Page 91 of Slashed Bonds

CHAPTER 11

We Don't Forsake Our Own

~CASSIAN~

Mori has stamina.

That’s the assessment, and I’m making it with heavy metal at a volume that would concern a physician, sitting on the top row of the bleachers with my elbows on my knees and my eyes on the woman running the track below.

She’s been at it an hour.

Not sprinting. Not jogging. The pace in between that most people can’t hold for twenty minutes, held for sixty, lap after lap on the four-hundred-meter oval behind the athletics complex while the sun comes up gray over the pines.

I finished my workout two hours ago.

I should be inside, dragging the roster out of bed.

A day off is a day off from the ice, not from my expectations, and there are twenty-two men in that house who know that and eighteen who’ll test it anyway.

Greenie’s clip went up at five-thirty.

Not the good one. Not the sheet cracking. The other one, the eleven seconds of a dog taking down the captain of the Blackridge Vipers in a lobby full of broken plastic, captioned with a single word and three exclamation points.

Four thousand views by six. I don’t know what it’ll be by noon. I’ve told him twice to take it down and he’s told me twice that he can’t, technically, because Roz shared it first.

Roz shared it first.

I’m going to have to renegotiate my opinion of Roz again.

It’s becoming a weekly appointment.

I got distracted.

The dog bed arrived at six-forty. Two men and a van, and a thing the size of a kiddie pool wrapped in plastic. I signed for it in the driveway in my workout gear and carried it up two flights by myself, because I wasn’t going to wake Niko for it and I wasn’t going to let Killian see me do it.

It’s in the room at the end of the hall now. Against the wall under the window. The first thing that’s ever been in that room besides a vacuum.

I stood in the doorway for a minute afterward. I don’t know what I was waiting for.

Sports bra. Black, fitted shorts that end high on the thigh and make the hip bones look like something drawn with a ruler.

Mori’s fit in the way that means she lifts, not the way that means she runs. Six-pack. A hint of curve at the hips where the muscle meets the bone. The shoulders and the thighs of a woman who’s been hauling her own weight around a sheet of ice since before she could spell it.

That’s how she moved Teller. Two hundred pounds, and she put him on his back like he was kindling.

I watched the tape of her draws until four this morning.

Greenie’s phone caught six of them.

Halloran’s rink camera caught the rest. Twenty-two faceoffs across five hours, against me, against Dubois, against the twins, and she won fourteen, and I’ve broken down every one of the fourteen frame by frame, because I need to know what I’m putting on my line before I put it there.

Here’s what she does.

She doesn’t set up square. Every center in the country sets up square, feet even, weight centered, because that’s what you’re taught at nine years old. She sets up a quarter turn open on her backhand side, right skate a half step back, and it looks like sloppiness until the puck drops.

Then it’s leverage.

Her bottom hand’s already lower than yours. Her blade’s already under yours before yours has finished coming down. And because her weight’s on the back foot, she doesn’t have to win the puck. She has to move it, four inches, to a skate she’s already pointed where she wants it to go.