Page 181 of Slashed Bonds

She shoots.

The release comes. The angle’s exactly what he thought. I’m watching from the boards with my heart in my teeth and I know, I know with everything the gift gives me, that he’s going to have it. His mitt’s already moving. The puck’s going left and his glove’s going left and the two are going to meet.

And she does something I almost miss.

What.

Her body turns.

Not the way a hockey player turns, the rough pivot, the hips wrenching the shoulders around. Something else. Something I’ve seen on television with the sound off in a hotel room at three in the morning and never on a sheet of ice I was standing on. Her weight goes up onto one blade and her free leg comes around and her arms come in, and the whole of her rotates on a single point with a grace that doesn’t belong in this building, the beautiful serene geometry of a figure skater, and she comes out of the spin a quarter turn farther than any shooter should.

An extra spin.

An extra quarter of a spin, on one skate, in slush, at speed, with ten thousand people watching, and the puck that was leaving her blade for the left corner leaves it for the right instead.

She faked him with her body. Not her stick. Her whole fucking body. He read every tell she has and she gave them all to him and then she turned them around.

We process it at the same time.

All of us. Brandt, with his glove hand out to his left and his eyes starting to track right, understanding in real time that the puck isn’t where his hand is. The sophomore, flat on his stomach ten feet behind her. The D-man beside me at the boards with the smug gone off his face so completely he looks like a different man. Killian at center ice, not moving, watching. Niko at the far end, in his crease, with his blocker hand already starting to come up.

The puck’s in the air.

Not fast. It doesn’t need to be. It rises over a pad that’s sliding the wrong way and a glove that’s reaching for nothing, and it finds the top right corner of the frame where the net meets the bar, and it goes in.

And the building goes silent.

I’ve never heard anything like it. Ten thousand people, and not one of them making a sound, the kind of quiet that has weight, that you could put your hand against. A whole arena trying to understand what it saw.

Every eye on her.

She skids to a stop behind the net. The signature sound, the long scrape of blades biting, the hiss Maddie put under a video five days ago that eleven thousand people watched before they knew her name, and the sound tells you how fast she was going, because it goes on a long time. Not for show. She was moving fast enough that she needed to stop, and she needed to stop behind the net because a D-man who’d been embarrassed on his own ice was coming, and she’d known that too.

She scored and got out of the way of the violence in the same motion. Who taught her that. Who had to.

She stands there.

Huffing. Chest going under the jersey, shoulders rising and falling, stick still in both hands. Looking at the net. Looking at the puck in it, lying against the mesh in the slush, like she’s confirming it’s there.

Then her eyes come up and find mine.

Across the ice. Through two cages. And I watch it click for her at the same second it clicks for me, the realization landing on both our faces like the same light.

We fucking won.

“THAT’S OUR MALICE!”

It comes from the far end.

Niko. From his crease, two hundred feet away, with his mask already off and his glove already thrown and his voice cracking on the second word like a boy’s, losing it completely, pads and all, in a way I have never once seen Nikolai Volkov lose it on a sheet of ice. He’s skating. Badly, because goalies skate badly at speed, with his blocker hand up and his mouth open and nothing in him that’s holding anything back.

The team’s already going.

Over the boards, all of them, Dubois first, then Okonkwo, the twins moving like one animal, Greenie with his phone already in his hand, and they’re racing toward her, toward the Omega behind Ashford’s net with the biggest smile I’ve ever seen on her face. The cage can’t hide it. The lipstick’s under there, dark red, the signature she puts on in a bathroom before every game and nobody’s seen the end of, and it’s stretched into a grin of pure triumph that I’m going to be seeing when I close my eyes for the rest of my life.

Killian gets there first.

He was closest, and he’s fastest when he wants to be, and he hits her in a hug that lifts her off the ice and makes her squeak, a sound I didn’t know she had in her, high, surprised, delighted, and I’d bet the whole of my father’s money that the hug isn’t a hug. Not only. He got there first so he’d be the one on top when the rest of them arrived. A wall. The structure guy, putting himself between her and twenty men who love her and would crush her anyway.