Page 215 of Slashed Bonds

I look over.

Casual. Nothing in my neck moves fast anymore, not since the dosage came down, and I let my eyes go to the man coming across the balcony like I’ve got all night, which I do.

Dox.

Tattooed from the hairline down. Neck, hands, the backs of his ears, the knuckles, a line of script along his jaw I’ve never gotten close enough to read. I’m surprised he hasn’t done the scalp yet. I’m probably jinxing it by thinking so. He’s in a black coat that costs what my first car did, and he walks like a man who’s never once been told to leave a room.

He reaches the rail I’m leaning on and puts his forearms beside mine.

Below us, the quad.

Four cruisers, parked at angles that say we didn’t plan to stay this long. Two unmarked. A van with the county crest on it that arrived an hour ago and hasn’t opened its back doors. Officers in pairs under the quad lights, finishing the last of the interviews, and the breath coming off all of them white in the cold.

Teller’s dead.

I turn it over again, the way I’ve been turning it over for three hours, and it still doesn’t sit in a place.

Bennett Vaughn. Twenty years old. Third-pair defenseman, right side, a kid with decent feet and a bad habit of cross-checking people who scared him, which is how his arm got broken by my captain in a practice two and a half weeks ago. He’d been in a cast and a sling since. Off the ice, he didn’t bother anyone. He ate cereal standing up at the counter. He had a girlfriend in the business school who came by on Sundays. He called me sir once, by accident, and went red to the ears.

Dead is the cycle. I know that better than most people in this house. I’ve been closer to it than any of them.

But close to home is different. Close to home has a face and a cereal bowl.

He died at a frat party. That’s the part everyone knows, because Maddie had it off her phone before Halloran finished his sentence, trending, with a hashtag somebody thought was clever. ViperDoxxed. A bottle of sports drink, the orange kind, the kind Halloran makes us hydrate with before games, except this one had enough of something in it to stop a twenty-year-old athlete’s heart.

That’s the public story. The one the uniform told the room.

The other story is the one he told Cassian and Halloran in the hall, with the door not quite closed, and I’ve got the kind of hearing a man develops when he grew up in a house where the dangerous conversations happened in two languages in the next room.

Blindfolded. Bound to a bed, wrists and ankles. Bruised in places a fall doesn’t bruise you. And a thing the coroner isn’t ready to “assume” before the tests come back.

So he overdosed. Yes. His heart gave up. Yes. But somebody tied him to a bed first and did something to him, and whether the overdose was the method or the cover is a question the police are being careful not to ask out loud yet.

It’s going to blow. When it does, it’s going to blow in a direction that hurts us. A dead Viper, at a party, with drugs in his blood, two weeks after a viral win. The committee liaison is going to have a page for it by morning.

Unless it blows the other way. Unless the thing in the bottle has a supply chain, and the supply chain has a name, and the name’s one we already have written down in a notebook in my room with four addresses and a plaque beside it.

Should we hurt those fuckers next. The note said that. I’d read it as a threat against three men. I hadn’t read it as a list with more than three names on it.

Halloran gave the room four minutes after the uniform left. I timed it. He stood in front of the fireplace with his hands in his jacket and said the things a coach says, that Bennett was one of ours, that the family’s been contacted, that nobody talks to press or posts a word, and Maddie put her phone face down on the floor without being asked. Then he said the other thing. Overdoses are up. Across the conference. If any of you are taking anything you didn’t get from a pharmacist, I don’t want to know and I want it gone by morning. He looked at me when he said it. He’s looked at me when he’s said it for four years.

Thursday. Nobody asked. Everyone was thinking it. Westmere’s in six days and we’re down a defenseman who was already down, and the question of whether the league postpones for a dead third-pair kid is a question with an answer none of us like.

They won’t. Teller wasn’t dressing. His arm was in a cast. On paper, nothing’s changed about our lineup, and the league reads paper.

So I’ve been doing the thing I do. Rebuilding the pairs in my head with the quad lights on my hands. Okonkwo moves up to the second pair with Dubois sliding back from the wing, which he’s done before and hates. One of the twins drops to D for a third pair that’ll see six minutes a night, and the twins can do anything if they do it together. On a hundred-and-ninety-four-foot sheet with the corners cut tight, six minutes of a thin third pair is survivable if the top four eat the rest.

I’ll eat the rest. I’ve eaten more. Twenty-six minutes against Ashford and my legs had another ten in them.

The real change isn’t on the sheet. It’s in the room. Twenty-one kids who watched a uniform come through a door are going to skate on Thursday with a thing in their chests that doesn’t belong on the ice, and the thing’s going to make them slow, or make them stupid, or make them hit too hard in the wrong moment. Cassian will have to decide which, and build the first period around it.

And I’m calm. Look at that. Inventory it.

I am calm. That’s the finding, and it’s a strange one, because three weeks ago this would have put me in a bathroom with my blindfold on and my hands over my ears while the room got too loud. Instead I’m on a balcony with a cigarette, watching cruisers, and the inside of my skull is quiet.

Ashwagandha.

That’s what I’m on. A root, in a capsule, from a bottle with a leaf on it, three times a day. Lessard put the whole house on a review when she took Mori’s chart, and she looked at mine for a long time and said this is a lot of chemistry for a man who doesn’t want to be a zombie, and I said I don’t, and she started pulling things. The heavy ones first. The ones that smoothed me into a flat line and let me sleep. Replaced, in part, with a root.