Page 68 of Slashed Bonds

It’s the same principle as a cantilever. You don’t fight the load. You give it somewhere to go that isn’t through you.

I’ve been hitting people for a living since I was sixteen and I have never once thrown a check that clean.

Not one.

The puck is on her stick.

Nobody on the ice moves.

Not the second line. Not Dubois. Not the defensemen behind her. A dozen Alphas frozen mid-stride, looking at the Omega who came to check a box and instead put a two-hundred-pound winger on his ass without breaking rhythm.

Our jaws drop. All three.

I feel mine go and I don’t fix it.

She’s already gone.

Twelve strides and she’s through center, and she doesn’t skate the way our forwards skate, in bursts. She skates the way water finds a drain. Constant. Low. The puck lives on her blade like it’s magnetized, and when the near defenseman, Okonkwo, steps up at the blue line to meet her, she pulls it wide to the forehand and tucks her shoulder and goes past him on the outside so close I hear his stick clatter on the ice as she strips it.

Now it’s her and Pruitt.

He drops. Naturally he drops. That’s the whole textbook. Butterfly down, pads sealed, gloves tight to the body, take away the bottom and dare her to go high.

She goes high.

No windup. The shot comes out of her wrists from the top of the circle, and it’s on him before his glove has finished coming up, and I hear him curse, a short bark of a sound, as it goes past his ear so close it moves his hair.

Then the crack.

Loud. Flat. The polycarbonate shooter-tutor sheet strapped behind the practice net, the one we use for target work, takes the puck square in the upper corner and splits from edge to edge with a sound like a bone going.

Through the target. Through the sheet. If the net weren’t fake, she’d have taken the water bottle off the top.

Pruitt’s on his back in the crease, looking at the ceiling.

Niko’s on his feet beside me. I didn’t see him get up. He’s standing at the boards with both hands on the top rail and dog hair all down his front, and he’s looking at the split in that sheet the way he looks at a shooter who’s beaten him clean, which has happened four times in four years.

“Glove side,” he says. Quiet. To nobody. “From the top of the circle. No windup.”

“I saw.”

“She didn’t look at the net.”

She didn’t. She looked at Pruitt’s glove hand, and she shot where it wasn’t going to be.

“She’s been in my net,” Niko says, and then closes his mouth on whatever came next, and I let it go, because I know what it was.

And she doesn’t celebrate.

Doesn’t raise the stick. Doesn’t look at the bench. She skids around the back of the net in one clean arc, tight, both edges, and comes out the other side already coasting, and she glides the length of the ice back to where she started.

Stops on Coach’s left.

Arms crossed. Unbothered. Lips bare.

And she says something.

I can’t hear it from here. Nobody can.