Chapter six
Odd-Man Rush - An offensive rush where attackers outnumber defenders.
Theron
The ride back was quiet, and I tried not to be bothered he’d refused my jacket.
Dante sat in the passenger seat of the car I’d called—a sedan from the service the team used, anonymous and warm—and stared out the window at Michigan Avenue sliding past in its nighttime version, all sodium light and late traffic and the emptiness of a city that hadn’t gone to sleep so much as changed shifts.
The nurse had found him a clean shirt from somewhere, and he wore it now with the careful stillness of someone managing a headache they weren’t going to mention.
Somewhere between the hospital entrance and the hotel, he’d tried to convince me he was okay on his own. “I’m fine,” he said, to the car window. “You don’t have to—”
“Yes, I do,” I said.
The hotel lobby was quiet at this hour, the desk staff discreet in the way hotel staff learned to be when professional athletes came through at midnight looking like they’d lost an argument with a wall.
The elevator was empty. We rode it to the fourth floor in silence that had a feeling to it—not uncomfortable, not quite comfortable, something in between that I didn’t examine too closely.
His room was 412. He had his keycard out before we reached the door, which told me he’d been thinking about the moment he could be alone inside it for at least the last twenty minutes.
“I’ve got it from here,” he said at the door.
I looked at him. The left side of his face had settled into the early stages of what was going to be a serious bruise by morning—the cheekbone swollen, the skin around his eye already darkening at the edges.
His eyes were clearer than they’d been at the hospital, which was something, but the slight glassiness hadn’t fully resolved, and the way he was holding himself—carefully, with the specific economy of someone managing pain across multiple sites—told me the ibuprofen had taken the edge off and nothing more.
“Get ready for bed,” I said. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You heard what the doctor said,” I told him. “So did I. Twenty minutes.”
The look he gave me was the same one he’d been giving me across the locker room for two months—direct, slightly challenging, the look of someone who’d decided that meeting my eyes was the one form of resistance available to him and he was going to use it.
I held it without difficulty, because I’d had two hundred years of practice at being immovable when I’d made up my mind, and after a moment, he exhaled and went inside.
I took his key card and went to my own room—415, three doors down—and changed out of the jacket and into a pullover, because the jacket was the kind of thing you wore when you were performing the role of head coach and this night had moved past that in ways I wasn’t prepared to think about.
I washed my hands. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror for some unknown reason.
The man looking back at me was technically fifty-eight years old, which was the age I’d decided on when I constructed this version of myself, and which suited me well enough that I’d stopped noticing most days.
Salt-and-pepper hair, thick at the temples and going properly silver at the crown now—that had happened gradually, the way things happened when you allowed them to move at their natural pace rather than managing them.
Deep-set eyes that were gray in ordinary light and did something else in my dragon—they shifted then toward copper, toward something older and less easily named.
The lines in my face were the lines of a man who’d spent decades outdoors and in arenas, and they fit.
What no one else knew was that I would still look fifty-eight in a thousand years.
I gave him twenty-two minutes. Then I went back down the hall and knocked a warning then used the key card.
He was on top of the covers, fully dressed, shoes still on, one arm tucked under the pillow and the other hanging off the edge of the mattress.
Out cold. The lamp on the nightstand was on, because he’d made it that far and no further, and in the warm yellow light of it, he looked younger than twenty-three—which was already young enough to be an uncomfortable observation.
I stood in the doorway for a moment.
The room had the standard hotel layout—one king bed, a desk, a chair in the corner that nobody ever used. The television was off. He’d obviously walked in, sat down on the edge of the bed, and simply stopped.
I came in and let the door close behind me.
His shoes first—I crouched and worked the laces loose with the same methodical patience I brought to everything, eased them off without the kind of movement that would translate upward into a sleeping body.
He stirred once, a small sound, and then settled.
The socks underneath were plain white, the kind you bought in multipacks, and for some reason, that detail made me smile.
I straightened up.
The jacket was next, which required him to be marginally more conscious, and that was where things got complicated.
“Hey,” I said, at a volume calibrated to reach him without startling. “Russo. Sit up for me.”
He made a sound that was not a word.
“I know. Sit up.”
He sat up, or something close to it—listing slightly to the left, eyes at half-mast, his coordination operating on whatever reserve was available after a mild concussion and a full day of playoff hockey and a bathroom fight.
He was present enough to register that someone was there, not present enough to care who.
I got the jacket off his shoulders. He helped with approximately fifteen percent of the effort, which was more than I’d expected.
“Shirt,” I said.
“’M fine,” he said.
“You’re asleep sitting up,” I said. “Lie down.”
“Said ’m fine,” he muttered, but he was already listing again, and I caught his shoulder before he went sideways and guided him back against the pillow with the sort of care of a man who had decided not to think too hard about what he was doing and why.
His weight settled back into the pillow. He exhaled—slow, involuntary, as if he’d been holding himself together through effort and had finally run out of reasons to keep doing it.
I stood up.
The lamp was warm and the room was quiet, and Dante Russo was lying in the bed in front of me with his eyes closed and his face bruised and his chest rising and falling with the careful rhythm of someone who had crossed from the edge of consciousness into something deeper, and I became aware, in the way I’d been becoming aware of things all night that I had no business being aware of, that my hand was still on his shoulder.
I removed it.
Stepped back. Two steps, then a third, until the backs of my knees found the chair in the corner that nobody ever used, and I sat down in it.
The copper in my eyes, I knew without looking, would be visible now.
That was what proximity did—what that kind of proximity did, the kind that my dragon had been cataloging all evening with an interest I’d spent years learning to override.
My beast had been making its case for weeks, in the persistent way it made cases when it had decided something, and I had been making counter-arguments with the discipline of two centuries of practice, and tonight the arguments were less clean than they usually were.
I knew what it was doing. I knew what the warmth in my chest meant, what the heightened awareness meant, what the four-block walk through Chicago at midnight had meant.
I was not naive about my own nature. I had simply made a decision, a long time ago, about which parts of my nature I was going to act on and which ones I was going to manage, and that decision had held for longer than most human lifetimes, and it was going to hold now.
I checked my watch. Two hours.
I set the alarm on my phone, silenced it to vibrate, and settled into the chair.
The lamp was on the far side of the bed from where I was sitting.
I could read the rise and fall of his chest from here, the slight parting of his lips on an exhale, the way one hand had curled loosely near his jaw.
The bruise on his cheekbone had deepened in the last hour; it would be full purple by morning, the kind that looked worse than it was and felt exactly as bad as it looked.
He made a small sound. Not distress—something softer than that. The sound of someone settling deeper.
I looked at the window. The curtains were drawn. Somewhere beyond them, Chicago was still doing what Chicago did, indifferent and enormous and lit orange at the edges from its own ambient glow.
The chair wasn’t comfortable, but I’d sat in worse.
He woke up the first time I checked him with that specific disorientation of someone pulled from deep sleep who hadn’t agreed to be pulled.
“Hey,” I said, the same low calibration as before. “Look at me.”
He looked. Eyes finding mine after a moment, the pupils contracting normally in the lamp light. Present. A little confused, which was acceptable.
“What’s your name,” I said.
“Russo,” he said, reflexively, and then: “Dante. Dante Russo.” A pause. “Why are you in my room?”
“Concussion protocol,” I said.
He stared at me for a moment with the expression of someone assembling context from available parts. Then something in his face shifted—not quite recognition, but the arrival of a memory he hadn’t been sure he’d kept.
“Need the bathroom,” he said.
“Yes,” I agreed and hovered while he went then tried not to hover when he came back.
He got back into bed, closed his eyes. “My face hurts.”
“I know.”
“My ribs hurt more.”
“I know that too.”
He was quiet for a moment. His hand moved to his cheek, found the swelling, and moved away again.
“You’re still here.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t have to—”
“We covered this,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”