Page 118

"Not us," he says. "Not now."

Down the hall, the door to the room opens and Webb comes out, towel around his neck, and sees us, and stops.

Owen straightens up. He takes his hand off the wall. His face goes still and smooth and closed, the restaurant with all its lights off, the one I haven't seen in months.

"Bus is in twenty," he says to me, in his captain voice. "Get dressed, Castel."

He walks away down the hall. He doesn't look back.

Castel.

He hasn't called me that since December.

I stand in the hallway with my wet hair dripping down the back of my neck, and Webb comes up beside me, and doesn't say anything, and puts his hand on my shoulder, and leaves it there. The way Sorel did in January.

Nashville leads the series, two games to one.

Somewhere in this city, on a hard drive in a security office on the ground floor of a glass hotel, there's two seconds of video with our names on it.

Chapter Twenty-Five

OWEN

Webb calls at six-fifteen in the morning.

"Don't look at your phone," he says.

I'm lying on my back in the hotel bed. Rémy's asleep next to me with his face in the pillow and his arm across my chest. The room's gray. The air conditioning is going. For a second I don't understand what Webb's saying.

"What?"

"Don't look at it. Get up. Get dressed. Go down the hall to my room. Don't look at your phone until you get here."

"Marcus, what⁠—"

"Owen," he says. "Please."

He's never said please to me. Not in twelve years.

I look at the phone anyway.

It's on an account called Rink Rat Tea. I've never heard of it. It has four hundred thousand followers. It posts rumors about hockey players, mostly trades and girlfriends and who got too drunk at whose wedding.

The picture's at the top of the page. It went up at four-forty a.m.

It's from a security camera. You can tell. It's shot from high up, at an angle, down the length of a hotel hallway, and it's grainy and gray, the kind of picture where everything looks like it's underwater. There's a door open on the right side of the frame. Somebody tall is standing in the doorway in a T-shirt. Somebody shorter is standing in the hall in front of him. The tall one's leaning down.

You can't see faces. You can't see anything, really. Two shapes in a doorway. It could be anything.

Except there's a timestamp in the corner. 11:58 PM. And under the picture, the caption.

Spotted: a certain Chicago captain and a certain Chicago rookie, room 814, the night before Game 3. Just roommates?? Discuss.

Two point one million views. Forty thousand comments.

I don't read the comments. I don't have to. I can see the first few, the ones with the most likes, in big white letters on the black screen.

OMG THE ICE MACHINE