Chapter two #2
The problem was that I knew this ice. I knew the exact give of it near the right-wing boards, the way the paint bled slightly under the left face-off dot from a resurfacing job done in a hurry three years back.
I’d logged thousands of hours in this building, and my body remembered it even when I was trying to pretend it didn’t, my edges finding their angles automatically, muscle memory working independently of whatever I was telling myself about staying focused and staying blank.
It wasn’t Antoine I spotted first, it was Briggs, who’d been waving at me in that airport terminal two months ago like everything was normal, like he hadn’t known.
He was taking shots at the far end, and he looked up as I came around the back of the net, and the thing that crossed his face wasn’t guilt or embarrassment or even the particular awkward discomfort of someone who’d been caught.
It was colder than that. A deliberate flatness, the kind you had to manufacture—the expression of someone who’d made a decision about you and was comfortable with it.
He looked back at the net.
Martinez was next. Same thing—eyes finding me across the ice for just a second, long enough to register and dismiss, and then he was gone, turning away with his stick on his knee like I was scenery.
I understood, technically. I understood the mechanics of it. But understanding it didn’t make the weight of it any lighter, the specific loneliness of being looked through by people who’d once looked at you like you were one of them.
I was setting up for another shot when I noticed Steel—Keegan—fall into the drill line two spots behind me, which shouldn’t have been notable except that he’d been working the far end with the top line forwards for the last ten minutes and there was no reason for him to migrate this direction.
He didn’t say anything. He just took his turn in the rotation, took his shot, and stayed in the line for the next pass.
Then Cole Armstrong materialized on my other side.
Cole wasn’t a man who appeared by accident anywhere.
He moved through space like he was always exactly where he’d decided to be, and the fact that he’d decided to be in this drill line, between me and the right-wing boards, felt intentional in a way that I couldn’t quite name.
He was focused on the puck, his expression that locked-down quality it always had—like there was a great deal happening behind it that had been made very deliberately unavailable to outside observers.
He took his shot. Crisp, precise, exactly where he was aiming.
“Hands are good tonight,” he said, flatly, almost to himself.
I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me. I took my shot anyway. “They’ll have to be.”
He didn’t respond. But he stayed in the line.
I became aware, gradually, the way you became aware of a change in weather—not all at once but through accumulated small signals—that the shape of the warm-up around me had shifted. Taranis Rees had materialized in front of the net and nodded approvingly when I shot right at him.
Renaud had drifted back into my orbit without appearing to do so deliberately.
When one of the younger Chicago forwards—a kid I didn’t know, someone they’d called up mid-season—crossed the center line by six inches during a loose puck drill and bumped me harder than the contact warranted, the silence that came from my side of the ice had a sharp sound to it.
Nothing was said. Nobody made a move. But the attention that swung toward that kid from half a dozen Colorado jerseys had a weight to it, and the kid felt it, because he backed up a step and returned to his side without making eye contact with anyone.
I straightened up. Suddenly the air didn’t seem quite as cold.
Theron
I watched warm-ups from the bench the way I always did—standing, arms crossed, close enough to the boards that I could hear the blades and the puck and the percussion of a team finding its rhythm before the real work started.
Thirty years of hockey, and the smell of a rink before a playoff game still did something to my insides that I couldn’t name and didn’t try to.
I tracked the lines as they moved through their patterns.
Renaud anchoring the first unit with that authority of his, reading the ice two seconds ahead of everyone else the way only players who’d survived seven seasons learned to do.
Steel moving through his drills with a economy of motion that was incredible.
Most people aware but who didn’t understand dragon physiology thought his speed was due to his animal, when the opposite was true.
Then there was Russo.
I let my eyes move to him the way I’d been letting my eyes move to him for two months—carefully, briefly, with the practiced casualness of a man who had spent four decades learning to observe without appearing to observe.
He was running the outside edge of the drill pattern, taking the pass from Ilyin, going wide, pulling up for the shot with that compact, explosive release that the scouting reports had flagged and that the footage had confirmed and that seeing in person had done something remarkable.
The kid could play. That had never been the question.
The question was what else he was, and what he’d do with it, and who was going to get hurt when he did.
I’d received the file on Dante Russo three days before the deadline closed.
Michael Dunn, the athletic director, had been given it by our GM and had walked it into my office with the expression of a man delivering something he found personally distasteful but professionally necessary, which was an expression Michael wore often enough that I’d stopped reading anything specific into it.
The file was typical by the standards of an NHL team and contained stats and physical details.
Then Michael had told me what wasn’t in the file.
Three young players. Russo had allegedly pursued three separate teammates over the course of eighteen months, leveraging proximity and the vulnerabilities of a close-knit locker room to get what he wanted.
Favors, their GM said, which was a careful word that could mean almost anything and so meant everything.
When the favors hadn’t materialized, or when the relationships had run their course, the behavior had reportedly shifted.
The wives. Partners. A systematic, retaliatory campaign of attention directed at the people his teammates valued most. His mistake had been going after the alternate captain who wasn’t about to keep his mouth closed, even when it meant he had to come out to his own GM.
The other players Russo had targeted were less sure of their value in the team.
Michael had set the file on my desk and said: he’s a problem we’re inheriting, and I need you to manage it.
I’d read the file twice and thought about it for three days and then told Michael I’d handle it, which was true, and didn’t tell him what handling it meant, which was also true.
Because Michael Dunn didn’t know what I knew.
Michael didn’t know what Keegan Steel was, or what Taranis Rees was, or what this franchise had quietly become in the two years since the betting scandal had gutted the old roster and left me to rebuild it from the bones up.
Michael didn’t know that I had a locker room containing at least six dragons in various stages of their own complicated relationships with their nature, and that introducing a player described as a predatory manipulator with a demonstrated pattern of targeting the people around him would be like dropping a lit match into a room I’d spent two years carefully depressurizing.
So I’d kept Russo out of the lineup. I’d let him practice, because you didn’t waste what the footage showed, but I’d kept him out of games, away from the social infrastructure, at enough distance that if the file’s version of him turned out to be accurate, the damage would be contained.
That had been the plan.
The plan had not accounted for what two months of actual observation would produce.
I watched him cut toward the net now and put a shot on Taz that caught the short side—not a lucky angle, not a shot born from improvisation, but a deliberately opened window that he’d read three strides before he arrived at it.
Taz got a piece of it, which was what he did, and Russo looped back toward the blue line with his head already up, already reading what came next.
Nothing about him matched the file. That was the problem.
I’d been watching for the behavior the file described—the way a genuinely predatory personality operated in a group setting, the way someone used proximity as a tool.
I knew what it looked like. I’d seen it, in locker rooms and in older, darker contexts, in the centuries before I’d constructed this version of myself and learned to live inside it. I knew the signatures.
Russo didn’t have them.
What he had instead was the specific, carefully maintained distance of someone who had been burned and was determined not to show the scar.
He was cordial with his teammates and no more.
He was professional in every measurable way.
He arrived before everyone and left after everyone, and he did not, in two months of close observation, make a single social overture that could be read as anything other than a man trying very hard to keep his head down and do his job.
I’d been told he targeted people. What I’d watched was a kid who flinched, almost imperceptibly, when someone got too close.
Those were not the same thing.
He was also different on his own on the ice than when he interacted with the team. On his own everything was instinctual. With the team, he was second-guessing himself.