Page 191 of Play Dirty

His sentence died as he bumped straight into Ares.

“Hey man!” he lamented, rubbing his face. “Watch where you’re—”

In one smooth motion Grayson snatched up the robot and flipped it over. Sebastian tore my underwear from its whirring clutches, and a second later, it was back on the floor.

“What are you doing to Trash Panda?” Zack asked.

“He got jammed up again,” said Grayson. “Nerf dart.”

“Oh shit, yeah,” Zack nodded. “Foamageddon.”

“Foamageddon?” I repeated.

“Also known as the Reaver’s Annual House Purge,” he nodded briskly. “We had it just before you got here.”

“Oh.”

“We’re still finding darts, all these months later,” Zack pointed in six different directions. “Diesel almost choked on one last week.”

“Diesel?”

“Asher’s Iguana,” said Grayson. “House dinosaur.”

I chuckled.

“Of course.”

Slipping behind me, Sebastian pressed my panties into my hand. I closed my fist around the tiny thong easily.

“Pizza’s here by the way,” Zack added hastily. “Get it now before Caleb eats it all.”

He disappeared the way he came, in the direction of the kitchen, letting us all breathe a sigh of relief.

But I could still feel it. The heat. The pull.

The way they looked at me.

Tomorrow we played.

Tonight—

— we got away with it.

~ 55 ~

GRAYSON

The puck hit the ice and everything else dropped away.

Noise. Crowd. Pressure.

Gone.

All that was left was movement. Muscle memory. Hundreds of hours of drills — intense and unrelenting.

And the sheer will to win.

The Sentinels came out swinging. No hesitation. No feeling-out. They pressed hard from the first shift — aggressive forecheck, bodies finishing every hit, sticks snapping at lanes like they were trying to break us before we could settle.