Page 82 of Slashed Bonds

“Tuesday morning. Ashford.”

The hallway goes still.

Ashford. Their building. Where the season ended.

I can feel Cash go rigid from across the hall without looking at him, and I know exactly which frame of tape he’s watching behind his eyes, because I’ve watched it with him.

Second overtime. Their building. The one with the low ceiling over the visitors’ bench and the crowd that sounds like it’s inside your helmet. Fifty-three shots and I stopped fifty-two, and the one that got through came off Marchetti’s skate after a draw Cash lost on his backhand, and I never saw it, and I’ve never once said a word to him about it.

He’s said enough words to himself. I’ve heard some of them through the wall.

We haven’t been back. The committee saw to that. And now the same committee’s sending us there on a Tuesday morning as a preliminary, in front of whoever bothers to show up for a nine a.m. faceoff, to find out whether the villains are worth the ticket price.

Their idea. My pleasure.

I’ve had five months to think about that building. I know exactly where I’m going to stand.

“They won’t take us seriously,” Roz says. “Obviously. They’ve spent four years not having to.” She looks back at Mori. “If you can get this Maddie to put something together for content this weekend, it’d be nice. Something to stir the pot. I want people in that building on Tuesday who came to see a bloody show.”

Mori nods, slow.

“I’ll call her tonight.”

Content.

I know what Roz wants, and I know what Greenie’s got in a folder on his phone, and neither of them has seen the thing I’ve got pinned to a wall in a closet with teal string running to it.

The clip they need already exists. It’s eleven seconds long. A woman with red bleeding through her hair stops on a dime, puts a two-hundred-pound winger on his back, and snaps a puck through a sheet of polycarbonate from the top of the circle without looking at the net.

Greenie shot it. I wonder if he comprehends the golden ticket in our grasp thanks to that obnoxiousness tendency to record everything?

Put that on a screen with the right eleven seconds of sound under it, and half the county shows up Tuesday to see if she’s real.

And if this Maddie is what Mori says she is, she’ll know exactly which eleven seconds is going to give us the viral ticket.

Roz nods back.

“Make yourself at home. I don’t know what you’ve got at your place that you’ll need here, but if you need a ride to go get it, bother those obsessed fuckers.” A shrug. “Let them be useful, if they’re going to perform loyalty when they can barely make it to practice on time.”

“Now that’s straight-up lying,” Killian grumbles.

He’s on my left, a half step back, where he’s been for the whole conversation without anyone noticing him arrive. His eyes flick to my arm across her throat. Then to her face. Then to me.

Make a move or stop wasting my lifespan. That was the permission. On the phone, in my closet, staring at a wall of string.

I’ve made the move. He can see it.

And the corner of his mouth does the thing it does maybe twice a season, and he looks away before anyone else catches it.

Roz doesn’t dignify it.

“Good work today.” She says it over her shoulder, already three steps toward the stairwell, and it’s the closest thing to praise any of us have gotten from her since April. “Tomorrow’s off. Get situated with Crowe around. And no fucking in the dorm house!”

There’s a beat where the whole hallway processes that.

Three Alphas. One Omega. A rule that was never going to survive contact with the building it was issued in, delivered by a woman who has met every one of us and knows exactly what she’s authorizing by pretending to forbid it.

“Now, Coach.” Killian, calling after her. “I know you fucking lying.”