Page 120 of Slashed Bonds

I close my eyes.

Who knows what Monarch has in store for us…but I dare hope, in the depths of my heart…it’s something that can lead to us pieces finally coming together.

Until we’re a fulfilled masterpiece…

CHAPTER 15

Would You Save It

~MORRIGAN~

Vomiting against the side of an oak tree at five in the morning is not cute.

But here we are.

The joys of being a reject.

The sun isn’t up. The sky over the pines is the color of dishwater with a bruise along the bottom edge, and the air has that specific bite that lives in the hour before dawn in late September, the kind that gets into your lungs and files a complaint. Frost on the running path. My breath going up in clouds. My hand on the bark of a tree that’s been here two hundred years and has never once had to deal with this.

I slept well.

That’s what makes it insulting. I slept in a bed with a goaltender’s arm across my ribs and a dog across my feet, and I slept like a person, six hours straight, no nightmares, which is a personal record for this decade.

And I woke up at four-forty with something under my sternum that wouldn’t sit still.

Restlessness. That’s the polite word for it. The impolite one is dread.

It’s the numbers. Maddie’s numbers. The account that was eleven thousand on Saturday was ninety on Monday and she stopped telling me after that, because she saw my face. She showed me the map, though. Sunday night, on her phone, a heat map of where the views were coming from, and most of it was the county and the city and the places you’d expect.

And one hot spot, small and bright, in a town called Halbrook.

She didn’t say anything. She let me look at it. Then she closed the app and said, “So that’s happening,” and went to find Greenie.

People are looking. Thousands of them, and the number’s still climbing, and every one of those thousands is a set of eyes I don’t control.

I’m not afraid. I want that clear. I’d know fear. I’ve had it under my tongue for five years and I know its exact weight.

This is different.

This is the knowledge that eyes find things. That enough people looking in one direction is a searchlight, and there are four men in a town called Halbrook who are going to be standing in that light before the season’s out, and I’m going to have to look at them.

Face them. The men who were supposed to love me.

Cherish me. Make me theirs.

In their building. That’s the part I keep arriving at. The schedule has us at Halbrook in November, and Halbrook has a visitors’ washroom in the administration wing with a cupboard under the sink, and in the cupboard there’s a dented tin of ice melt, and behind the tin…

Nobody’s found it. Nobody’s ever going to look. It’s been five years and it’s still there, and I’m going to walk past that door in a Vipers jersey and know it.

I grip the bark harder.

My fingertips hurt. The bark’s rough, cold, and I’m pressing into it until the pain in my hands is louder than the thing under my sternum, and I take slow breaths, in through the nose, four count, out through the teeth, the way I was taught at eleven.

Breathe before the whistle.

I snuck out of Nikolai’s arms to do this.

He didn’t wake. He sleeps like the dead on the good nights, and last night was a good night, and I lifted his forearm off my ribs one finger at a time and slid out from under it and was dressed and out the door in four minutes. Knox lifted his head. I told him stay. He put his head back down on Nikolai’s ankle like the two of them had discussed it.