Page 196 of Play Dirty

“I was there,” I shot back.

“Yeah, but did you see it?” he laughed, already turning to yell at someone else.

I barely had time to answer before Riley clapped a hand on my shoulder. Boone right behind him, shaking his head like he still couldn’t believe it.

“Kid fed him that pass like he was reading from a script,” Boone muttered. “Didn’t even look surprised.”

“That’s because he wasn’t,” I said, before I could stop myself.

Boone’s eyes shifted to mine, assessing me almost exactly like he had in the grocery store. Then he nodded once.

“Yeah,” he said. “I believe that.”

It came back to me in flashes. The locker room. The noise, the heat, the way everything felt way too big to fit inside those walls.

Sticks slamming against the floor, shoulder pads getting thrown. Sebastian laughing like he’d just robbed a bank and gotten away with it, as Ares paced — high on adrenaline — like he still had hits to give.

And Grayson—

Steady. Introspective.

Like the game hadn’t so much ended, as shifted into something else.

He’d seen it. The change in Carter Sutherland. The distraction. The way their goalie had taken himself out of the game before the first puck even dropped.

This was the one piece he didn’t have. The only part he couldn’t control.

The part I did.

He didn’t know it yet. I hadn’t told him.

I would.

Just not tonight.

Right now it was time to celebrate, and the whole house knew it. The living room was a full-blown war zone of empty cans, half-eaten food, and bodies packed too close together to make sense. Music blasted from multiple directions at once. The couch had been pushed into the hallway to create an impromptu dance floor, and someone had set Sir-Cleans-a-Lot in the middle of it, spinning in circles while draped with a Reavers jersey.

Zack was at the center of everything. As usual.

“IT WAS ALL PART OF THE PLAN!” he was yelling, arms wide, like he was about to take credit for the entire season.

“You didn’t even touch the puck in the first period!” someone shouted back.

“DECOY!” Zack fired back instantly.

Sebastian spit beer from his nose, laughing, and Sir-Cleans-a-Lot spun right over it, dragging the jersey with him. Ares just shook his head, one corner of his mouth twitching like he was trying — and failing — not to smile.

Grayson stood behind me, dangerously close, fighting the urge to slip his arm around my waist. I knew because he’d leaned in and told me as much, in the short silence between songs.

“You started this,” I called back over my shoulder, as he leaned in.

“Started what?”

I gestured vaguely to the chaos around us. “This.”

He glanced once around the room, then back at me.

“No,” he said. “They did.”