Antoine had told me once, early on, before I understood what early on was actually going to cost me, that you didn’t really belong to a team until you’d bled for them. Typical Antoine—romantic about violence, poetic about pain. I’d believed it then because I’d believed most things he said in those first few months, back when I was twenty-two and hungry and he was the first person who’d ever looked at me like I was worth the full weight of his attention.
I understood now that he’d been wrong about most things, including that.
But I laced up my skates and stood and rolled my shoulders, and somewhere underneath the controlled blankness I’d been wearing for two months, something that felt almost like hunger stirred back to life.
I was going to play hockey tonight. In this building. Against those people.
And whatever Antoine Devereaux had told them about me, whatever story had followed me from Chicago to Denver like a stain I couldn’t see but everyone else could—tonight I was going to be on the ice after the puck dropped, and that was the only answer I’d ever actually had for anything.
Show up. Do the work. Let the game speak.
Warm-ups were their own kind of theater.
Both teams on the ice at the same time, separated by the center line like a courtesy that everyone understood was temporary—sixty minutes from now we’d be trying to put each other through the boards, but for now, we skated our half and they skated theirs, and the crowd filtered in around us and pretended not to watch the way two armies might eye each other across a field before the flags went up.
I kept to my half. That was the rule I set for myself the moment I stepped through the tunnel and felt the Chicago ice under my blades for the first time in two months—stay on your side, keep your head up, don’t give anyone anything to read on your face.
The problem was that I knew this ice. I knew the exact give of it near the right-wing boards, the way the paint bled slightly under the left face-off dot from a resurfacing job done in a hurry three years back. I’d logged thousands of hours in this building, and my body remembered it even when I was trying to pretend it didn’t, my edges finding their angles automatically, muscle memory working independently of whatever I was telling myself about staying focused and staying blank.
It wasn’t Antoine I spotted first, it was Briggs, who’d been waving at me in that airport terminal two months ago like everything was normal, like he hadn’t known. He was taking shots at the far end, and he looked up as I came around the back of the net, and the thing that crossed his face wasn’t guilt or embarrassment or even the particular awkward discomfort of someone who’d been caught. It was colder than that. A deliberate flatness, the kind you had to manufacture—the expression of someone who’d made a decision about you and was comfortable with it.
He looked back at the net.
Martinez was next. Same thing—eyes finding me across the ice for just a second, long enough to register and dismiss, and thenhe was gone, turning away with his stick on his knee like I was scenery.
I understood, technically. I understood the mechanics of it. But understanding it didn’t make the weight of it any lighter, the specific loneliness of being looked through by people who’d once looked at you like you were one of them.
I was setting up for another shot when I noticed Steel—Keegan—fall into the drill line two spots behind me, which shouldn’t have been notable except that he’d been working the far end with the top line forwards for the last ten minutes and there was no reason for him to migrate this direction. He didn’t say anything. He just took his turn in the rotation, took his shot, and stayed in the line for the next pass.
Then Cole Armstrong materialized on my other side.
Cole wasn’t a man who appeared by accident anywhere. He moved through space like he was always exactly where he’d decided to be, and the fact that he’d decided to be in this drill line, between me and the right-wing boards, felt intentional in a way that I couldn’t quite name. He was focused on the puck, his expression that locked-down quality it always had—like there was a great deal happening behind it that had been made very deliberately unavailable to outside observers.
He took his shot. Crisp, precise, exactly where he was aiming.
“Hands are good tonight,” he said, flatly, almost to himself.
I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me. I took my shot anyway. “They’ll have to be.”
He didn’t respond. But he stayed in the line.
I became aware, gradually, the way you became aware of a change in weather—not all at once but through accumulated small signals—that the shape of the warm-up around me had shifted. Taranis Rees had materialized in front of the net and nodded approvingly when I shot right at him.
Renaud had drifted back into my orbit without appearing to do so deliberately.
When one of the younger Chicago forwards—a kid I didn’t know, someone they’d called up mid-season—crossed the center line by six inches during a loose puck drill and bumped me harder than the contact warranted, the silence that came from my side of the ice had a sharp sound to it.
Nothing was said. Nobody made a move. But the attention that swung toward that kid from half a dozen Colorado jerseys had a weight to it, and the kid felt it, because he backed up a step and returned to his side without making eye contact with anyone.
I straightened up. Suddenly the air didn’t seem quite as cold.
Theron
I watched warm-ups from the bench the way I always did—standing, arms crossed, close enough to the boards that I could hear the blades and the puck and the percussion of a team finding its rhythm before the real work started.
Thirty years of hockey, and the smell of a rink before a playoff game still did something to my insides that I couldn’t name and didn’t try to.
I tracked the lines as they moved through their patterns. Renaud anchoring the first unit with that authority of his, reading the ice two seconds ahead of everyone else the way only players who’d survived seven seasons learned to do. Steel moving through his drills with a economy of motion that was incredible. Most people aware but who didn’t understand dragon physiology thought his speed was due to his animal, when the opposite was true.
