Chapter 2 Steele
A week later
The Pinnacle Arena smells of blood and cold metal.
I don't intend to let that happen.
"Banks." I tap Crew's helmet with the back of my glove as we line up for the face-off. "Sin Keller's been cheating left all night."
A grunt from behind his cage. Crew Banks processes information, and then suddenly a whole cliff face drops into the ocean.
The puck drops.
Malcolm wins it clean, flicking it back to Crew, and the Cats' forwards move like they've been scripted.
Keller cuts left, bodies shuffle, and there's a half-second where the right lane cracks open like a fault line. I'm already moving, reading it a beat before it exists, and Malcolm threads the pass through two defenders with so little effort it's almost insulting to everyone else on the ice.
The puck finds my stick at full speed.
One stride. Two.
Smithson is in the net, sets his edges and squares up, waiting.
First the right side, left side, five-hole.
He is running through the options the same way I am, except I've already made my decision.
I'm going blocker side, high, and I'm going to make it look like I'm going five-hole until the last possible millisecond.
The shot leaves my stick like a crack of pure physics.
Net.
The horn blares and the Pinnacle erupts, and I'm already being buried under a pile of bodies, Even Steven crowing something incoherent in my ear while Levon Phillips crashes in from the bench.
Crew gets there last, the glacier drops, and when his glove finds the back of my helmet, it's less a tap and more a collision.
"Told you," I say, when he surfaces next to me.
"You told me nothing." His face is unreadable behind the cage, but his eyes crinkle. "You said cheating left. I read the lane."
"Because I told you he was cheating left."
"God, you're the worst." He skates off, and I'm grinning so hard my face hurts.
Thirteen minutes.
The Cats push back hard, Ryker Millington throws his weight around on the boards, and McFarlane takes a run at Even Steven that earns him two minutes in the box for charging.
We kill the power play, then score a short-handed goal off a Keller turnover that I have absolutely nothing to do with but take full credit for anyway, because the energy in this building is so electric I want to absorb it through my skin.
Final horn.
3–2, Scented Scorpions.
The locker room sounds like the inside of a drum, and honestly, I'm content to sit in the noise for a while.
My ribs ache. My wrist is tight from the shot.
Vonn's across the room getting slapped on the back by half the team, and he deserves it.
He held the third period together when we needed him to, and nobody's going to forget that in a hurry.
Crew drops onto the bench beside me, already starting on his gear.
"One step closer," he says.
"Don't jinx it."
"I'm not jinxing anything. I'm stating a mathematical fact."
"Same energy." I peel off my glove and flex my hand.
The phoenix tattoo stretches across my thumb and index finger, the same one my brother has, and for a second I press my thumb into the heel of my palm and think about him.
He'll have watched the game. He watches every game.
He'll send a text later that says something like noted and I'll know he's pleased. He won't say it aloud or call me.
It's fine. I've learned to read the subtext.
I shove the thought down and pull off the rest of my gear, the locker room gradually trading its post-win chaos for the lower-grade hum of guys making plans.
Korbin's already got a venue locked in, somewhere off Broadway with the right balance of loud and dark, which is our exact demographic, and the list of who's coming is growing by the minute.
"River texted," Crew says, not looking up from his phone.
My hand pauses on my jersey. "Is he here?"
"Apparently, he brought Remi to watch the game."
"I thought she was busy training."
"She is. Nikki gave her a day off. So River persuaded her to come and watch us."
Something in my chest does a thing I refuse to examine. "How's her knee?"
Crew glances at me sideways. "You knew she hurt her knee?"
"I heard River mention it last week." Which is true. It's also true that I clocked her in the stands mid-second period during a stoppage, and spotted the way she was sitting. "Is she okay?"
"He didn't say." Crew pockets his phone. "He said they're heading to Korbin's thing."
"Great." I stand, roll my shoulder until it pops. "Good."
Crew gives me a look. It's a strange one, but I've been on the receiving end of them often enough to know what it means. He sees me, and he's choosing not to comment.
"Don't," I say.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to."
He pulls on his jacket and says nothing.
Slapshots is strung with Edison lights and fills fast with Scented Scorpions and their extended orbit. Bourbon is on every shelf, a stage nobody's playing tonight. By the time Crew and I get there, Even Steven is already deep in a story involving a rental car and a pelican.
River Silver finds us before we've ordered.
He looks wrong in civilian clothes. I'm used to seeing him in hockey gear, so River in jeans and a navy jacket with his arm in a soft brace looks like a man extracted from his natural context, tolerating the displacement with moderate grace. His green eyes hit me first, before they flicker to Crew.
"Good game," he says.
"You flew from New York to watch us?" I ask.
"I came because Remi had an appointment." He says it as if it closes the subject. The way he does when he doesn't want to talk about it.
The same as when the coach gave me the option to transfer to the Scented Scorpions, I didn't think twice.
Crew didn't think twice either. He just showed up at my apartment with two boxes of his stuff and said I'm not playing in Boston without you, and that was that.
We assumed River would follow. But without a word to us, he signed with the New York Bears, and the pack we'd half-built in our heads dissolved on a telephone call.
He was supposed to go where we went.
That should be better, I told myself then. Remi, River's sister, is an omega. But as River has made it clear, his sister is off-limits. I hate it, but it's a complication neither of us needs. So if River had come to the Scorpions too, Remi would've been in our orbit, and that would've been worse.
"Where is she?" Crew asks, scanning the room with the same expression he uses to read defensive formations.
River's jaw pulls tight. "Restroom."
So Crew and I both look.
Force of habit.
We find her at the same moment. The girl in the dark green dress, with a careful stride.
Though she is managing the busy floor as if it's a personal insult.
She has a figure skater's posture, also like a dancer's, I suppose.
But her right knee is unhappy, and she compensates for it the way athletes do.
"It looks bad. Will she make it to the Olympics?" I ask.
"Yeah. And she has two weeks to recover before she leaves for Italy." River's voice goes very flat.
Crew rotates his drink slowly in his hand.
"Training injury?" I ask.
"Yeah, that's what she said." The tone of someone who's answered this enough times to wear it smooth. "She's watching it. She's fine."
"She doesn't look fine."
"She's fine, Steele." He turns to look at me, and there's something under the delivery that has nothing to do with her knee. "She knows what she's doing."
The three of us stand there and track her as she limps across the room.
"Hey," she says as she stands at River's elbow.
Up close, she has sparkling green eyes that don't miss much and lips I want to kiss. She smells of orange blossom and something warmer underneath. She's looking between me and Crew like she's waiting to see what we'll do with ourselves.
"Hey, champ." I tip my drink toward her. "You watched the entire game?"
Her chin comes up. "Of course."
"Good. You can confirm for posterity that the goal in the third was entirely my idea."
A tiny crease forms between her brows. "Levon Phillips assisted."
"And I facilitated the energy."
"That's not a stat."
"Everything's a stat if you believe in it hard enough."
She opens her mouth with a comeback, but then closes it and rolls her eyes instead.
River's not smiling. His face is still focused and aimed at the space between me and Crew like he's measuring a gap in the boards.
Crew pulls her into a hug. "Good to see you, Rem."
"You too." Genuine, easy. She relaxes into it for one second before straightening up.
A year ago she would've stayed longer.
River puts his hand on her shoulder. "We need to head out soon."
She turns to look at him. "River, it's not even..."
"Four AM practice."
Her mouth closes. Frustration, resignation, and an exhausted kind of tired, and then a small, controlled nod.
"Four AM," I say. "That's medieval."
"That's the Olympics," she says lightly, not excitedly, which says more.
I let it sit.
Remi gets Crew's jacket off the barstool behind her because she's shivering and neither of us thought to offer.
We talk for over an hour, yet it doesn't feel like she's been here long enough before River says they need to leave.
"Thanks for the jacket." She gives it back to Crew and says goodnight to everyone in her orbit.
I hold her a little longer than necessary. She pulls back and smiles.
"I'm just going to get some fresh air. I'll wait outside." She navigates the crowd toward the door with that careful-kneed stride.
River pauses as we watch her go. "She's off limits." Quiet, without theater. Not a threat, a fact.
"We know," Crew says.
River looks at me.
"We know," I say.
He nods, and then he's gone, and the bar fills in around the space where they were standing.
Crew takes a long pull of his drink.
I do the same.
"Four AM practice," I say.
"Don't."
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're thinking aloud."
"I'm always thinking aloud. It's a character trait." I set down my glass and reach for my jacket. "Come on. I'm done."
Our apartment is on the second floor of a converted Victorian three blocks from the arena, which my brother helped to arrange and which I don't think about too much in terms of what that implies about his level of involvement in my life.
It's a good apartment. High ceilings, original hardwood, a kitchen we use because we both like to cook.
Crew drops onto the couch the way a tree falls: all at once, with finality and as if he'd had enough of standing.
"Fucked," he announces.
"Same." My ribs have settled into a dull, structural ache and my wrist is tight from the shot, and the post-win adrenaline has burned down to ash in about forty minutes. I stand in front of the hall cabinet, then pull open the bottom drawer.
The wolf mask sits where I left it. I pick up the matte black mask and set it on the coffee table between us.
Crew looks.
"Not tonight," he says. "I really am fucked."
"I know. Not tonight." I sit in the armchair across from him, lean back, and study the ceiling. "Saturday night."
Crew closes his eyes.
The mask sits on the table between us.
Saturday night.
It's a reasonable plan. It's also uncomplicated, and nothing to do with having to forget about those green eyes, or the careful limp, or the smell of orange blossom in a crowded bar.