Page 1 of Bro Code

CHAPTER ONE

Riley

The anthem ended and the puck dropped. Riley stopped thinking.

His body knew what to do – go into the corner, come out with the puck. Nothing difficult. Just air so cold it made your lungs raw, the other guy’s shoulder bashing yours, the rasp of skates, and the dull roar of the crowd under that.

It was good to be back on the ice.

He stripped the puck no problem and was about to pass it when a stick shot between his legs, captured it, and left him standing like a pylon. He looked up to see Nic Arsenault skating away with his prize.

“Thank yah kindly!” Arsenault called over his shoulder.

That motherfucker…

Riley sprinted after him, “Cut the chirping and save your breath for the game, Arsenault!”

“Manners cost nothing!” Nic sang, sending the puck into the net.

Riley slammed his stick into the boards in frustration as the crowd screamed and rattled the bleachers. They were wild tonight. No surprise: first game of the season – Arsenault wasn’t the only one wasting his breath. It was like the fans had forgotten they still had eighty-one games to go.

He managed to keep it one-nil through the first period, which was respectable, given the circumstances: they were playing Montreal, and Montreal was stacked this season. Not only did they have Nic Arsenault – the golden boy who seemed to have forgotten that his job was defending, not scoring – but they also had his boyfriend Liam Harris, who traded up to Montreal from the States at the end of the summer. Harris and Arsenault together were a lethal combination: when Nic was busy showing off instead of defending, Liam picked up the slack, occupying any ice he left unguarded. It was like they had a psychic connection where one of them always knew exactly where the other would be.

Riley had been on the Olympic team with them in the spring. Back then, Harris and Arsenault were a powerhouse duo Riley was happy to have on the ice. On the opposing side, they were a nightmare.

He managed to slip one past the goalie with ten seconds left in the period and tied it up. Relieved, he went into the locker room and drank water and listened to Coach Bertrand talk about their penalty kill.

The second period was when things started going wrong.

It was nothing, at first. Riley got bumped off the puck at the wall, which was fine. That happened – you reset and you went again. He reset. He went again. Couldn’t quite make the angle, and the shot went wide. The crowd gasped in relief.

Fuming, he sat on the bench after his shift, tracking the puck, running the next sequence in his head. He was supposed to be the one on top of this: reading the plays, planning their response. That was the center’s job. He chugged water and watched the ice, and when he went back out two minutes later he was ready.

Except he still wasn’t.

Lindholm got a pass to him and Riley tried to score – it pinged off the post, and instead of whooshing a gasp of relief, the crowd cheered this time. Like they were happy he’d failed. Fine. He was on enemy ground: New York’s rivalry with Montreal went way back. No one here was rooting for him.

He collected the puck and tried again. Pinged off the post. Again. When he got back to the bench, everyone was quiet and no one seemed to want to look at him.

“Dogshit,” he muttered, dropping down beside Lindholm.

“The post is your friend,” Lindholm said, in his lilting Swedish accent. “The post keeps you humble.”

“I don’t need to be humble, I need to be up by one.”

Next shift, he got to the puck a step slow, and Harris slammed into him like a boulder coming down a hill. The crowd reacted as Riley fell, and somewhere inside the noise of their reaction he could swear he heard his own name.

Which was impossible. It was eighteen-thousand people. There was no way he heard a single word in all that chaos.

“Mon Dieu!” Arsenault sang as he sailed up and offered a hand to help Riley up. “Did we forget to eat our Wheaties this morning, Webb?”

Riley glared, ignoring the hand as he got to his feet. Down the other end of the ice he could see Liam Harris resetting his position and tracking Arsenault like a dog tracking its person. He nodded at him.

“Maybe if I had a man servant cleaning up my messes for me, I could afford to gallivant all over the ice like a fucking ballerina, too.”

Nic narrowed his eyes through his visor as he coasted around Riley in a circle. “Let’s keep this polite, eh? No need to bring my man servant into it.”

Late in the second period Riley set up for a shot that should’ve been a shoe-in. The play was easy: he would drive, Lindholm would send him the puck, Riley would shoot. They’d run it in practice thirty times.