Page 220 of Slashed Bonds

Chip off the wall. Dubois gone. Two-on-one with the twin they’d dropped to D for the night, and Dubois didn’t hold it a beat too long, because I’d told him on the bench that I had, and he put it under the glove the Alpha had already committed to. One-nothing. Their building went quiet in a way I recognized from Ashford.

They tied it in the second on a seam pass I should’ve read. I read it late. Nikolai’s blocker got a piece and not enough, and he looked at me across the ice afterward, not angry, filing. Then Killian scored on the one-timer I’d been telling him since the Sunday before Ashford that he had in him, and we were up a goal going into the third, and everybody on our bench was breathing like men in a real game.

I scored the fourth. Blocker side, low, from the hash marks, a half beat faster than I’d have released a month ago. The puck went where the glove wasn’t because I never looked at the glove, and the Alpha didn’t move, and I’m not sure anymore whether that’s because I beat him or because he’d been told to let me.

Four-one. Cassian went back to the tape that night and found the moment. 12:40. He put a red mark on it and didn’t say a word.

Carrow was the opposite. Carrow hadn’t been paid, or hadn’t taken it, and they came at us for sixty minutes like a team with something to prove about rejects, and the first thing they proved was that I bruise. A winger with a neck like a fence post ran me into the glass behind our net at 4:00 of the first and I came up with my ears ringing and Killian already between us saying nothing, which is louder than anything Killian could say.

We were down a goal twice. Nikolai kept it at one both times, a glove save on a two-on-nothing that I still don’t understand the geometry of, and a pad stack with ninety seconds left that put him flat on his back in his crease and the puck under his hip. The twins played eighteen minutes on a pair they’d never skated as a pair, and they played it like they’d been born on it, finishing each other’s clears.

And I set a screen on the winning goal with my whole body, in front of a goalie who was trying to see through me and a defenseman who was trying to move me and couldn’t, and Killian’s shot came through the gap between my hip and the D-man’s stick and I heard it hit twine before I saw it.

Then Carrow, Saturday, which nobody had paid, and which was the hardest sixty minutes of hockey I’ve played since Halbrook. Two-one. Killian’s second goal of his career, on a wrist shot from the point through a screen I set with my body. Two assists for me. Fifty-eight saves from Nikolai, who came off the ice at the end of it and sat on the bench with his mask on for a full minute before anybody could get a word from him.

And Cassian won fifty-four percent of his draws.

That’s the number I keep turning over. Fifty-four. He was at sixty-eight against Ashford and seventy-one against Westmere, and against Carrow he was fifty-four, and the dot is the one place on a sheet of ice where Cassian Vane does not lose. He wasn’t hurt. He wasn’t tired. He was somewhere else.

He’s been somewhere else for a week.

Teller’s funeral was yesterday.

That’s why the house is quiet. Not the hush of a house asleep, which I know, which I’ve lain awake inside of for five years. The other hush. The one that comes after twenty-two people have stood in a church in black with their hands folded and watched a box go into the ground with a boy in it who ate cereal standing up.

Bennett Vaughn. His mother read the eulogy. His girlfriend from the business school sat in the front row and didn’t cry until the end, and then couldn’t stop, and Greenie, who I’ve never seen do a serious thing in his life, went and sat beside her and stayed.

Nobody from the league came.

Maddie didn’t post. Not a frame. She stood beside me in a black dress I’d never seen, with her hair down and dark for the first time since I’ve known her, no pink anywhere, and her phone stayed in her bag the whole service. Roz sat with her hands folded and her reading glasses off and a face like a door that’s been shut from inside. Halloran spoke for two minutes and his voice held for one and a half.

Viper came. In the back, in leather, with Vix beside her, and the two of them left before the box went down, and I didn’t ask why.

I noticed that. Twenty-two Vipers and two coaches and a liaison who sat at the back taking notes, and not one face from the conference office. Not a wreath. Not a card. A boy died with a Blackridge jersey in his closet and the people who run Blackridge’s bracket couldn’t find a Tuesday.

File that. Beside the other things.

I’m worried about Cassian.

I’ve been worried for a week, since the day the uniform left the quad, and I didn’t have a name for the worry until the dot gave me one. He’s gone quiet. Not his usual quiet, the captain’s quiet, which is a man watching a room and choosing his words. This is a different animal. He’s disinterested. He sits in the lounge with his headphones on and looks at the fire, or the wall, or the window, anything that doesn’t move, and when you say his name he takes a second to come back from wherever he was.

It isn’t like him. Cassian doesn’t zone out. Cassian is the man who knows where everyone in a building is going to be in two seconds, and for seven days he hasn’t known where he is.

He’s been alone more. I’ll come down at six and his truck’s gone. I’ll come up at midnight and his door’s shut with no light under it, and in the morning Nikolai will say he was at the rink, or the gym, or driving, in a voice that closes the subject.

I found him once. Tuesday, three in the morning, in the kitchen with the lights off and his headphones on, sitting at the table with both hands flat on the wood like a man holding it down. I stood in the arch for a full minute before I went to him. I put my hand on his back, between the shoulder blades, over the place where the word over his heart would be if I could reach through.

He didn’t turn around.

He didn’t flinch either, which is something. He let the hand sit there, and I felt him breathe under it, slow, deliberate, counted, and after a while he reached up and covered my hand with his and held it against his back. That’s all. No words. Then he took the hand off and put his back on the table and I understood I’d been dismissed, kindly, by a man who wasn’t there.

Four letters over his heart. A sister who made signs. A boy in a box with a cereal bowl. I’m not stupid. I know where he is. I don’t know how to go there and get him.

I’ve asked. Both of them.

Nikolai looked at the counter and said, “Cash grieves different.” Killian looked at me, which is how I knew it was bad, and said, “He’ll come back. He always does. Don’t go looking.” And then both of them went back to what they were doing, which was watching each other.

They’ve been doing that too. Looking out for one another like men in a trench. They know something about this they’re not saying.