Page 36 of Slashed Bonds

Killian sighs.

“You’re locked in, aren’t you?”

“Dangerously so,” I confess.

“Well. We’re going to get busy soon. So either make a move or stop wasting my lifespan.”

I grin at the ceiling.

Permission to pursue.

The luxury.

“Don’t tell Cash yet.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

He won’t. Not until he’s cornered, and he will be cornered, because our captain finds out everything eventually. Cash knows Malice exists. He doesn’t know the extent.

He doesn’t know I bought a room.

I’m careful. My movements are clean. The only person I let track me is Killian, and that’s deliberate, because there’s something genuinely delicious about a man who stalks me better than I stalk anything.

Love a challenge.

“Roz found somebody, by the way,” he says. “For the roster.”

“Mm.”

“Some ringer out in the barns. She’s been driving three hours each way to watch a beer league.”

“Sounds like a Roz problem.”

“It’s a you problem when she can’t finish a check and you’re eating forty shots a night.”

“I like eating forty shots a night.”

“You do,” he admits. “That’s the concerning part.”

He isn’t wrong.

I’ve built my entire game on it.

The thing people misunderstand about my crease is that the chaos is architecture. I come out further than any goalie in this league has any business coming out. Halfway to the hash marks, top of the paint, daring a shooter to try me with speed, and every year some analyst calls it reckless and every year I let them.

Because I’m not reacting.

I’m choosing.

Here’s how it works.

I set my blocker high and I open a gap low, right along the ice, no wider than a mail slot. Then I hold it. I hold it while they carry, while they look up, while their eyes drop — and everybody’s eyes drop, it’s involuntary, the brain sees a hole and takes a photograph of it — and the instant their weight shifts into the release, I’m already moving.

They don’t beat me.

They shoot where I told them to.

The Ashford game in February was the cleanest version of it I’ve managed. Third period, up one, their best forward comes down the wing with a step on Killian and every reason to believe he’s got me.