The Linemate's Enemy

The rink is empty and Connor Brannigan has been at it for two hours, working the same patch of shredded ice at the left faceoff circle. He started with a hundred pucks in the bucket by the bench. He is down to forty-three, and most of those are scattered across the ice like evidence. Alone means nobody counts how many go wide. Then he hears skates through the wall: the practice rink, the cold one with the bad lighting and the chipped glass management keeps promising to replace. He knows the stride. Julian Moreau skates like the ice was his idea and everyone else is only borrowing it. There is a door between the two rinks where the frame warped and the latch stopped catching. Connor noticed it weeks ago and filed it away without asking himself why he would remember a thing like that. Through the crack, Julian is sitting on the ice with his back against the boards, no helmet, head down. He pulls off his right glove and stares at his hand, and even from across the rink Connor can see the scar, a jagged line running from knuckle to wrist. It was not a knife. It was a broken bottle, and it was his father, and his mother told the police it was an accident. Connor's own father was Declan Brannigan, twelve seasons in the league, every one of them as an enforcer, the man sent over the boards to fight the other team's tough guys. He collapsed in the tunnel a couple of hours after the final buzzer of his last game. Connor has spent his whole career trying to be anything other than that, on a team where Mason Reeves has spent fifteen years knowing exactly where the line is and how to make somebody else cross it. The coach's fix is blunt. *You and Moreau are going to figure this out, or you're going to ride the bench together until you do.* What it actually begins with is six sticks that need re-taping in Rosa's equipment room and a pair of hands too blistered to do them. A closed-door MM hockey romance about a first-line spot, two men carrying damage left by two very different fathers, and a live microphone three hours before puck drop.