He made a sound—part curse, part laugh—and hung up.
I stared at the blank screen, tasted smoke in my mouth because my dragon liked the news as much as I did. I didn’t need to admit how fast my heart was pounding. Jacket on, key card, wallet. Lobby empty, desk clerk buried in paperwork. I slipped out into the roar of the city, the wind biting. Old instincts pushed me forward, urged on by my beast. Only four blocks down Michigan. I speed-walked every step because a cab would take longer, mind locked on Russo’s name, on that bathroom floor where a kid half my size had been beaten for walking into the wrong place.
ER lights blinded me when I walked in. Security guard gave a curt nod and let me through. Renaud stood at attention as I approached. “They’re with him. That’s Nurse Jacobs.” He pointed.
I cut across. “I’m Kincaid. Dante Russo’s coach.”
She checked her chart. “Dr. Patel has him. Laceration on the cheek, swelling, possible concussion. Maybe a cracked rib. Lots of bruising.” I nodded. Didn’t need her to fill in the blanks. I’d seen bodies like this before.
Back to Renaud where Keegan, Ash, and Cole were. “Keegan and I found him,” Renaud said. “He was out maybe three minutes. Cole saw them leave—Grizzlies fans, loud in the bar. Cops have CCTV. Doctor wouldn’t let Dante talk to them yet.”
I exhaled. Dante just got his shot back. Now this. “Think they got a good look?”
“Camera footage is clear. Security’s on it.” I didn’t ask Max how he knew. His dragon had a persuasive quality to him that went further than being the guy everyone was drawn to.
We stared at the doors. Time slowed. My chest felt tight. Renaud never sat. He didn’t need to—his patience was harder than steel.
After what felt like forever, the door cracked open and Nurse Jacobs waved us in. Russo was on the exam table, shirt off, blood drying on his jaw and up one side of his face, turning dark at the edges. He looked at me, then away, as if embarrassed to be found like this.
The doctor was young, efficient. “MRI’s clear. No major damage, but he took a good hit to the head. Mild concussion. Bruising, laceration on the left cheek, and bruised but not cracked ribs. He’ll be sore, but nothing more.”
“Not my first time,” Russo said. His voice was flat. “I’m fine.”
He wasn’t fine. His eyes were glassy, and one hand shook a little when he tried to sit up. I could see the blood on his fingers, ground into the skin in uneven streaks.
I nodded at the doctor. “Thank you.”
She left.
Renaud stepped in first. “You need anything? Water. Food.”
Russo shook his head, then winced at the movement. “Just want to get out of here.”
He looked at me then. Eyes dark, wide, a little unfocused, but steady. “Coach.”
I didn’t smile. The moment didn’t warrant a smile. “I’m glad you’re all right,” I said.
He blinked once, like that was an answer that didn’t make sense. Renaud said something quiet to Russo about getting him a shirt and stepped back to give him space, and I used that moment to look away.
I walked to the narrow window at the end of the examination bay. It looked out on a service alley—a loading dock, a dumpster, a single sodium light turning the concrete the color of old bone. Not much of a view. I looked at it anyway.
The thing I was not going to do was examine what had happened in the four blocks between the hotel and this building. The way the city noise had been present and irrelevant, the way I’d moved through it with a single fixed point somewhere ahead of me that had nothing to do with a hospital address and everything to do with a face I’d seen go into the boards twice tonight and come back up twice, and then he’d gotten hit in a hotel bathroom where he hadn’t come back up.
I was his coach. That was the complete and sufficient accounting of my interest in this room, in this outcome, in the specific relief that had moved through me when I’d walked through that door and found him conscious and upright and characteristically determined to pretend he was fine. Coaches cared about their players. That was not a complication. That was the job. It could never be more than that.
The problem—and I allowed myself the word problem, because refusing the word didn’t make the thing it named any less real—was that what I’d felt in those four blocks hadn’t felt like the job. It had felt older than the job. It had felt like something that predated coaching, predated this franchise, predated the version of myself I’d constructed in this century and inhabited with the practiced ease of a man who’d had a long time to get comfortable in borrowed clothes.
It had felt like the part of me that didn’t have a job description. It had woken my dragon.
And I had no idea what to do about that.
Chapter five
Blue line – The line that divides the neutral zone from the offensive and defensive zones.
Dante
The doctor came back in with a clipboard and a look that said she’d delivered this exact speech before and had stopped apologizing for it.
