Page 9
“I’m asking you.”
My pulse is slamming in my ears. My hands are finally open. I’m breathing through my teeth, and I make myself stop. “I’m done.”
“Greeley. Other end.” Dannebrog waits until Greeley goes, skating backward the whole way with his eyes on me. “Two lengths. Then back in line. And if Berwyn asks, nothing happened, because nothing’s allowed to happen. You hear me?”
“I hear you.”
On my second length, Rafe is standing at the far blue line with his stick across his thighs, watching me.
“The robot has a setting,” he says as I pass.
“Fuck off.”
“No, I’m impressed.” He falls into stride beside me. “I had money on you being a narc.”
“You don’t have money on anything.”
“I have money on everything, Kennebeck. That’s the difference between us.”
The rest of the skate is clean because I make it clean. I call for the puck early and loud. I move it on one touch. I win two faceoffs off Greeley without looking at him, and on the second one I hear him swear. Near the end, Rafe tries to beat two guys by himself, loses it, and slams his stick against the boards so hard the sound goes up into the empty rafters and Dannebrog turns his head.
I go past him. “Could’ve moved it.”
“You a captain now?”
“If I was, you’d be sitting.”
Something hot and ugly comes up behind his eyes, and then it’s gone, and he grins like I told him something funny. “Careful. You’re starting to sound like you care.”
Thirty seconds later, I put the puck on his tape with him moving into open ice, and he scores, and for half a second, his face looks almost satisfied. Then he glides up next to me. “See? Coachable.”
“You scored. That’s not the same thing.”
“It is when it’s me.”
By the end, my shirt is stuck to my back and Rafe has scored enough times to confirm the problem. He really is that good. Somebody should have knocked the ego out of him years ago, nobody did, and now it’s going to have to be me, and neither of us is going to enjoy it.
The locker room is loud and humid and smells like old tape and older sweat. I’m on the bench unlacing my skates when Greeley walks past on his way to the showers and says something to the junior beside him. I don’t catch the words. I catch my name in the middle of them, and the junior’s laugh.
Koda catches all of it. He’s up so fast the bench rocks. “Hey. Greeley. Say it louder.”
The room drops half a decibel. Greeley stops. “Wasn’t talking to you, Barnes.”
“You were talking about my line.”
“I was talking about your center.”
“Say it,” Koda says, and takes a step with a skate still in one hand and the other already opening. I’ve known him fourteen days, and I know what that hand looks like. I reach over without getting up and grab a fistful of the back of his shirt.
“Sit down.”
“Don’t fucking touch me, Kennebeck.”
“Sit down.”
“He’s—”
“I know what he is. I don’t need you to tell him. Sit.”
