Page 179 of Slashed Bonds

The thrill of a game is a dangerous thing when you’ve been tied for ten fucking minutes.

Overtime. Sudden death.

Three skaters a side on a sheet that’s half slush at one end, with a clock that doesn’t matter because the next goal ends it, and a building that’s gone from screaming to a sound I’ve only heard in hospitals. Ten thousand people holding one breath.

One goal. That’s the whole question now. One goal decides whether the rejects are worth something to this crowd of manipulated motherfuckers, or whether we were the entertainment and the entertainment’s over.

Two-two.

That’s where regulation left us, and it took sixty minutes of the ugliest, best hockey I’ve been part of in four years to get there.

Ashford scored first. Six minutes in, a point shot through a screen Okonkwo should’ve cleared and didn’t, and Niko never saw it, and I watched him look over his shoulder at the puck in his net and go still in a way I didn’t like. Nik stillness. I skated past the crease on the way to the dot and said his name, the short one, and he blinked and came back.

Not tonight. Not with her on the ice. If he goes tonight, I don’t have a syringe in my gloves.

Then she took Halvard’s wall away.

Second shift. The kid came up the left side with his head down and his hands white on his stick, wanting the outside the way the tape said he would, and Malice wasn’t where he thought she’d be. She was a foot inside, low, hips set, arriving at the spot he was about to occupy a half second before he got there, and the sound their bodies made against the glass went through the building like a door slamming.

He lost his stick. He lost his feet. He lost, I’d guess, the version of the evening he’d planned, and he sat on the ice with his back against the boards looking up at an Omega who’d already turned away from him to find the puck.

Niko taught her that this morning. In a flooded ring. I watched it from the doorway for a full minute before I let them know I was there.

Killian tied it at the end of the first. Off her stick. She read the sophomore’s pinch, waited him into it, chipped the puck past his hip as he stepped up like he was late for something, and then she didn’t go herself. She fed the point. A flat pass to Killian at the top of the left circle, and Killian did the thing he’s never done in a game, which is shoot it instead of carrying it, a wrist shot that went off Brandt’s shoulder and in before the Beta had decided which way to lean.

He didn’t celebrate. He looked at her. She nodded once, the way you nod when a man’s finally done the thing you told him he could do, and skated to the bench.

Ashford went up two-one in the second on a power play after Marchetti took a slashing call he didn’t need to take, and I tied it in the third off a draw. Clean win on my backhand to Dubois, back to me, and I put it under Brandt’s blocker from the hash marks before he’d set, because the ice at his end had gone to soup and the puck skipped twice on the way and he never found it.

Shoot early on him. Her words, in a bathroom, with her nails in my throat. Page four of the whiteboard. She was right.

And then nothing. Fifteen minutes of nothing. Niko standing on his head in the bad end with the slush around his skates, stopping everything they threw, and Brandt in the good end doing the same, and the horn, and here.

Three-on-three. Me, Killian, and her.

Halloran wanted Dubois for the third skater and I said no. I don’t say no to Halloran often enough for him to be used to it, and he looked at me across the bench with the committee liaison sitting two rows up behind the glass taking notes, and I said it again, and he put her over the boards.

She’s been the best player on this ice for sixty minutes. If I’m wrong about that, fire me after.

Ten minutes in. The puck’s been up and down four times, each rush uglier than the last, legs going, and I’m at our blue line when Ashford’s center coughs it up at center ice trying to go through Killian, which nobody does.

I see the opening before anyone else.

I always do. That’s the only gift I’ve got that didn’t come out of a bottle or a tattoo gun. The sheet lays out in front of me the way it does, the five other bodies and where they’re going to be in two seconds and three, and there’s a lane up the middle with nobody in it yet and a goalie who’s cheated toward Killian’s side because Killian’s been the shooter all night.

My body’s moving before I’ve finished the thought.

Puck on my blade. Center ice. The slush end ahead of me and Brandt in it, deep in his crease the way he gets when he’s tired, and the top of the frame open above his shoulder like a mouth.

Golden. That’s the word. It’s right there.

And two possibilities, both of them clear at once.

The first is the net.

The second is the fucker coming across the ice at me.

Their D-man. The one who isn’t the sophomore, the senior with the long reach and a reputation, cutting from the far wall with his shoulder down and his eyes on my ribs and not on the puck, and he’s going to get there. I can see it in the geometry. I’m faster with the puck than he is without it, but the angle’s his, and he’s a ticking clock, and no matter how I bend the line he arrives at the same time I do.