Chapter three #2
Kincaid was standing in front of my stall.
Not looming—he wasn’t a looming kind of man, didn’t use his size that way—but present in a way that filled the space completely, those gray eyes finding mine with the same attention he gave everything: total, unhurried, like he had already decided he wasn’t going anywhere until he’d gotten what he came for.
The room had gone slightly quieter around us. Not silent—guys were still talking, equipment was still clattering—but the frequency of the noise had shifted, the way it shifted when something worth listening to was happening nearby.
“Walk with me,” he said.
It wasn’t an invitation.
I set my skate lace down and followed him out of the locker room and into the corridor that ran behind it, the one with the fluorescent lights and the scuff marks and the smell of rubber and old tape that existed in every arena in the league regardless of what had been done to the public-facing spaces.
He walked until we were far enough from the door that the room noise became a background hum, then turned and faced me with his arms crossed and his expression doing the thing it always did—giving away nothing while somehow communicating everything.
I waited.
“Tell me what you’re doing out there,” he said.
“Getting in position. Working the cycle. Looking for—”
“Tell me what you’re actually doing.”
I stopped. The corridor was cold in the way arena corridors were always cold, and I was still in my gear, and there was no good answer to that question that didn’t require me to say something I hadn’t said to anyone in this building or anywhere else in the last two months.
Kincaid waited. He had the patience of someone who had learned a very long time ago that silence was the most efficient tool available for extracting truth from people who were determined not to offer it voluntarily.
“I’m passing up shots,” I said.
“Yes.”
“I see them. I know they’re there.”
“I know you know.”
“And then I—” I stopped. Found the word and didn’t want to use it. Used it anyway. “I flinch.”
He didn’t respond immediately. His eyes moved over my face with that same assessment he brought to everything—measuring something I couldn’t identify, taking inventory of something I couldn’t see.
“Devereaux,” he said. Not a question.
My jaw tightened. I made it stop. “Partly.”
“What’s the other part?”
I looked at the wall past his shoulder. The scuff marks. Someone’s blade had caught the paint at knee height and left a long diagonal slash across the beige surface, months or years ago, and nobody had bothered to fix it because nobody fixed things in arena corridors. They just accumulated.
“I’ve been on the outside for two months,” I said. “And I got out there tonight, and the shot was there and some part of my brain decided that taking it was—” I searched for the word and didn’t find a clean one. “That it wasn’t mine to take yet.”
Silence.
“That’s a problem,” Kincaid said.
“I’m aware.”
“Not a character problem.” He said it without emphasis, the way he said most things—flat and direct, stripped of the softening that people usually layered around difficult truths. “A mechanics problem. Something got into the machinery and you haven’t cleared it out.”
I looked at him then. Straight on, the way I’d looked at him across the locker room for two months—meeting his eyes because it was the one form of refusal available to me, the one place I hadn’t let myself go small.
“Is that what you think it is?” I said. “Mechanics?”
Something moved in his expression. Brief, and controlled, and gone before I could name it.
“I think,” he said carefully, “that someone spent a significant amount of time convincing you that your instincts were wrong before you got here. And that you believed them long enough for it to stick.” He paused.
“I didn’t help with that assumption, in fact I’ve made it worse.
And I think that’s not something I can fix between periods, and it’s not something you can fix by deciding to fix it.
But I need you to understand something.”
I waited.
“I put you in that lineup tonight because sixty days of watching you told me something different than what I was told before you arrived.” He let that sit for exactly one second.
“I’m not asking you to trust me. I’m asking you to trust what you know about the game.
The rest of it—whatever is living between your eyes and your hands right now—that’s a conversation for another time.
Tonight I need you on that ice doing what you actually know how to do. ”
The noise from the locker room filtered through the door. Someone laughed—Keegan, probably, that short, sharp sound he made when something genuinely surprised him.
“And if I pass up another one?” I said.
Kincaid’s expression didn’t change. “Then you pass up another one, and we figure out why, and we try again.” He uncrossed his arms. “You’re not on trial out there, Russo. I know it feels like you are. You aren’t.”
I didn’t know what to do with that. I’d been preparing for a different conversation—the one where he told me what I already suspected, that the night had confirmed what he’d been told, that I was exactly the liability everyone had warned him about.
I’d had my response to that conversation ready, the controlled, spine-straight version of myself that had walked out of every other room in the last two months without showing the damage.
This conversation didn’t have a prepared response.
“Okay,” I said, because it was the only word I had.
He nodded once. The same nod he gave Renaud across the locker room when something had been communicated and received and didn’t require further elaboration. Then he turned and walked back toward the door, and I followed him back inside.
The second period started the way the first had ended—tight, physical, neither team willing to give the other any sort of an opening.
I watched the first two line changes from the bench and tried to locate whatever Kincaid had put back in me in that corridor, that small, careful thing he’d handed over without making a production of it.
It was there. Fragile, like something recently reset, but there.
When my line went over the boards, I told myself one thing: see the ice. Just see it. Don’t decide in advance what you’re going to do with what you see.
It helped a little. My first shift I won a puck battle in the corner against a bigger forward and came out with possession, which was not nothing.
My second I took a hit along the right boards that was clean and hard and rattled my teeth, and I stayed on my feet and kept the puck alive, and when I came back to the bench, Varga bumped my shoulder once with his fist—brief, wordless, the hockey equivalent of a full sentence.
The third shift I had the lane again. Same circumstances, same window. This time I loaded up.
The check came from my blind side.
Not illegal. That was the thing I had to keep reminding myself as I found the ice with my shoulder and the sound of the crowd surged the way it did when someone went down hard—not illegal, not dirty, just a defenseman doing his job with maximum efficiency and zero interest in whether I got back up.
I got back up. That was the other thing I’d learned in two years of professional hockey: you always got back up, because the alternative was giving them the satisfaction of watching you stay down.
I came back to the bench. Said nothing. Kincaid said nothing.
Fourth shift. Another hit. This one from behind the net, a forward I didn’t know who had figured out what the last one had figured out—that I was carrying something, that there was a half-second hesitation in my game that a smart, aggressive player could exploit—and he used it.
My chin found the glass. I tasted copper and saw stars in a brief, colorful constellation, and then the stars cleared and I was still upright and the puck was gone and so was the opportunity.
The fifth shift I got hit twice.
Not back to back. Once in the neutral zone on what should have been a clean puck exchange, and once along the left boards where I’d gone for a chip that I knew even as I went for it was a fifty-fifty at best. The second one put me into the boards hard enough that I had to take a knee for a moment, not from injury but from the simple physics of impact, and when I straightened up and looked across the ice, I saw him.
Antoine.
He was coming off the bench for a line change, gliding toward the center with that easy, unhurried quality that had always made him look like the game was happening slightly slower for him than for everyone else.
He’d just watched me take that hit. He’d watched me go into the boards and take the knee, and now he was looking at me across thirty feet of ice with an expression I knew with a precision that lived somewhere below anything I could have explained or defended or argued against.
He was smiling.
Not broadly. Not in a way that a camera would catch or a referee would notice or anyone in the building would be able to describe afterward. Just the corners of his mouth, just a fraction, just enough. The smile of a man who had predicted an outcome and was watching it arrive on schedule.
I went still.
Everything that had been moving in me—the hesitation, the flinch, the small, careful voice that had been whispering not yours to take for two months across almost a thousand miles—went very quiet.
And something underneath it woke up.