Page 49 of Wild Card 13

"I was complimenting her."

"You were embarrassing yourself."

"Same thing."

"It is not."

Marco looked around the room. "See? This is why nobody invites him anywhere."

Alois finally lifted his eyes. "Leave them out of your stupid jokes." The sentence landed like a brick.

Marco lifted both hands. "Fair."

The conversation finally started drifting toward hockey. Road trips. The opposing goalie. Some argument about fantasy football that had somehow survived into January.

The office door opened.

The memory shattered instantly.

I blinked and the locker room disappeared. The smell of coffee and tape gave way to the quiet hallway outside Hockey Operations.

Bea stepped out first. Freya right behind her. Both women immediately glaring at me.

Freya looked from me to the office and back again before shaking her head.

"You know you've got media in like fifteen minutes, right?" Bea whispered as she passed.

I stared at her. She stared back.

"Great talk," she said finally, looking at me the same way somebody might look at a man standing on train tracks while a locomotive approached in the distance.

Her gaze flicked toward Lucy's office. Then back to me.

Bea sighed, then hooked her arm through Freya's. "Come on."

Freya dug her heels in. "Oh, absolutely not. I want to see how this goes."

"Freya."

"I have questions."

"You always have questions."

"They're good questions."

Bea started dragging her away.

Freya twisted around to point at me. "Get your head in the game, Burns." Then she pointed through the doorway. "And whatever this is, maybe don't make it worse."

I watched them disappear down the hallway.

The second they turned the corner, the smile vanished from my face.

The hallway went quiet.

My pulse thudded against my ribs.

Inside the office, Lucy hadn't moved.