Page 138 of Slashed Bonds

“Brandt gives you the top of the net.”

He blinks. Once.

“He sits deep. He’s a tarp. He’s beaten Niko once in his life and he’s still living there, and a goalie who’s living in his best night thinks every shooter wants to go through him.” I hold his gaze. “I don’t go through people. I’ll go over him in the first period, high glove, and after that he’ll start coming out to meet me, and he’s never once practiced coming out, and that’s when you run the 1-3-1 like it’s a trap and not a system.”

Silence.

Then the corner of his mouth lifts. A quarter inch. The standing ovation.

“It’s on the whiteboard,” he says. “Page four.”

He’d already found it. He let me say it anyway. That’s the alliance. That’s the whole thing, in one exchange.

And that’s why I’m afraid of this alliance.

Because I know how it ends. There are only two ways. We rise, or we all fucking burn.

I’ve seen both. I was on a bench for the first one, with four boys in matching jackets and a crowd on its feet, and I thought that was what rising looked like. Then I was on a loading dock for the second, and I learned what burning costs, and who pays, and that the people who light the match are rarely the ones standing in the fire.

This man’s handing me the match.

And my real fear?

Us doing both…

CHAPTER 18

We Ain't Killing Anyone Tonight

~KILLIAN~

Ipull on the cigarette and hold it.

Crouched on the bench behind Viper House with my elbows on my knees, staring across the service road at the athletics complex, which at this hour is a slab of black glass with nothing behind it. No lights. No compressor hum. A building holding its breath.

Two in the morning. Game day.

The house behind me is as quiet as it’s been in a week.

Twenty-two men asleep, or pretending. Greenie’s light was still on when I came down, because Greenie doesn’t sleep before games and never has, and the twins were in the kitchen eating cereal out of the box in silence, which is their version of prayer.

And the masks arrived. Six o’clock, two boxes, Maddie signing for them in a pink robe like she was receiving a delivery of weapons. Black, matte, cut to sit under a helmet cage. Twenty-two of them in a row on the lounge table with a viper slashed across the mouth of each one in violet, and the roster walked past them all evening without touching them, the way you’d walk past a thing you weren’t sure you were allowed to want.

She’s going to make us put them on in the tunnel. In front of the cameras she’s summoned. And every one of these men is going to pretend he thinks it’s stupid.

I tried mine on in the dark of the lounge after the house went down. Nobody saw. It fits under the cage. It covers everything from the bridge of the nose to the jaw, and when I looked at the window with it on, there was a man in the glass I didn’t have a file for.

Maddie’s smarter than any of us. That’s going to be a problem for someone, eventually. I hope it’s not us.

She slept all day. From the bath to dark. Niko sat in the chair in his room with a book he didn’t read and his feet on the bed frame, on what Roz had called Malice duty a week ago as a joke and what has stopped being one.

The Omega doctor came at two in the afternoon. A Beta, gray coat, a case she carried like it was heavy. She went in, and the door closed, and forty minutes later she came out and talked to Cash in the hall in a voice too low for the second floor, and Cash’s face did the thing it does when a number comes out wrong.

I was at the end of the hall. I’m always at the end of a hall. I heard four words.

Built to maintain. Not heal.

I looked in on Mori before I came out.