Page 279 of Slashed Bonds

I’m ready to drill him.

He knows the rule. Everyone in this house knows the rule. Nine minutes to a semifinal, I’m in the flow state, the place where the sheet lays out and the bodies move on it two seconds early, and you don’t put a hand in my jersey in that state unless something’s on fire.

I don’t get a syllable out.

“Mori’s pregnant.”

What.

“WELL, YES TO THE FUCKING HELL!”

Killian. Both fists up like he’s scored, pads and all, a sound out of him I’ve heard twice in four years and both times were on ice.

I’m still processing what the man said.

The words are in the room. I heard them. They went into my ears and they’re sitting in the middle of the flow state like a puck that bounced wrong, and I can’t get my stick on them.

“What?”

I need him to say it again. Not because I didn’t hear. Because the thing that reads a sheet two seconds early has stopped reading.

“Mommy.” Nikolai’s counting on his blocker. “Monarch. Malice. Morrigan.” Four fingers. “Is pregnant.”

He stares at me. Waiting. The way you wait for a man to work out a formula he’s been handed in a language he reads slowly.

Pregnant. Caesura burned the receptor and followed the pathway and shut the follicles down one by one, permanent, six-week half-life, panels buried. I read the dispensing logs myself. I read the word permanent on four charts in three hands.

And Lessard said six months before it’s steady. And Dox said right strings. And a woman in a basement put something in her hand that argues with hormones.

And she’s been asking for pickles.

A whole minute. I can feel it go. Nikolai doesn’t rush it and Killian’s stopped celebrating long enough to watch my face do whatever it’s doing, and at the end of the minute the only question that comes up out of me is the prime one.

“The sperm that won,” I say, slowly, “had better have been mine.”

“FUCK OFF.”

Nikolai laughs. The real one, the one from a car with a key in the ignition.

“I know that’s my baby. I bet it’s a girl, too. I need a princess as our first.”

“No.” Killian groans. Puts a glove over his face. “You’ll spoil the shit out of her.”

“Well, no fucking shit. That’s the point.”

And Killian and I are both groaning now, into our gloves, because the picture’s arrived. Nikolai Volkov as a father. A man who’s obsessed with his Omega when she does nothing but breathe in a room, who built a floor of a gym for her before he had her name, who handed her a spoon in a lounge full of people and said blow on it first. Now give that man a child.

We’re fucked. Society’s fucked. There’s going to be a two-year-old with a goalie’s reflexes and a wardrobe from three continents and nobody in this house with the spine to say no to her.

“Wait.”

I come back. The sheet’s starting to lay out again, and the first thing on it is the word he opened with.

“What do you mean, she’s out?”

“She passed the fuck out.”

“Then why the fuck are we HERE?”