Page 256 of Slashed Bonds

Six days. A tap, a draw, a slide, a sound.

Nikolai had stayed out after, the way he does, with Pruitt feeding him pucks from the slot and the lights half down. Not for his hands. For his head. He’s been doing a thing since Carrow where he stands in the crease with his eyes shut for ten seconds before every drill and I asked him what it was and he said finding the still and I didn’t ask again.

His mother’s word. The one place he’s still. He’s building a door to it he can open on purpose, so that when four men come down the ice at him in six days he can be the lake and not the storm.

And then last night.

Which I’m not going to think about on a mat in front of Viper, because Viper can read a thought off a forehead the way other people read a watch, and she’s already looking at the bite on the inside of my left thigh with a professional interest I don’t appreciate.

“Hamstrings,” Valerie says, standing over me. “Fold from the hip, not the back. You’re going to need them for the climb and you’re going to need them Thursday on that ice, and I’m not sending you to a semifinal with a pulled anything.”

She knows about Thursday. Everyone in this building knows about Thursday. There’s a countdown on the whiteboard in the lobby that one of Nikolai’s staff updates every morning with a marker, and today it says 6.

I fold from the hip.

It hurts. Clean, though. Good hurt. The kind that means a muscle’s being asked to be longer than it was.

“Since we’re waiting for Mori to stretch those sore legs.” Valerie goes back to the pole, puts a hand on it, and swings up onto it in one motion like the floor’s pushed her. “Want some gossip?”

That has us.

All three. Maddie with the matcha halfway to her mouth, Viper with her eyebrow still up, me with my face coming off my knee again. Valerie comes down the pole slow this time, in a spiral, the dark plum of her set catching the light, a headband the same plum holding her hair off a face that’s enjoying itself.

She grins.

“Your archnemesis truly is in hot water with money.”

“GOOD.”

All three of us. In unison. Maddie’s bright, Viper’s flat, mine somewhere between, and Valerie laughs so hard she has to put a hand on the pole.

“I mean, the office building she owns?” She’s still laughing. “The one she brags about in every interview, the one with her name on the glass? It went up for sale this morning. Quietly. A listing with no photos and a broker who doesn’t return calls.”

I arch an eyebrow.

Office building. She owns one. I knew that. I’d put it in the place where I keep the things I know about Naomi Vance and don’t look at.

“Wait.” It comes out slower than I mean it to. “The two-story one?”

Valerie nods.

“The one with the big corner office upstairs.” Her eyes are on me now, steady, like she’s handing me something and wants to see how I hold it. “The one with the balcony off it.”

The room goes quiet.

All eyes are on me. Maddie’s gone still with the bottle in her hand. Viper hasn’t moved, which for Viper means she’s moved a great deal. And I know the building. I know it the way you know a room you’ve been carried out of. Two stories of glass and pale stone on the good side of Halbrook, a lobby with a fountain, a staircase with a brass rail, and at the top of it an office with a view and a long balcony and a window beside the balcony that opens outward, that I went out of, that someone closed behind me and then went downstairs to laugh.

The incident. Brushed. Under a rug. In a building with her name on the glass.

I was in that office twice. Once at seventeen, when she’d had me up to talk about a sponsorship that was going to be good for all of us, with coffee in a white cup and a view of the river and her hand on my shoulder in a way that I read, then, as warmth. And once at eighteen, after the boardroom, when the four of them walked me up a brass-railed staircase to a room with a long balcony and told me there was one more thing to discuss.

I remember the carpet. Gray, with a pattern like water. I remember the window being open before anyone opened it.

“Well.” I hum it. Light. The way you’d note the weather. “Isn’t that unfortunate.”

“Not so unfortunate,” Valerie says.

She crosses her arms. The sleeves move, all that ink shifting over muscle, and the thing in her face isn’t laughter anymore.