Page 180 of Slashed Bonds

Fuck. This is going to hurt like balls.

I can take it. I’ve taken worse. I can take the hit and get the shot off and maybe it goes and maybe it doesn’t, and either way I’m in the boards and he’s standing over me.

Then her scent hits me.

Through the cage, through the sweat and the rubber and the cold, like something thrown. Frost first, the way it always is. Then the ozone under it, the sharpened-pencil smell that means her Switch is up, running, reading the ice the way I do, and under both of them the new note, the warm one, the one that showed up this morning in a shower and hasn’t left.

She’s on my right. Coming. Not where I’d have put her, where she put herself, a stride behind and a lane over, in the one spot on the ice that the D-man coming for me can’t see because I’m in the way.

Saving grace. That’s what she smells like. That’s what she is.

My arms move before my mind catches up.

A backhand feed. Blind. Off my stick at the exact second the D-man’s shoulder commits, a flat pass to a place I don’t look at because looking would tell him, and I don’t need to look. I know where she’ll be. I’ve known where she’ll be since a loading dock five days ago when she stood on the concrete and told me to wait in line.

Then the boards.

He hits me the way men hit when they’ve been waiting all night for the chance, full weight, shoulder into my chest, and the glass takes us both, bows, holds. The sound goes through the building. OHHH. A thousand voices making the shape of it. Somebody behind the glass yelling SHIT close enough that I hear the consonants.

I stay up.

Don’t ask me how. Legs, I suppose. Four years of Killian hitting me in practice harder than any D-man in this league would dare. I stay on my skates with my back against the boards and my lungs trying to remember their job, and he’s in front of me with his face an inch from my cage.

Smug. That’s the word for it. The grin of a man who’s done the thing he came to do and is waiting to be told so.

I glare at him.

You’ve made a mistake, friend. You hit the wrong Viper.

And then the building changes.

He hears it before he understands it. The OHHH turning into something else, rising, a wave going up the stands in the direction we aren’t facing, and I watch his face try to catch up to it, the grin faltering, the eyes starting to slide off me toward the sound.

He turns.

So do I.

And Malice has the puck.

Locked in. I can see it from here, from the boards, from inside a chest that hasn’t taken a full breath yet. The posture of her. Low, forward, head up, every piece of her body pointed at one thing, and she’s moving down the ice so fast that the lights smear on her jersey.

A blur. That’s not a figure of speech. I’m watching her and I can’t hold her still in my eyes.

Everyone’s chasing.

Ashford’s third skater, who was caught up ice when their center turned it over, now turned, digging, losing a stride every three. The sophomore, who’d been covering Killian, abandoning Killian to go after her and finding out what Killian found out five days ago in a scrimmage, which is that she isn’t where you aim.

One of them dives.

Full length, stick out, a desperate plea of a play, trying to knock the puck off her blade or her feet out from under her or anything at all, and she’s gone before he lands. Past him. Over his stick with a hop I don’t see her start, like the ice had told her he was coming.

Then she’s in on Brandt.

Alone. Twenty feet, fifteen, the slush spraying off her blades in a sheet, and Brandt’s set. He’s been watching her all night. He saw the hip check and the feed to Killian and the way she’s been shooting high and early, and he’s a Beta with a Beta’s patience, and he’s read her.

Left.

I can see him read it. The weight going to his glove side, the pad starting to slide, because she’s coming in on her forehand and her hips say left and her shoulders say left and every tell she has on the ice says the puck’s going to her left into the far corner, and he’s going to reach out and take it cold.