Page 86 of Play Dirty

The rink felt wrong.

Not just loud, not just hostile, but totally, weirdly off.

It didn’t help that the place was beat to shit; paint peeling off the walls, lighting straight out of a horror movie. It felt like the ice tilted ever so slightly in one direction. And everything — every bounce, every whistle, every break — kept sliding that way.

Toward them.

“—that’s BULLSHIT!” Dorian shouted from the bench.

No call.

Again.

Midway through the third, we were down by two, 6-4. And it wasn’t because we were playing badly. That was the worst part.

No, we were good tonight. Sharp. Connected. Faster than we’d been a week ago.

The systems were working. The spacing was better, and our entries were clean. Grayson was reading lanes exactly the way I’d mapped them out, and Caleb had finally stopped drifting high on the backcheck.

In short, we were doing everything right.

And it didn’t matter.

“Keep your heads!” Mercer barked, pacing behind the bench like a caged animal. “Don’t let them drag you into it!”

Too late.

Across the ice, Derek Solomon grinned like he owned the place. Which, for a few hundred dollars, it looked like he probably could.

Right wing. Ottawa Ironclads.

And an absolute piece of shit.

He’d been at it all night. Little hooks. Late bumps. A stick that just happened to catch a skate at the worst possible time.

Every single one just subtle enough to slip past the refs.

Or maybe not slip past.

I leaned forward over the boards, my eyes narrowing as another “missed” call went down.

“Unreal,” I muttered.

Beside me, Mercer didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. His jaw was tight enough to crack teeth.

Out on the ice, Sebastian reset in the crease. Something was off about him tonight. I could see it. Not in his positioning — he was still technically sound — but in the timing, which was always just a fraction of a second late. Everything he did seemed a half-step behind. Like he was reacting, instead of anticipating.

Almost like something was pulling him out of sync.

“Seb,” Grayson called, tapping his stick lightly. “You’re good.”

Sebastian nodded. But it didn’t look like he believed it.

The puck dropped again. Chaos followed. Zack took it through the neutral zone, cutting inside—

— and went down, hard.

My stomach dropped. Trip. Clear as day. And yet…