No Trade, No Mercy

Six seasons. One defensive pairing. One no-trade clause each. One arrangement nobody has ever had to name. The expansion draft is coming, and the club can only protect one of them. Unless they take on a third. Isaiah Colt is twenty-two years old, under league investigation, and exactly the kind of problem a front office wants solved by someone else's reputation. He moves into their lake house in August. He is on their line by October. He is not the problem they were told he was, and they are not the men he expected. Two of them have a clause. All three of them have something worse. A dark MMM hockey romance about the contracts we sign and the ones we don't.