Page 70 of Slashed Bonds

“Stalking is illegal, you know.”

I hum it over my shoulder, peeling out of a practice jersey that weighs twice what it did five hours ago, since it’s absorbed roughly a gallon of me.

The shoulder pads come next. Then the elbows. Every strap is a negotiation, because my fingers have gone the specific kind of stupid that only happens after a full night on the ice, and I’m not going to pretend I mind.

I’m giddy.

Thriving. On cloud fucking eleven, if that’s the tier you have to reach to be this high after five straight hours of game time.

Five hours.

Coach called it practice. It was a war with water breaks. Roz ran us through systems for the first ninety minutes, then Halloran split the roster and put us at each other’s throats for the rest, and nobody on the coaching side blew a whistle until somebody bled.

Years. It’s been years since I skated with a team that could match my brutality.

Roz’s systems first. A neutral-zone trap she runs 1-3-1, with the high forward reading the breakout and the three across the red line collapsing on whichever side the puck picks. It’s a patient system. It asks you to wait, and waiting is the thing Alphas are worst at, and I could see on the first rep which of them she’d built it for.

Cash. The high forward. He’s the read. Everyone else is the trap closing.

She put me on his wing for the second rep, and I understood the whole thing in three shifts. He doesn’t move to the puck. He moves to where the carrier’s going to have to put it after every good option’s been taken away, and he gets there early, and he stands there, and he looks bored.

Then the puck arrives, because it has to, and he’s already gone.

I’d watched it on film. On the ice it’s something else. It’s like skating beside a man who’s reading the play out of a book that was written an hour ago.

Then Halloran split us.

Reds and blacks. Full ice. Game rules, no clock, keep going until he got tired of looking at us, and he didn’t get tired for three and a half hours.

First draw of the scrimmage, I lined up against the captain.

Center against center.

He looked down at me across the dot with his headphones gone and his hair tied back and his face doing nothing at all. I looked back. The linesman, one of the assistant trainers with a whistle, put the puck in and dropped it.

He won it. Clean. His blade was under mine before the puck finished falling, and it went back to his defense, and he didn’t look at me afterward, which is the highest compliment a center can pay another center.

Second draw, four minutes later, I won it.

Not clean. I cheated. I tied up his stick with mine and kicked the puck back to Dubois with my skate, which is a thing you can do until a referee decides you can’t, and the trainer wasn’t a referee.

Cash looked at me then.

One eyebrow. A quarter inch. The equivalent, from him, of a standing ovation.

And they matched it. That’s the part I can’t get over. I’ve been the most violent thing on every sheet I’ve stepped onto since I was fourteen, and tonight, for the first time in half a decade, I was one of a dozen.

My body hurts.

There’s a swelling coming up on my bottom lip where the ring caught the inside of my mouth on a hit I saw coming and took anyway.

Oops.

Second hour. Blacks on a rush, me on the left, Cash carrying through center with Killian trailing as the late man. Their defenseman, Marchetti, stepped up at the blue line to take the carrier, which is what you’d do, and Cash slid the puck to me at the exact moment Marchetti committed, without ever looking my way.

I was open. He knew I’d be open before I did.

I took it wide, cut in behind the net, and the second defenseman met me coming out the other side with everything he had.