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“It is,” said Maksim, at last. “It is a sad face. It is also the face of a man who will hurt you. Both things are true, Lex. I need you to remember that.”
“Yeah.” I closed the folder. “Yeah. I will.”
Game Three was Tuesday night, and I hate to report that we lost.
Two to one. It was a hell of a game. Fast and mean and beautiful, one of those nights when both teams play like the ice is on fire. I hit Maksim four times. He hit me twice. We kept our faces stone, and our eyes on the puck, and our hands entirely off each other in a way that must have looked, to nine thousand fans, like the most bitter and disciplined rivalry in the history of the sport.
It nearly killed me.
Because that’s the thing nobody tells you. I could be near him. I could see him. I could skate past him, close enough to smell that faint honey-and-snow, and not touch. Not look. Not say. Every shift, I felt something like a taut wire strung between our ribs, humming. And when the horn went, and the Ravens piled onto each other at center ice, and Maksim turned his head for exactly one second and looked across the blue line at me, I knew that whatever came next, the wire wasn’t going to hold.
The Ravens had won 2–1, and the series stood at two games to one.
I stood in the tunnel afterward with my helmet in my hand and my heart in my mouth, and felt my phone buzz against my thigh.
ICE PRINCE: You were magnificent.
ICE PRINCE: I hit you harder than I intended in the third. I am sorry.
LEX: ur a bad liar. u loved it
ICE PRINCE: I loved watching you. That is not the same.
I put the phone away, and looked out at the ice, and grinned.
Two more games. We’d need to win both.
I was going to enjoy every second.
Chapter 23
MAKSIM
Gloves
In a decade of professional hockey, I had dropped my gloves eleven times.
I remember each of them precisely. It is a matter of some private shame. In the language of the sport, an enforcer answers a hit with a fight, and there are rules to it, ancient and elegant: you skate to your opponent, you nod, you shed your gloves, you take hold of his jersey, and you trade blows until the referee steps in. You do not go for the eyes. You do not kick. You do not, when the other man falls, follow him down. It is a duel. Two men agree to hurt each other a little, before nine thousand witnesses, and afterward sit five minutes in the box and nod.
I had done it eleven times, and each time I had held back so much of myself that I was left shaking in the locker room, vomiting into a sink.
The coach knew nothing. The trainers knew nothing. I had a reputation, in the league, for not fighting: the quiet Russian, the icy one, the enforcer who mostly stood in front of the net. The crowd did not mind. The crowd loved a legend, and a legend who does not fight is a legend who might.
Then Lex Pendleton skated up to me in the second period of Game Four, gloves already off, and said, very quietly, through his mouthguard: “Drop ‘em.”
I want to be clear about the circumstances.
It was the fourth game of the series, and we led two games to one. The Kings had been playing like men with something to prove, hitting harder and forechecking brutally, and midway through the second period a Kings winger named Sorensen had put a check on our captain along the boards that was not entirely clean, though it was not quite illegal. The arena rose, and the Ravens bench rose, and somewhere in the second row a man threw a cup.
And before I had time to think, Lex was in my face.
We stood at center ice while the officials converged, and I saw his eyes. Hazel, green at the edges, wide with an excitement that was three parts fear and two parts something else. He was asking me. I understood. It was not a challenge. It was a question, in the only language we had been given in front of nine thousand strangers: Do you trust me? Will you do this with me?
“Lex,” I said, low. “The crowd.”
“That’s the point. It’s expected.” He leaned in. “If we don’t, it looks weird. Everyone knows the drill. Enforcer hits enforcer. You’ve done it before.”
“Not with you.”
