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No scars. No bruises. I’d hit that back into the boards an hour ago, hard, and there wasn’t a single mark on it.

That should have been my first clue. Guess what I did instead.

I decided to be offended.

Because he’d heard the door. I know he heard the door. And he didn’t turn around. Didn’t say a word. Just kept folding a shirt like I was a draft from an open window.

This pissed me off in a way that felt personal, and I don’t have a good reason, and I’ve thought about it a lot since. I hated the energy coming off him, this quiet, high-and-mighty I am above all of you thing, like everyone born was a step below him on the staircase. I saw him for five seconds and my hands were already clenching. It’s an irritation you can’t explain to other people. It sits under your skin like a splinter you can’t find.

Before I could stop myself, I was walking across the tape.

“Hey.”

He turned around, and our eyes met.

I don’t know what I expected, maybe a glare or a sneer, but what I got was gray, and not a blue-gray or a steel gray but the gray of the ice right before it cracks. I stood there with my mouth open like a fish, forgetting every insult I’d been saving up, for at least two whole seconds.

Two seconds is a very long time to be quiet, for me.

“What was that out there?” I finally said. “You think you’re tougher than me? What was all that attitude?”

I sounded stupid. I felt stupid. But I was already talking and I couldn’t shut up, my mouth was running ahead of my brain like it always does, and his face was so blank it made me want to scream.

“You listen to me,” I said. “You’re not higher than me. We’re the same. Enforcers, different teams. When you’re on the ice, you face me like a rival. When I challenge you, you don’t just keep quiet like a sissy. You get that? Clear?”

I said it loud and clear, like I was some kind of boss, and the whole time his eyes stayed fixed on me, steady and unblinking. They really were unblinking, because I counted. For a second my words got stuck in my throat, and for one strange moment I almost felt…

Scared.

No. Nope. That word does not exist in my dictionary.

“What are you looking at? Say something.”

“You talk too much.”

His voice, Jesus, it sounded like an ocean rolling over in a storm, very low and very slow, every word set down carefully as though it weighed something. The accent curled the edges of it. And for one second, something in my body wanted to obey it.

That’s stupid. Why would I obey him?

“You don’t tell me what to do,” I said. “You do not tell me what to do, Maksim.”

“Is that so?”

That was it. Before I could think, I grabbed the collar of his undershirt and shoved him back into the lockers. The whole row rang like a bell.

He didn’t fight it. He didn’t even blink. But when my knuckles pressed against his chest, I noticed something else, and I wish I hadn’t.

He was cold , and I don’t mean shower-cold or sweat-drying-in-the-AC cold, I mean ice-bath cold, as though I’d grabbed something that had been sitting out in a snowbank all night.

“Let go,” he said.

He said only two words, but he said them like an invitation to do exactly the opposite, and I’ve never once backed down from that in my life.

“Make me.”

I didn’t even see him move.

There was a rush , like wind through a door, and then my back hit the lockers so hard my teeth clicked. His forearm sat across my collarbones. Not enough to hurt. Not even close. But way more than enough to keep me right where I was, and I knew it, and he knew it, and I couldn’t figure out how a guy could do that without shifting his feet.