Page 124 of Slashed Bonds

I stare at the words.

My eyes blur again, but it isn’t sadness now. It’s the other thing. The seething, controlled, low-burning rage that’s been under my skin for five years and only ever gets let out in one place.

The ice.

Where all of it can come to play and none of it gets judged. Where nobody ridicules me for a puck in the net. Where the thing I am, the whole ruined inventory of it, gets converted into something with a score attached, and the score can’t be argued with.

They can judge me. They can ridicule me. They can send texts at five in the morning from a gas-station phone in Halbrook. They can spend the rest of their lives trying to finish what they started.

But my skill. My performance. The drive that gets me up off the frost when every single thing in this world is doing its level best to keep me down.

They can’t take that. That’s the one thing that came back up the wall with me.

And here’s the other thing they can’t take, the thing I’ve never said out loud, not to Cash with his six pages, not to Roz with her clipboard.

I know them.

Not the way a scout knows a team. The way you know the men you learned to skate beside. I know Theo’s draw, because I stood across the dot from him in a parking lot at nine years old with a tennis ball, and his tell is that he breathes in through his mouth a half second before he goes, and he’s never once fixed it, because nobody’s ever been close enough to hear it.

I know Rhys goes glass-and-out on his backhand every single time he’s under pressure in his own end, because he got burned trying something else in a U16 game and never forgave himself. I know Dorian can’t stand still on a penalty kill, that he drifts toward the puck like it’s warm, that the passing lane behind him opens like a door every time he does.

And Silas.

Silas drops early. He’s dropped early since he was twelve. He’s a butterfly goalie who’s afraid of the top of the net and has built his whole game around making sure nobody finds out, and I’ve known where his glove hand goes under pressure since before he had a glove that fit.

Twelve years. I was their teammate before I was their Omega. They forgot that when they threw me out. I didn’t.

There was a play we ran. The five of us, from fourteen on, in every program that would have us together. Theo took the draw and pulled it back to Rhys on the point, Dorian went to the net like a man who’d been promised something, and I drifted to the weak-side circle where nobody was watching, because nobody ever watched me when Dorian was going to the net.

Rhys walked the line. Silas, from the bench, called now when the goalie’s eyes went to Dorian. And the puck came across the seam to me, and I one-timed it, and it went in.

Every time. Four seasons. Coaches tried to scout it and couldn’t, because the whole thing ran on the five of us knowing where the other four were without looking, which you can’t diagram.

They still run it. I watched them run it on tape in a barn in the county on a cracked phone, with a winger in my spot who doesn’t drift, who stands there, waits, and gets covered.

It doesn’t work anymore. Not the way it did. And I’m the only person alive who knows exactly why.

Cash will have a file on Hellsing Ross by November. He has one on everybody. It’ll be good, because his always are. Tape, tendencies, a forecheck drawn in three colors.

Mine’s better. Mine’s a childhood.

And when November comes, I’m going to stand across a dot from Theo Ross in front of eight thousand people, and I’m going to listen for him to breathe in through his mouth, and I’m going to win the draw, and then I’m going to win the next one, and I’m going to keep winning them until he understands that the girl he threw out a window was the one who knew where every one of his bodies was buried.

That’s not revenge. That’s hockey. The revenge is what happens when the two of them stop being different things.

Unless they take my breath.

And I’ll admit it, to a tree, at five in the morning. That’s what it’d take. To stop me. They’d have to kill me.

And wouldn’t that be a blissful ending? Wouldn’t that be quiet?

I close my eyes. I grip the phone.

Cower? Withdraw? Go back to the barn and the shed and the money games, and keep Knox safe, and keep myself…

It’s funny.

I don’t care about myself. That’s the plain truth of it and I’ve known it for years. I care about Knox. I care about a dog with one eye and a chewed stick who chose me out of a box.