Page 99 of Slashed Bonds

The flicker.

Dangerous, giddy, the look of a man who’s been handed a set of blueprints and told the building is his.

He knows what my look means.

He’s always known what permission looks like.

“They want to play cat and mouse, we’ll play to their tune.”

I face forward again.

Toward the track, and two people on it, and know the season upon the horizon is going to be one so grand and bloody, I can taste the very metallic taste on the tip of my tongue.

Don’t we all love a bit of bloody rivalry…

“And they’re going to realize rather quickly that we don’t fucking forsake our own.”

CHAPTER 12

The Train Wreck Begins

~MORRIGAN~

“Now, bitch. What blackmail or bribery do I have to do to get onto Greenie’s cock?”

My pen stops.

I’ve been writing. Actual work. A page and a half of hockey plans in a notebook with a black cover, in the presence of my best friend, which is a thing that has never once happened in the three years I’ve known her, since the two of us in a room together is a threat to productivity on the level of a natural disaster.

We don’t get things done.

We get ideas.

Attempted robbery of a vending machine at two in the morning for the thrill of it. Graffiti on the back wall of a pharmacy that had done me wrong.

A plan, never executed, to steal a golf cart from the Bellwether grounds crew and drive it into the ornamental pond.

Miracles happen, apparently.

The plans are for Tuesday.

Cash gave me the tape last night. Not asked me to watch it. Handed me a tablet outside Nikolai’s door at eleven with Ashford’s last six games loaded and said tell me what you see and walked away.

I’ve watched four of them, and here’s what I see.

Their goalie is named Brandt. Not Silas. A different one, a Beta, and I had to sit with the name for a minute before I could look at him without my hands going cold.

He’s good. He’s a positional goalie, deep in the crease, patient, doesn’t come out to challenge, lets the play come to him and covers the bottom of the net like a tarp. He’s beaten Nikolai once, in April, on a shot he never saw, and he’s spent the summer telling people about it.

Which means he’s still standing in April. A goalie who’s living in his best night isn’t watching yours.

Here’s the thing about a goalie who stays deep.

He gives you the top of the net. He’s betting you can’t get there, and against most shooters it’s a good bet, because most shooters see a deep goalie and try to go through him instead of over.

I don’t go through people.

I’ve written that down. Underlined it.