Page 284 of Slashed Bonds

Skating. Six of them, in uniform, in skates, which means somebody told them an hour ago to bring skates, coming out of both tunnels at once and crossing the sheet with the practiced ease of men who played in high school, and they have her surrounded at the dot before she’s finished her sentence.

“Naomi Vance. You’re under arrest for the intentional attempted murder of an Omega and the murder of her unborn child. You have the right to remain silent⁠—“

I stop listening.

The words go past me. I’m standing on a sheet of ice with my heart going the way it went at the bottom of a pile at Ashford, and the thing I’m understanding, in my body, in the place where I keep the things my father taught me without meaning to, is what she went through.

It’s one thing to hear it. From her, on a hill, with her face in my hoodie. From Killian, reading a phone across a kitchen table with coffee. From a note under a rock.

It’s another to see it.

With my own eyes. A girl with bright eyes braced in a doorway asking a man to stop and the man not stopping.

Something’s come unlocked.

In me. I feel the bolt go. The thing that puts donors through doors and defensemen through glass, the thing my father hunted four men with over three years with time between, and it’s awake and it’s standing in my chest demanding a thing that has one name.

Justice. Not the kind in handcuffs. The other kind.

I find Killian.

Slowly. Turning my head on the dot, and he’s at the point where he’s supposed to be, with his stick across his thighs and his face doing the thing it does when he’s read a wall and found where it’ll come down, and he looks back at me, and we’re on the same page. The same line of the same page.

Then I look behind me.

At the net. At the man in it.

And it’s not Nikolai.

It’s Nik. In control. Standing in the crease with his mask up and his eyes gone to the two flat shades they go to at minute four, except he’s not Switched, he’s not gone, he’s standing there with his hands at his sides breathing slow and looking at the woman in handcuffs at center ice the way a lake looks at a man who’s about to fall through it.

He found the still. He found it on purpose, in the worst moment of his life, and he’s standing in it. And the thing standing in it with him wants blood.

That seals it.

Three of us. On a sheet. In agreement without a word.

The PA comes on. A voice that isn’t Naomi’s, isn’t anyone’s, a man from the league reading from a card with his hand shaking so hard I can hear the paper.

“The semifinal is officially postponed until further notice. The opposing team is officially disqualified, due to the removal and arrest of their rostered Omega. This game will resume in a matter of weeks, once the investigation has concluded. Please exit the arena in an orderly⁠—“

Nobody exits.

Twelve thousand people stand in a building that belongs to nobody and watch a woman in a white jersey get skated off the ice between six men in uniform, with her painted helmet left on the dot where she dropped it, and four men in Hellsing Ross white standing on their blue line not moving, not looking at each other, not looking at anything.

Theo’s looking at the tunnel.

Still. The one nobody came out of. And I understand, watching his face, that he’s waiting for her. That some part of him stood by a desk five years ago and has been standing there since, and tonight he came to a dot to see her face and got Maddie’s, and a screen, and his own silence played back to him at a volume that got into his teeth.

Good. Stand there. Wait. She’s not coming. She’s in a clinic two towns over with a hand on her stomach and three people around her who’d kill for her, and when she comes back it won’t be to look at you.

Maddie’s still at the dot.

Pink stick planted. Helmet up. Watching the woman in cuffs go with the sinister thing still on her face and her phone, I notice, in her glove, held low, recording.

The first chord.

That’s what this was. Not the symphony. One note, struck hard enough to ring through a building, with a hundred more written behind it in a notebook in Killian’s room and a folder on my counter and a laptop in a van.