Page 62 of Slashed Bonds

“Greenie,” the captain says, from the floor, with a dog on him. “Turn the fucking phone off.”

Greenie does not turn the phone off.

Roz hasn’t moved. Hands in her pockets, coat collar up, watching me with that look she had in the barn, the one that says she’s already solved me and is checking her work.

I look back.

Why do I have a strong suspicion I’m going to like this assistant coach?

CHAPTER 7

Carved To Be Ours

~KILLIAN~

“Now I’d fuck tha…AH!”

Greenie never stood a chance.

I don’t get my eyes rolled before he’s on the ice. Flat on his back at the mouth of the bench, both arms wrapped around a head that is, thank whatever, still inside a helmet.

Because the thing that went past it was the blade of Nikolai’s skate, and a blade at that angle does more than concuss.

It opens.

Jude Greenwich. Twenty-one. Fourth-line winger with a shot that lands one time in six and hair the color of an energy drink. He’s made it his personal project to find out how long I’ll last on this team of crazed bastards before I put him through the glass myself.

Most days, the answer is longer than he deserves.

Tonight I’m not sure.

Cash is already moving. So am I. We don’t look at each other, because there’s no need. He takes the left arm. I take the right. We have Nik off the boards and back onto the bench before his second swing lands, and we hold him there, one on each side, the way you’d hold a door shut in a wind.

He doesn’t fight us. That’s the tell.

Nik in a Switch fights everything. This is Niko, awake and furious, which is a different animal and, on balance, the more dangerous one, since Niko remembers.

“He was talking about her,” Niko says. Level. Conversational. Blood still drying on his chin from the lobby.

“I know.”

“He said he’d…”

“I heard him.”

“Then let me up.”

“No.”

He goes still under my hand. I feel him weigh it. Then he leans back against the boards and stares across the ice like a man deciding what to do later, and I keep my grip on his shoulder anyway, because I’ve known him four years and later is where he does his best work.

Greenie sits up. Touches his helmet. Finds it whole.

“Jesus, Nik.”

“Say her name again,” Niko says, without looking at him, “and I’ll find out what’s under the helmet.”

Fair.