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He smiled. It didn’t reach his eyes.

“I wish only to remember tonight,” he said. “That is all. I want to keep every detail. I am afraid I will forget.”

“You don’t forget things.”

“I am afraid,” said Maksim, “that I will.”

I let it go. I want that on the record: I let it go. Something in me knew, that little animal instinct that had never once failed on the ice, that there was a door in that room he wasn’t opening. But I was tired, and warm, and drunk on the taste of him. So I put my head on his chest and let his fingers thread through my hair. I listened to his heart, which had begun to beat, faintly, when I lay against it. Faint, slow, and strange.

I fell asleep to it.

Game Five was the worst hockey game of my life, and the best.

The building was a solid wall of sound. Kings blue on one side, Ravens black and red on the other. Every seat sold. The ice was fast, the boards were scarred, and I could feel Roake somewhere in the stands, a cold spot on the back of my neck like a draft from an open door. I never found him. I didn’t try. I had my eyes on the puck, and my stick in my hand, and a debt to pay.

It was 3–3 with four minutes left.

I had the puck. I saw the lane, saw the gap between two defenders, felt my legs pump, felt the whole world narrow to a corridor of ice. I was flying. I was going to win it. I was going to end it right here, and the Kings would go to the next round, and I would look at Maksim across the ice and he would know.

Then something hit me from the left.

I don’t remember the hit or the fall. I remember the ceiling with its bright lights wheeling, and a ringing in my ears, and a voice far off that might have been Jason’s, and cold air on my face. And then a hand, a cold, familiar, shaking hand, closed around mine.

“Lex.”

I opened my eyes.

Maksim was kneeling on the ice beside me without his helmet, with a look on his face that I’d never seen on anyone. It was terror, pure and unguarded and naked. The trainers were running across the ice, and the crowd had gone dead silent, and he didn’t care who was watching. He took my head in both hands and looked into my eyes as though he could see straight through them.

“Lex. Can you hear me?”

“Yeah,” I croaked. “Loud and clear.”

“Can you move your fingers?”

I wiggled them.

“Your toes?”

“Ice prince. I’m fine. I got clipped. You’re making a scene.”

“I do not care.”

“ I care. Everyone’s looking.”

“Good.”

I stared at him.

It was the wrong thing to say, and the right one. He heard it himself. I watched him hear it, and go pale, and let go of my head. He rose in one smooth motion and skated away from me. Just like that. Back to the Ravens’ bench, shoulders stiff, without another word.

The trainers got me to my feet. The crowd applauded. I limped to the bench with a wrenched shoulder and a scraped chin, and I never touched the puck again.

Ravens 4, Kings 3. Maksim scored the winner in the last ninety seconds, an empty-net goal from center ice.

I watched him do it from the bench, with an ice pack on my neck, and I thought: He didn’t look at me. He didn’t look at me once.

The handshake line is the oldest ritual in the sport. After the series, after the goals and the fights and the blood, both teams line up at center ice and file past each other, gloves off, hands out, saying good game, good game, good game. It’s a small, ridiculous, moving thing. You look each man in the eye. You mean it or you don’t.