Chapter One
Max Stevens
The penalty box might as well have my name etched into the glass.Max Stevens. Repeat offender. No apologies necessary.
Most nights the box gives me two minutes to breathe. Two heavy minutes where my brain drifts to Rockford. Pine trees. A hot tub in the mist. A woman who disappeared before sunrise.
I shove that memory away and dig my skate into the ice.Not today.
Tonight's different, one official seems to have it out for me. He hates my guts in a real way, not the performative chirping I get from the guys who are just doing their job and enjoying it a little too much. This is different. This is a man who has decided, with the authority of yearsin the job, that Maxwell Stevens is a problem that needs containing.
He doesn’t say it. He doesn’t have to.
He’s been on me since warmups. I notice refs the way I notice defensemen, weight distribution, sight lines, which way they lean on a call. This one moves with absolute economy. No wasted steps. No unnecessary signals. He calls what he sees, and he sees everything, and he has spent this entire game seeing me.
Number forty-one. I clock the jersey number while I’m sitting in the sin bin watching the third period wind down. He’s at center ice now, hands clasped behind his back, tracking the play with the unhurried attention of a man who saw the problem before anyone else knew there was one. The call that put me here was clean. That's what costs me. Not the two minutes, or the penalty. When forty-one raised his arm, he was right. We both knew it. Being seen clearly, that's the part I hate. I don’t like feeling that.
I especially don’t like feeling it on a Tuesday in October while the Gold Coast Guardians are up by one and I’m observing from behind glass.
Fuze flies past the me on a breakout, and I track the play, and in my peripheral vision forty-one tracks it too. He’s positioned perfectly. He always is. When the puck goes offside, he raises his arm before the linesmen can register it, and the whistle blows, resetting the period. He then glides back toward the center with a stillness that I've come to recognize as his neutral state.
Who is this guy?
I’ve seen him before. I know I’ve seen him before — league rotations mean the same officials cycle through, and his face has the particular familiarity of someone I’ve been on the wrong side of in a different building on a different night. But I can’t place him exactly, and it sits in the back of my skull the way small wrong things do.
The door opens. Two minutes served. I step out. Forty-one doesn’t look at me. He’s already reading the next play, the next potential situation, the next thing that needs his assessment. As I pass him on my way to the wing, I get three seconds of proximity — close enough to note the silver in his dark hair, the particular set of his jaw, the way he holds himself as if the ice resurfaced itself for him specifically.
He glances at me.
Three seconds. Direct. The kind of expression that already has a verdict and he’s simply informing me of it.
Then he turns away.
I find Trey on the next shift, and we cycle through the neutral zone, and I forget about forty-one for the next four minutes because that’s hockey — the next shift matters more than the last penalty. We win the face-off. Lucas buries one on a feed from the half-wall. The building loses its mind, and I’m first over the boards to pile on, and by the time the celebration settles, we’re two up with forty seconds left, and the game is done.
In the tunnel afterward, Fuze is still going about the goal, his voice bouncing off the concrete.
“Clean look, clean finish, you’re welcomeeveryone?—”
“You touched it with your skate,” Anthony says.
“My skate, my goal, my moment?—”
I pull off my helmet. Trey falls into step beside me.
“You good?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
He gives me the captain’s stare. It’s the three-step assessment he’s been running on me since I was nineteen years old. “The box in the third.”
“Clean call,” I say.
He blinks. “It was. That’s not what I’m asking.”
“I’m fine, Trey.”
He lets it go. He always lets it go when I say I'm fine in that register. I roll my shoulder and keep walking.
