Page 50 of The Reckless Rookie

What I should have done was let go of his hand, say nice to meet you, walk away, and tell her that night, hey, I met your ex, he’s a piece of work, and let her tell me what it meant.

What I did was not let go of his hand.

I keep the shake going, then close it down, slow and hard, with more grip than a handshake has any business holding, and I use it to draw him in close, the way I pull a guy in at the whistle so the linesman can’t read my mouth. And I say it low, just for him, under the noise of the room, so quiet the words are only ever going to exist between the two of us:

“You come near her again and they won’t find enough of you to bury.”

I feel it land. I feel his hand go still in mine.

And then he does what I don’t understand until it’s far too late. He lets his face fall open. He steps back like I shoved him, loud enough in the body for the whole room to read it even though nobody heard a word, one hand coming up to his chest, and he says, pitched to carry,

“Okay. Okay. Take it easy,” both palms up now, like a man backing away from something unstable.

Heads turn. Ryan’s. Roman’s. And Sully’s already crossing the room, because a coach in a playoff run has a radar for exactly this, and he gets a hand on my shoulder and a smile on his face for the donors and says through his teeth, “Car. Now,” and walks me out of a room where the only thing anybody saw was a hockey player with a record putting his hands on a nice man in a suit.

It doesn’t feel like a win. I knew what I’d done before I was out of the room. Everyone saw it, Roman and Ryan and Sully, and Sebastian got exactly what he came for.

He never raised his voice until he wanted the room to hear him. He played it perfectly, and I handed him the ending.

I did that. And it’s going to land on her, not me. I don’t know exactly what that man wants from her, but I know he wants something, and I handed him a reason to come at her harder and called it defending her. She’s the one who’ll pay for the ten seconds I couldn’t hold on to.

I still couldn’t have stopped myself. I can’t get around that. But I’m not going to stand here and pretend I didn’t do it. Catalina knows by morning. I don’t ask how. Sebastian will have made sure, some call, some just so you’re aware, the knife going in a second time from a distance.

She finds me at the water trough and she is so calm it scares me worse than yelling would.

“You spoke to Sebastian.”

“I did. He was waiting for me at the charity thing.”

“I know how he works, which is what you did not stop to consider before you gave him exactly what he wanted.” Her voice doesn’t rise. That’s the tell. “He came to that event to get in a room with you. He has been waiting for you to do something he can use. And you did. You handed a man who is trying to take my ranch a story about my violent placement, and you did it feeling like a hero.”

I did threaten him. I said the words. Quiet enough that only he heard, which I know now is worse, because now they’re only ever his to repeat. And standing there with nothing to say back, it lands on me, what Bonita taught me at a stall rail that I clearly never learned past the ice. She wouldn’t let me near her when I came in hot, because a charged animal is a danger to whatever it gets close to. And last night I walked into the most dangerous room in Catalina’s life carrying the whole charge, off the leash, and told myself I was protecting her.

“It doesn’t matter what you did. It matters what he can say you did, and you gave him something to say, because you were in a room full of witnesses putting your hands on him with a temper everyone in this state has already read about.” She looks at me, and there’s something in her face worse than anger. It’s the look of a woman revising an estimate. “You didn’t think. You never think. You see something you don’t like and you go straight at it because that’s the only move you’ve got, and I keep forgetting that under all of it you’re still…”

She stops.

“Say it.”

And she does. She doesn’t swap it for a softer word. She looks at me and says the true one, flat and quiet and final.

“A child.”

She hears herself say it a half-second too late, this woman who counts every word before she spends it, and I watch what it costs her, and she doesn’t take it back. “You handled it like a child, Finn.”

A boy playing a man’s game in a man’s world, swinging at everything because swinging is all he was ever taught. She’s not all wrong. That’s what guts me.

But she’s not all right either, and I don’t have the words yet for the part she’s got wrong, the part where they built me for exactly this, cheered me for exactly this, pay to watch me be exactly this every single night, and the second I’m it off the ice I’m a kid who can’t be trusted. Same hands. Same wiring. Everybody loves it until they don’t.

I don’t say any of that. I don’t have it yet.

I stand there at the trough and take it, because the worst part, the part I can’t argue, is that she’s right about the thing that matters.

I didn’t think.

And it might cost her everything.

Chapter twenty-seven