Page 280 of Slashed Bonds

Killian. Already moving, pads toward the door, and I’m a step behind him with no idea where she is and total certainty I’d find her in this building by scent alone in under a minute.

Nikolai stops us.

Both arms out, blocker and glove, across the door like a goalie across a crease, and he says a thing I’ve never once heard him say in four years.

“Nah. Use your brains, men. Not your cocks and your hearts.”

We stop.

Sense. Out of him. Nine minutes before a semifinal with his Omega unconscious somewhere. I’m going to remember this and I’m going to hold it over him for the rest of his life.

“Val, Viper, and Dox already have her. They’re taking her to the private clinic, the Omega one, Lessard’s, to get checked. They had to sneak her out the service dock because the paparazzi are at every door in this building. She’s not alone. She’s with the three people on earth I’d trust with her if it wasn’t us.”

The service dock. A woman carried out of a semifinal through the loading bay in a hoodie by a pole dancer, a pharmacist, and a man who runs the Underground, while twelve thousand people wait to boo her.

“Is it that serious?”

I demand it. Because the picture in my head now is a different one, a hospital bed and a chart, and the arithmetic of standing on a sheet of ice taking a draw while our Omega lies in a clinic two towns over having found out, an hour ago, that she’s carrying our child.

“Fuck this.” I say it flat. “We’re not playing. Not on that ice.”

“No, we’re not,” Nikolai agrees. “But we can’t execute shit if we leave now. The building’s full. The cameras are live. If three of us walk out that door nine minutes before the anthem, the story tonight is the Vipers quit on a semifinal, and everything Viper built last night gets buried under it by morning.” He looks at me. “We do the puck drop. We stand there for the anthem and the drop. Then Coach swaps us, and Greenie and the twins and the rest of them cover the rest, and we’re in a truck inside fifteen minutes. I’m confident in them. You should be. You built them.”

He’s right. God help me, he’s right, and he’s right about the second thing too.

“But the puck drop is the Omegas’,” Killian says.

The new rule. Added this morning, in a memo from the league that came in at seven with the review announcement, in the same email, like a man apologizing with one hand and pointing with the other. In recognition of the conference’s commitment to Omega participation, the opening faceoff of all postseason games will be taken by each team’s rostered Omega.

Optics. A photograph for the front of a program. Two Omegas at a dot while the men who do the playing stand behind them.

“And we’re out of an Omega,” Killian finishes.

“Not quite.”

Nikolai smirks.

The smirk from the ring. The one that means he’s seen something coming before it arrived, which for a goalie is the whole job.

“Come on. We’ve got to give Coach and Roz the small details so they can swap us out.”

I nod.

And I decide. The way you decide on a dot, in the quarter second before the hand drops, that the rest of the building doesn’t exist. I can concentrate for nine minutes. I can secure what needs securing. And then I’m going to be at her side with a hand on her stomach and nothing in the world between.

We go.

Roz takes it with her eyebrow still up. Halloran takes it with his hands in his jacket and his face the color of the stone in our fireplace, and when Nikolai gets to the word pregnant Halloran closes his eyes for one full second and opens them and says, “Puck drop. Then you’re gone. I’ll tell the officials you’ve got a medical.”

“It’s not a lie,” Nikolai says.

“I know it’s not a lie. I’ve coached for nine years. I know what a medical looks like on a man’s face.”

And then we’re on the ice.

In position. The three of us, with the rest of the first unit, on a neutral sheet under lights that make the whole thing look like a photograph of itself, and the Civic’s sold to the roof. Twelve thousand people in a building that belongs to nobody, making a sound that’s half ours and half theirs and some portion in the middle that read a newspaper this morning and came to watch a family’s face.

The east end’s going soft already. I can see it from here, the sheen by the benches where the duct runs. It doesn’t matter. We won’t be on it long enough to use it.