"The person who was on the ice."
He smiles, faint and humorless. "That's bullshit."
"It's data."
"Data requires a fucking source." He takes a half-step closer. He's two and a half feet from me now. The smell of him: ice, cold sweat, iron-and-salt under it. “You don't have a source for that.”
"I have three months of scrimmage patterns."
"Patterns aren't people." He looks down at my hands. I track my own stillness: they rest flat on the desk and haven't moved since he walked in. "You've never asked."
"I'm asking now. Four goals. Why were you pissed?"
He watches me. Kenji is pretending not to listen.
"Because they were easy," he says. "Easy means someone let me score."
"Even in a scrimmage?"
"Especially." He leans forward, braces his hands on the edge of my desk, and his taped left knuckles come into focus. He's eighteen inches from my face now, the dark of his eyes pulling at me, and he drops his attention to the closed drawer once before he comes back to me. "Watch from up close. Elm House. Tonight."
"I'm working."
"You're always working." He straightens and turns toward the door. The hand on the handle pauses. He looks back at me. "Cole will be there. I'll be there. Take all the notes you want."
He leaves. The door clicks shut behind him.
My hands are steady on the desk, but underneath, my nerves are firing—that same line from clavicle to third rib, sharper now, the muscle along it locked so tight it aches.
I open the drawer, take out the notebook, turn to the page I left blank.
D.V.—office. 2 min 14 sec. Distance at closest: 18 inches. Hands braced on desk edge, knuckles taped on left hand only. Speech pattern: short clauses, clipped answers. Eye contact: unbroken across full duration, except one drop at approx. 1 min 47 sec, to closed drawer above my left knee. Duration of drop: less than 1 sec. Recovery immediate. Practice sweat at collar of compression shirt, undried. Red contact mark beneath jaw, stick blade shape, approx. 2 inches. Smell: ice, cold sweat, iron-and-salt. Heart rate elevated within 4 sec of door opening,sustained. Nerve line: clavicle to third rib, lower this time, hip to inner thigh. Filed under: he didn't know what was in the drawer. Probably.
I close the notebook and press my palms flat on the desk, leaning into the wood until the tremor in my hands fucking stops.
I look out the window. The arena is dark. A single light burns in a second-floor window of Elm House, two hundred yards in the opposite direction.
The shadow behind the light does not move.
Chapter 3
Dante
The Chronicle building door swings shut behind me, and the cold scrapes the side of my face that had been turned toward her desk—sharper at the fresh skate cut under my jaw, a sting that feels like a fucking reminder.
The interview is an hour from now. Mid-season feature, four-thirty, Cole booked it last week. Skate first, then her, and my body already knows the order.
She didn't open the drawer above her left knee, but I tracked the place anyway. Her hand on the desk had gone still when my eyes landed there, and the memory of that stillness sits in the back of my throat like something I should have swallowed.
The arena lights are up for the second skate. Two-a-days through Frozen Four prep. Three-thirty on the ice. My quads still ache from the morning skate in tight bands above the knees,the kind of ache that builds across a season and only lets go when the season fucking does.
I push through the rink doors, bag on my shoulder, and take my stick from the rack along the tunnel wall as I head down the corridor.
The Briarcliff tunnel smells the way it always smells: cold rubber, sweat locked into concrete, the sharp metallic bite of ice coming off the rink. Sixteen games are left, every one of them with scouts in the stands now, clipboards and pens moving, eyes tracking every shift. The overhead lights buzz, and most people stop hearing the sound after a while, but that buzz never fades into background for me—it's the sound of being watched, and my shoulders tighten under it.
Two freshmen drag bags toward the locker room ahead of me, slower than the morning, skates hooked over their shoulders by the laces.
My phone vibrates in my warmup jacket.
