Page 278 of Slashed Bonds

Staring at me.

In disbelief. His mouth’s open a quarter inch, the way Theo’s opens before a draw, except on him it’s not a tell, it’s a boy who’s walked in on something and hasn’t decided what it is yet.

Here it comes. The anger. The disgust. Some flavor of the thing I’ve been bracing for since a boardroom. Say it. Get it over with. I’ve got twelve minutes before I’m supposed to be on a bench.

I wait for it.

It doesn’t come.

What comes, instead, into those eyes, the two shades of them under the mask, is shock. Pure. And behind the shock, trickling in like light under a door, a thing I don’t have a name for because I’ve never been on the receiving end of it.

Excitement.

Twinkling. There’s no other word and I’d fight anyone who offered one.

“You’re fucking lying.”

He says it to Viper. Then to me. Then to the stick in Viper’s hand.

“She’s pregnant? Oh, fucking hell.” A step into the room, pads clacking. “That had better be my baby. Because I know it’ll piss Cassian off that I’m first.”

He’s—

He’s happy. He’s standing in a washroom in forty pounds of gear twelve minutes before a semifinal and he’s happy, and he’s already competing about it.

My cheeks go hotter than the fever. I can feel it climb. And I don’t know if it’s the relief, the plain animal relief of understanding that the man in the door isn’t angry, that he’s the opposite of angry, that he’s already picked a side in an argument about whose it is. Or if it’s the other thing. The thing underneath. The slow dawning fact that I am, impossibly, inevitably, miraculously, with four men in the building who put a drug in my neck to make sure I never would be⁠—

Carrying.

A child. In me. Now.

My eyes roll back.

I feel them go. And I let them.

For once in my life, in a stall at the Civic with my best friends and a goalie in a doorway, I let myself lose one.

Because fuck. I’ve finally met my match in surprises.

CHAPTER 44

The First Chord

~CASSIAN~

“Morrigan’s out.”

Nikolai says it and he’s already got a hand in my jersey and the other in Killian’s, hauling, pads clacking, and we’re both looking at him like he’s lost the last of what he had, because we’re in the tunnel of the Civic Arena with nine minutes to the anthem and he’s dragging two of his starting skaters toward a supply closet.

Out. What does out mean. Out of the room. Out of the building. Out⁠—

Halloran catches it from the bench door. Roz is beside him with one eyebrow going up the way it does when she’s decided to let a thing happen and bill us for it later, and I hold up a hand to both of them with the fingers spread.

Five.

Then I’m lugged into the visitors’ room with Killian in tow and the door bangs behind us.

The room’s empty. Everyone’s in the tunnel or on the bench. Twenty-one stalls with twenty-one bags in them and the whiteboard with the lineup I wrote Monday night and the red note under it, and Nikolai spins us both to face him with his mask pushed up and his hair flat under it and a look on him I’ve seen in a crease and nowhere else.