Page 5

“I’m good,” he said, not looking up. “I’ll get a ride home.”

“Not a chance.” Cole rounded on him with the particular stubbornness of a man who had decided something and would not be talked out of it. “You scored the game winner, Thorne. You don’t get to skip the one beer we’re all forcing ourselves to have in your honor.”

“I don’t want—”

“Nobody cares what you want,” Dante cut in, not unkindly, already lacing up his street shoes. “Ember, tell him.”

“He’s coming,” Ember said in the tone of someone reading a weather report. “It’s decided.”

Ash’s jaw worked.

For a second I thought he was actually going to argue, dig in the way he did when a call went against him, but then his shoulders dropped half an inch and he reached for his other boot instead, tugging the laces loose with more force than necessary.

“Fine,” he said. “One beer.”

“That’s the spirit,” Keegan said, already halfway to the door.

Murphy’s was loud in the particular way sports bars got loud after a win. Somebody had put game highlights on three of the six screens, and every time the replay hit our first goal there was a fresh round of hollering from the corner where Sorin and Aurelian had commandeered a booth.

The regulars knew us by now.

Nobody bothered us for autographs there, which was half of why we kept coming back.

I ended up at the bar itself, waiting on a pitcher, and Ash drifted over a few minutes later—not toward me exactly, but close enough that it didn’t feel like an accident.

He leaned against the bar top, arms crossed, watching the crowd with the wariness of a man counting exits.

“You didn’t have to let them drag you here,” I said, keeping my eyes on the bartender instead of him, giving him room.

“You’ve met Baelor.” A ghost of something almost like humor touched his voice. “Man doesn’t understand the word no.”

“He understands it fine. He just doesn’t respect it.”

I finally looked at him.

Up close, the tightness hadn’t left his face, not really. It had just gotten better at hiding behind the stubble and the practiced blankness.

“You good?”

He was quiet long enough that I thought he was going to brush it off the way he’d brushed off my hand in the tunnel.

Then his jaw shifted, something loosening fractionally, like a held breath finally let out halfway.

“That was my dad,” he said, low, like the words cost him something to hand over. “Back there.”

I didn’t say anything.

I’d learned that much, at least, in fifteen years of playing hockey with men who didn’t talk. Sometimes the only way to get more was to give them nothing to push against.

“He’s not—” Ash stopped and started again. “It’s complicated.”

“Doesn’t have to be uncomplicated for you to talk about it.”

He looked at me then, actually looked, and there was something in his hazel eyes I hadn’t seen aimed at me before, something unguarded and almost startled, like he hadn’t expected to get this far and wasn’t sure what to do now that he had.

“Max, I—”

“Well, hello, Captain.”