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Drop the puck
publish date:
2026-11-10 19:03:22
Latest chapter
Offside with the hockey bad boy Offside
They played the game.I still don't entirely understand how. After the arrests, after the ambulances, after Agent Reyes sat on an overturned bucket in the service corridor with her head in her hands and said, In twenty-two years, I have never had a night like this, somebody at the NCAA decided the championship should go on. Ten thousand people had refused to leave their seats. They'd waited in the dark for two hours, singing. Somebody had started the Wolves' fight song, and the Hawks fans, god bless them, had joined in.So at 9:47 p.m., under the full blaze of the restored lights, the puck dropped again.I watched from the bench.Not the press box. The Wolves' bench, a hard plastic seat between Damien and Ethan, with a blanket around my shoulders and my brother's hand in mine. Damien sat on my other side, still in his suit, his casted arm in my lap. Brandt had been taken to the hospital with a broken collarbone and four cracked ribs and a smile on his face. He'd refused to leave until
Offside with the hockey bad boy The stairs
"Don't," Damien said.His voice was very quiet. He stood in front of me with his good arm out, shielding me from Pike's line of sight, and I could feel him shaking. Not from fear. From a rage so deep it made the air hum."Put it down, Pike," Damien said."Why would I do that?" Pike asked."Because you're going to prison either way. And if you hurt him, you'll never see the sun again," Damien said."Wrong." Pike's smile widened. "If I hurt him, Mr. Halloran's lawyers will say it was self-defense. The kid fell. Again. Terrible accident. Poor boy with a bad leg. Wandering around a dark arena. Who could say what happened?""There are agents all over this building," Damien said."Not on this floor." Pike's smile never wavered. "Every door above us is locked. Every camera is dead. The only way down here is the way you came." He cocked his head. "I counted. You have about six minutes."Six minutes. Four, Rohan had said. Give me four.I did the math. Three minutes had passed since the lights
Offside with the hockey bad boy Blackout
Darkness is not a color. It is a physical thing, a hand that closes around your throat.For two full seconds the arena held a silence so complete that I could hear my own pulse. Ten thousand people. Not a sound. Then someone screamed, and the whole building screamed with her."EVERYBODY STAY CALM!" boomed the announcer. The speaker crackled and died."Rohan!" Priya was shouting into her phone. "Rohan, what happened? Rohan! Pick up...""It's not the grid!" His voice crackled over the line, faint and furious. "Somebody cut the main feed! The backup generators should have kicked in already, but they're not responding. It's deliberate!""Can you fix it?" Priya asked."Give me four minutes!" Rohan yelled.Four minutes. I turned toward the ice. In the dark, I could see nothing but shapes. The pale glow of cell phones, a thousand small stars winking on all at once. The beams of flashlights. The high, thin wail of a baby somewhere in the crowd."Ethan!" I yelled."Ava!" It was my mother's voi
Offside with the hockey bad boy Drop the puck
The line outside Halloran Arena stretched three blocks.I had never seen so many people in one place. Ten thousand tickets, sold out in four minutes, and half the crowd had been turned away at the doors. Students in gray Wolves sweatshirts, alumni in jerseys older than I was, families with signs, kids with painted faces. Somebody had covered the huge white letters over the main entrance with a black tarp. Somebody else had spray-painted a word across it in dripping red.JUSTICE."Ava! Over here!" Priya shouted.Priya waved from the media entrance, bouncing on her toes. She wore a Courier press pass the size of a dinner plate, a Wolves scarf, and the expression of a girl who had not slept in thirty hours and had never felt more alive."The FBI's got every exit covered," she said, hugging me. "Rohan's inside, running the cameras. Marisol's in the press box. Agent Reyes says there are forty agents in the building.""And Pike?" I asked."Not a sign." She pulled back, studying my face. "He
Offside with the hockey bad boy The last paragraph
I had a thousand answers and none of them could get past my teeth."Yes," I said finally. "I wrote it."He nodded slowly. He didn't look away."When?" he asked."September twenty-second. On the bus from Ohio." My voice shook. "I was nineteen hours into a trip I'd rehearsed for a year, and I was so angry, Damien. I was so scared. I'd read every article about you. I'd watched that video of you and Ethan on the balcony a hundred times. I wrote it to give myself courage. To remind myself why I was going.""I will burn him down," he said."I wrote it before I met you," I said."I can see that." His voice was gentle. It was the gentleness that destroyed me. "I'm not angry, Ava. I just need to know which parts were real.""All of them. That's the problem." I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. "They were all real. The anger, the plan, the intent. I did want to take you apart. I wanted to find everything you'd done and put it on the front page. I thought you were a murderer." I for
Offside with the hockey bad boy The other drive
The FBI took four hours to finish with my family.They sat us in the kitchen, the same kitchen where Richard Halloran had once poured my mother a cup of tea and told her that the kindest thing was to let it go. Now a federal agent named Dana Reyes sat at the head of the table with a legal pad and a voice like warm gravel. She took Ethan's statement first. Then my mother's. Then mine. Then she played the recording from the cane, start to finish, and nobody in the room said anything when Halloran's voice rang out, calm and unmistakable: Finish it, Dale. I don't want him walking again."That's a confession," Agent Reyes said quietly, when it ended. "Not a perfect one. But with the audio from the phone, the stairwell footage, and your brother's testimony, it's more than we've had on any of these cases in ten years.""Will he go to prison?" my mother asked."I don't make promises." Reyes capped her pen. "But I can tell you that nobody wearing a suit like his has ever been this thoroughly p
