Chapter 28 #2
“Okay,” I add, quickly. “For the record. I do not have, on any honest professional measure, a flirt strategy. He never moved on it. He never made me feel anything but, in fact, professional. I have been clear with myself on that point for five years. But I was nineteen and I had eyes and I am, on the small inner accounting, also more confident now than I was then — which, I will admit, is the precise piece of information that has me reassessing the small private archive.”
“Mm,” Rémi says.
“I stand by old me. Old me was, structurally, fine. But on the new information available to me in this hotel room — the fact that the man had, just three months prior to meeting me, lost his Omega and possibly a first pregnancy to the exact small administrative tier that was, separately, also about to be circling the small not-yet-signed me —”
My voice gives out.
“Oh,” Matteo whispers.
“Maybe me being offered the same opportunity,” I finish, quiet, “was, on the small inner ledger of a man fresh in grief, the precise nightmare-mirror of what he had just buried. And that is why he told Vance I wasn’t interested.
Not because he didn’t see me. But because seeing me clearly was, in the calculus of a man who had just lost his Omega to those same upper-tier hands, the precise opposite of doing right by me. ”
“Iris.” Jude’s voice has gone very level.
“Mm.”
“On the small dry accounting of an outside party,” he says, “the man did the right structural call with the wrong communication delivery. He stepped between you and Vance and absorbed the small private decision on your behalf, on the assumption that you were not, at nineteen, in a position to make the small dangerous adult choice yourself. He was, at the time, fresh in grief, six months into a transfer he did not want, and convinced that the same administrative tier that had killed Saoirse Boyne would, structurally, do it again. The decision was wrong in execution. The reasoning is, on a charitable read, defensible.”
“Yes,” I whisper.
“Which does not mean we are, in the present tense, going to let him keep making that call without you in the room.”
“No,” I agree.
The hotel room is very, very quiet.
Matteo, after a beat, exhales, and closes the laptop screen. The room, suddenly, is only the small warm yellow of the overhead lamp on Rémi’s side and the steady breathing of the four of us.
“Okay,” Matteo says, evenly. “Here is the captain math of the rest of this night, gentlemen, ladies, Pinkies. We are, in three hours, sleeping. We are, in nine hours, in the locker room. We are, in eleven hours, on the ice against a roster with a Stanley Cup ceiling.”
“Okay.”
“However.” Matteo turns his head and looks, very directly, at me. “I would like, on the public record of this hotel bed, to not, in fact, close the door on the idea of you eventually being scouted to the senior leagues, Iris.”
I blink.
“Santori,” I say, slowly. “Are you not worried. About the small senior-administrative tier that we have, in the past two hours, just confirmed is responsible for the literal murder of the literal last Omega goalie. Coming for me.”
Matteo is, for a careful long beat, quiet.
Then his mouth does, in the small slow unfolding way I am only just learning he does anything when the subject is, in fact, serious, the small dangerous smile.
“Maybe,” he says, evenly, “I would, frankly, like to see them try.”
Oh.
“Santori.”
“For the public record, Pinky. I am, technically, not in the stereotypical mafia family. We do not, in fact, run that infrastructure. My family is in the Italian trades. We are concrete, we are catering, we are commercial laundry, we are imports. We are, however, professionally connected to certain other Italian families whose infrastructure is, on a small need-to-know basis, considerably broader. And my mother, my father, and my four uncles are, when one of us declares an interest in something, or in this case in someone, professionally and emotionally serious. If protection is what we need, the request can be made. The request will be filled.”
“Oh.”
“I am not,” Matteo continues, quiet now, “going to let the rest of your career sit on a shelf because some small douches in small high places are frightened that an Omega is going to redefine the small private architecture of their sport. They can, frankly, go touch some grass. It is, on the calendar of the universe, about time the world saw an Omega in the senior leagues. That Omega is, on the small inner ledger of every Alpha currently sitting on this bed, going to be our girl. And she is going to be the small domino that triggers the rest of them.”
Santori.
Santori, I am going to cry in this hotel bed for the second time today.
“Matteo,” Rémi adds, beside me, mildly, “not incorrect. If we can pull more of the archived evidence around Saoirse Boyne, we can, on a quiet timeline, identify who was specifically involved on the administrative side of the original incident. We can keep watch.”
“And,” Jude says, on my left, “if we get Marcus Vance involved, professionally, he is going to pull strings. The man is, by reputation, ruthless. He is also, by reputation, a man who has wanted, on his own private trophy shelf, the first Omega goalie in the senior leagues for the better part of a decade and a half. If signing Iris gets him the fame and the exposure that comes with closing a deal his industry has watched him chase for fifteen years, he will do, in the small dry accounting of his own self-interest, whatever needs to be done to deliver us what we need. I am professionally confident about that.”
“So,” I say, slowly, “he is not, in fact, a bad guy.”
Jude shakes his head. “He is a man wearing a facade he enjoys wearing with pride. My grandfather has done business with Vance for the better part of three decades, and the small private opinion in that house is that he is, on the substance, safe. We simply need to get Coach Declan, on his own private opinion, to land in the same place. That part of the project is, frankly, going to be the hardest part.”
They nod, the three of them, in unison.
And then Matteo, on a small theatrical pivot of his entire mood that should not, structurally, work on me, lies flat on his back, pats the centre of his own chest with both palms, and announces, brightly: “Right. Pinky. Cuddle time.”
I laugh.
Out loud. Properly. The small unmanaged laugh of a woman who has, in the past ninety minutes, gone through approximately fourteen distinct emotional weather systems and is, frankly, being asked by the universe to do another one.
“Santori.”
“Yes, Pinky.”
“We have just had a serious focused tactical conversation about my potential murder and you, in the immediate downstream of that, want to cuddle.”
“We need goodluck,” Matteo informs me, with absolute serenity, “for the game in the morning. The small empirical-evidence basis on which a goalie’s save record correlates to whether or not she has been adequately cuddled the night prior to a game is, on the small private analytics I have personally run, statistically robust. We are not going to break the streak. Come here.”
“What streak,” Rémi asks, mildly. “You have, in this current cohabitation arrangement, cuddled the goalie precisely six nights.”
“Six-game-zero-loss streak, Bellerose. The data set is admittedly small. The correlation, however, is, on the small inner ledger of a winger who has been keeping receipts, professionally robust. Come on, Pinky. The integrity of the experiment depends on you.”
Twenty-One, you are not, in fact, going to be the death of me. I am going to be the death of me, on the back of you.
I crawl across the duvet to him. The blood-orange-and-cinnamon-sugar-and-espresso of his scent comes up to meet me, the small warm chest-pillow of him available for the precise routine I have, in the past four weeks, started to recognize as a small standard service offering.
I settle in. My cheek finds the small soft worn-fabric of his sleep T-shirt over his sternum.
His arm comes up and folds across the small bracket of my upper back. He kisses the crown of my hair.
“Rémi.” Matteo, around the curl of my hair, lifts his free hand and pats the duvet on my other side. “C’mon. Snuggle up.”
Rémi, beside me, does the slow defenseman eye-roll of a man calculating the precise mid-bed cubic-foot allocation. “Santori. Stay on your side.”
“Rémi.”
“Fine. I am moving in only because Pinky is, structurally, too good to not hug through the night. Not for you.”
“Not,” Matteo says, smug, “for me.”
Rémi slides up against my right side. The pine-and-snow of him drifts down and layers itself over the blood-orange of Matteo and the small frosted strawberry of my own, and the small private chamber of my chest, against every reasonable assumption I would have made about it ninety minutes ago in a hotel corridor, drops a notch.
Jude, on the far edge of the bed, rises in the slow unhurried captain way of a man closing his own night down.
He carries Rémi’s laptop to the small writing desk in the corner.
He closes it. He dims the overhead lamp by half.
He crosses back. He slips, quiet, onto the small available stretch of duvet on my left.
He does not, in fact, say anything.
His hand simply finds the front of my sleep T-shirt, slow and unhurried, and his palm presses, warm, to the small soft bracket of my stomach in the precise possessive captain palm of a man laying claim to the small piece of ribcage between him and the rest of the night.
Oh.
This.
This is what safe sounds like.
The amber-bourbon-and-vanilla of Jude’s scent layers itself over the pine-and-snow of Rémi and the blood-orange of Matteo and the small frosted-strawberry of my own, and the four of us, on the one king-size bed in a hotel city I have never been in, do the small unhurried thing the four of us, in our pack-house in Minnesota, have, in the past nine days, started doing without explicit comment.
I close my eyes.
The conversation in my head, on the small dark precise sentence I earned in the corridor this afternoon, does not, in fact, go quiet immediately.
The small bright photograph of Saoirse Boyne in her goalie pads, of a Coach Declan O’Rourke whose face has not, in five years, worn that small unguarded grin in front of me, is going to be in the small private archive of my own brain for the rest of my career.
The small dark sentence about the woman who came before me — the woman who would, on the precise probability curve of the universe, have been me, had she lived long enough to teach the small senior administrative tier what to do with a small bright wheat-haired goalie standing in net — is, in fact, going to be the small ghostly companion of my next four weeks.
But the small darker conversation is, on the steady press of three Alpha bodies around me, beginning the small slow process of moving from the foreground to the small private back room where I can, in fact, leave it for one night.
I drift.
And, at the small soft edge of the drift, I feel the precise small soft press of lips against my temple, and Jude’s voice, low and unhurried, against the side of my ear.
“Goodnight, O’Shea.”