Page 19 of Slashed Bonds

“Bet she’s fast on her back too.”

Ruiz half rises. I put my glove on his shoulder and push him back down.

Don’t. They want the fight. They’re bigger, and they’ll win it, and then we lose the two hundred.

“We’re going to score four,” I tell him. “That’ll be worse for them.”

Third period, we’re down one, and the barn has gotten loud in the way these places get when money changes hands in the stands.

I take the draw and lose it on purpose.

Kessler’s winger jumps on the puck, and I’m already turning with him, close enough to feel the heat coming off his shoulder, and I lift his stick blade with mine at the exact moment he goes to receive the pass.

The puck skitters free.

I collect it at my own blue line with a hundred and eighty feet of clean sheet in front of me and every Alpha on that ice turning at once like a herd that has realized the gate is open.

Go.

Ten strides and I’m past their first forechecker, and I can hear Kessler coming behind me and to the left, all power and no angle, because he never once learned to take away the inside.

Their defenseman steps up at the far blue line to meet me.

Gray jersey. The one who doesn’t check his shoulder.

I drop the puck back through my own feet, dip my inside shoulder like I’m cutting wide, and he bites so hard he nearly falls over his own edges. Then I pull it back to my forehand and I’m through the gap with nothing but the goalie.

He’s a Beta kid, maybe nineteen, and he’s already made his decision. He’s playing the shot. He’s dropping early, glove hand drifting up and away from his body the way it does when a goalie has been beaten high once and hasn’t stopped thinking about it.

So I don’t shoot.

I wait.

One extra beat, until his weight commits and his pad slides, and then I roll it around his right skate on the backhand and stand there watching it settle in the mesh.

The sound of that never gets old.

The barn erupts. Somebody bangs a stick against the boards hard enough to crack the plywood.

Kessler catches me two seconds later with an elbow that comes in high and late and rings my helmet like a bell.

There it is.

I go down. I get up.

Dorian taught me how to get up.

The thought arrives out of nowhere and I shove it off the ice with everything I have, because that name has no business here, in the one place that’s still mine.

Kessler is grinning at me from four feet away, waiting for the meltdown that would let him finish this properly.

So I smile at him with blood in my teeth and I take the next draw and beat him on it again.

Then again.

We score twice more in six minutes. Tremblay gets the second, and I get the third with eleven seconds left, off a rebound, from my knees, and the noise those men make when they lose two hundred dollars to a rejected Omega is a sound I’d frame if I could.

Kessler doesn’t shake my hand.