put a bird on the asphalt and the reason was caffeine on top of whatever’s been bleeding out of our hands into our blood since Friday. We’d felt like we were growing wings. We’d felt like we could clear the roof of the grocery store from a standing start.

So mocktails. For now. We can play the aesthetic in a ballroom and drink like a hockey team after tomorrow.

After tomorrow, the bets are off. All of them. Because none of the four of us has any intention of going to the final. I’d like that understood by whoever’s keeping the record. Cassian doesn’t. Nikolai doesn’t. Killian doesn’t. We’ve been carrying a team of rejects up a bracket for two months to make a point, and the point gets made on a dot tomorrow night in front of every camera in the conference, and after that the trophy can sit in whichever glass case wants it.

We play to ruin. I said it to his face. Tomorrow I say it to his hands.

Monday was the Civic.