Page 92 of Slashed Bonds

On her forehand she’s ordinary. Sixty percent. On her backhand she’s a hundred and I couldn’t beat her there once.

Nobody’s told her that’s her tell. Nobody’s been good enough to need to.

Which means Ashford’s centers, who’ve never seen her, will line up square, and lose the backhand draws, and by the second period they’ll be cheating over to her strong side, and by then Roz will have moved her to the other dot.

I’ve drawn it out. Six pages. She’ll take the defensive-zone draws on the left, I’ll take the right, and when I lose one on my backhand, which I will, because I do, she’s the one on the wall waiting for the pass I couldn’t stop.

That’s the whole plan. That’s the piece we didn’t have in April.

Ashford’s not the same team.

That’s the other thing I’ve had five months to learn.

They lost their top pair to graduation.

The replacements are a sophomore who pinches too deep and a transfer who doesn’t, and they’ve never played together in a game that mattered. Their goalie’s the same, and he’s good, and he’s beaten Niko exactly once, and spent the summer telling anyone with a microphone about it.

A goalie who talks about his best night is a goalie who’s still standing in it.

Their building has a low ceiling over the visitors’ bench that makes the crowd sound like it’s inside your helmet, a bad patch of ice in front of the far net where the compressor line runs, and a home crowd that will have read exactly one thing about us before Tuesday, which is whatever Maddie decides they should read.

I’ve got six pages on them too.

I’ll have ten by Monday.

Mori’s hair’s up. High ponytail, black with red bleeding through the length, and a few strands have slipped and stuck to the side of her face. She’s drenched. Anyone would be. But her face is somewhere else entirely, flat and unfocused, and I’ve seen that look on Niko when he’s tapping posts.

She’s not exercising. She’s running through something. Whatever’s building in her head, this is how she treads water in it.

I expected them to fuck last night.

It’s the obvious read. Two years of an arrangement, a day off, a bed, a rule from Roz that was practically an invitation.

I’d factored it in. I’d factored in the noise, since the walls in Viper House are original to the carriage house and the carriage house was built for horses.

Instead, silence.

I do rounds at night. That’s not something I’ve told anyone and it’s not something anyone’s asked about.

Killian’s medication does one of two things when it’s the wrong dose, and both of them involve him being upright and not present.

He walks. Or he sees things in the corners and talks to them, low, in German.

I’ve found him at the top of the stairs at three in the morning with his eyes open and nobody home behind them, and I’ve walked him back to bed by the elbow, and in the morning he doesn’t remember, and I don’t tell him.

Niko I check for the opposite reason.

He doesn’t sleep. Not on the bad days of the cycle. And a man with a Switch who’s gone forty hours without sleep is a man one wrong sentence from a wall.

So I looked in.

Two in the morning. His door cracked the two inches he leaves it, because he can’t stand a closed door and can’t stand an open one either.

And there they were.

Niko flat on his back with one arm flung over his head. Mori curled against his side, face in the hollow under his shoulder, one hand fisted in his shirt.

Both of them so far under they might have been drugged.