Page 65 of Slashed Bonds

Greenie’s been shooting content since August. Practice clips. Bench chirps. Niko doing something inadvisable to a water bottle. Hours of it, sitting in a folder, because we can’t find a social media person willing to take the account.

Three have quit. One lasted a day.

The problem isn’t the footage. The footage is gold. The problem is that anyone with a résumé looks at our file and does the arithmetic, and the arithmetic says: three Alphas with disciplinary jackets, no Omega, a program the committee’s been burying for four years, and a captain who threw a sponsor through a door ninety minutes ago.

Nobody wants to be holding the phone when we finally do the thing everyone’s waiting for us to do.

My file’s the thickest of the three. I’ve read it. Cash got a copy through a lawyer his family keeps on retainer for exactly this kind of curiosity, and I sat at the kitchen table in Viper House and went through it page by page like a set of blueprints.

Two suspensions. One for a hit that put an Ashford forward in a neck brace for six weeks, which was clean, and the tape shows it was clean, and the committee suspended me anyway because the kid’s father sat on a board. One for what happened in a parking lot after a game in Kingsmere, which was not clean, and I’d do it again, and the man I did it to has never once said my name in public since.

Then a page of notes from a designation psychologist I saw twice.

Affect flat. Withholds. Recommend further evaluation.

I’ve had that page memorized for two years. It’s the best description of me anyone’s ever written, and she got paid four hundred dollars to write it.

Here’s what the organization wants. I’ll say it plainly, because nobody else will.

They want villains on ice.

Bodies that look like ours. Faces that look like ours. Men women can put on a poster in a dorm room and men can watch from a couch while they hate their jobs and their soft middles and the gym membership they haven’t used since spring. They want the story where the monsters come out of the dark and skate, and they want the ticket revenue that story generates.

And they’re afraid of it.

Four years of being afraid. Four years of brackets with no room and letters that never arrive. They want the theory tested. They don’t want to be the ones who tested it.

So they wrote a rule.

You need an Omega on the roster to be official.

New policy. Empowering Omegas, they’re calling it, and the word empowering does a lot of work for a rule that means an Omega must stand on the ice in front of Alphas who hit for a living, in the name of women’s rights, as decided by a committee of men.

We all know it’s fake. The committee knows. The Omegas know, because Omegas aren’t stupid, whatever the pamphlets imply. It’s an illusion built to convince everyone outside the building that someone inside it cares.

And it leaves a team like us on the side of the road.

Because we won’t take anyone.

That’s been the sticking point for two seasons.

Roz brought us candidates. Good ones. Fast ones. And every time, one of the three of us would watch the girl skate for ten minutes and say the same thing.

She’ll get hurt. And when she gets hurt, it’ll be because we put her there to check a box.

We’re not putting an Omega on the ice as target practice for a headline. Not even to get the letter.

Which is why we didn’t get the letter.

And now I’m watching this one nod at Coach with her arms crossed and her hair in her face, and the thought arrives without asking.

A puck is going to hit her.

That’s not a maybe. That’s the job. Pucks hit everyone. I’ve taken them off the collarbone, the ear, the inside of the thigh where the pad doesn’t reach. And I’ve watched Niko take them off the mask at a speed that turns a brain into a maraca, and I’ve stood there on the ice and felt nothing about it except the mild irritation of a man who’ll have to cover for the concussion protocol.

The thought of one hitting her makes my stomach do something it’s never done for Nikolai.

Drop. Turn. Refuse to settle.