Mattias
I’m mid-rep with roughly one hundred and ten kilograms of steel above my chest when Reeve Poirier, our penalty-loving defenseman from Saskatoon, swings the door open so hard itthudsagainst the wall and shakes the training room. My resulting flinch makes my triceps shudder, and I fight to rerack the bar. Poor timing for attempting a new maximum.
“Men vad fan,” I swear in my native tongue, sitting up and throwing a scowl Poirier’s way. He knows how much I hate being interrupted.
“Coach wants to see you in his office.” His tone is pricklier than usual.
I drag a hand through my damp hair, pushing it away from my face. I’m in the middle of a set. “Now?”
He nods. “He sounded pissed.”
I frown. Darius Marshall rarely loses his temper, so it must be something serious.
“Did you do something?” I ask. Poirier excels at saying the wrong thing, often intentionally. He looks more ornery than usual with hisdark hair damp and his tan face rosy from his cardio session. His dark eyes, usually sharp and perceptive like those of a wolverine, are heated.
“He was already in a bad mood when I went up there to bitch about the draft picks. I still can’t believe we took Thompson. That guy’s such a prick and his defense is shit. I’ve seen Swiss cheese with fewer holes in it. We’re so fucked for this season, I can already feel it. My dad’s beer league team has a better shot at the Cup than we do.”
“Why do you care? You don’t even like hockey.”
“So? I like my paycheck, and I want to keep it. Now get up there and shower him in your Swedish pacifism before his head explodes.”
“Fine.” I towel my face off. While English is Poirier’s first language, not mine, I do think my vocabulary is better—and I’m surprised he knows the wordpacifism. I throw my towel in his face on the way out.
I wish I could at least grab a coffee, but the rink runs a skeleton crew during off-season and there’s never any brewed. Not like home, where there’s always a fresh pot, and it’s not watery like this American grocery store stuff that tastes like distilled mold, either. I settle for digging a salted licorice candy out of the small bag in my pocket and pop it into my mouth. I usually avoid sugar, even in the off-season, but Westergren just got home from Stockholm and brought me back my weakness—Svensson's Supersalt.
Cold air meets my sweaty skin as I make my way upstairs. The rink is a ghost town during the summer. A vending machine hums and a light flickers above the ice, but there’s none of the usual buzz. Hockey camp doesn’t start until ten, and most of the guys are still home for the summer. Not me. Not Poirier, either.
“Coach?” I say, knocking on his open office door. He looks up from his desk, and I imagine that if he had hair, he’d be pulling it out. His dark eyes are shadowed and his brown skin shines with sweat despitethe chill. A forgotten play diagram lingers on the whiteboard behind him, a reminder of last season’s failures.
“Falkenberg.” His deep voice sounds taxed.
He gestures for me to sit, so I do, holding myself stiffly upright to avoid soiling his chair with my sweat-drenched shirt. “Poirier said you wanted to see me.”
Surely he isn’t already following up about my strength conditioning. This will be my seventh season with the LA Monarchs, and Coach has been hounding me to put on an additional five kilos of muscle to power up my shot. My contribution has always come from speed more than power, but I’m getting there—and there’s no sayingnoto Darius Marshall. He’s a hockey legend with four Founders’ Cups under his belt. He’s put on a little weight since his days as a player, but he still looks like he could crush my skull with his biceps.
“So you haven’t seen the news.” Something in his tone tells me I’ll wish this had been about my conditioning.
“No,” I say.
“Teddy Hearst was arrested an hour ago.” He gives me a resigned look.
Teddy as in Theodore Hearst—our principal owner and a real estate tycoon from Boston who owns half of Los Angeles.
“Arrested?” I echo.
Teddy loves hockey, which isn’t always the case with NHL ownership, but something about him has always rubbed me wrong. He’s too rowdy, throwing back martinis in his VIP box like they’re water, marrying and divorcing a new model every other year.
“Money laundering,” Coach sighs. I feel like I’ve been slapped. “The feds raided his house. Washed a couple hundred million from his real estate ventures through the Monarchs, according to preliminary reports.”
Suddenly I feel like I’m going to be sick. Like I’ve taken a gloves-off hook to the gut.
“I haven’t told the team yet, but it’s all over the news.” Coach drags his palm over his face.
Money laundering and a raid? It sounds like the sort of thing that happens in movies, not in real life. Not to my team. There must have been some sort of mistake.
“What does this mean?” I manage to say. My mind is racing, spinning through all of the worst possible scenarios. Total liquidation. Absorption into other teams. Contracts nullified and dissolved. Me, shipping back to Sweden empty-handed. All of it for nothing.
This can’t happen.
