Hard Limit (St. Louis Mavericks 2)

“What?” I said.

“Did you see it?” Wes asked me.

“See what?”

His face fell, and I looked at Nash, whose expression was equally somber.

“What’s going on?” I asked him.

Nash took a deep breath and met my gaze. “Keegan talked some shit to get attention since he can’t get any from playing hockey. He’s a fucking douchebag and I’m going to beat his ass next time we play Nashville.”

“What did he say?”

Every man in the room looked away from me. I took out my phone and said, “Where is it?”

“Don’t read it,” Nash said. “Just trust me—you don’t want to read it.”

I looked up from my phone screen. “I want to read it.”

“Keegan doesn’t know shit,” Wes said. “He’s got an axe to grind.”

The locker room was silent and my irritation flared. It seemed everyone here except me had read this article.

“Where is it?” I asked, my fingers ready to type into my phone.

Coach Gizzard walked into the locker room, his expression as sullen as everyone else’s.

“Kirby, Volkov, and Jansson, come with me,” he said.

Wes, Konstantin, and I followed our coach out of the locker room. He didn’t say a word as he led us around to the suite of offices the Mavericks’ administrative staff occupied. When he walked into a conference room and I saw who was sitting there, I knew things were bad.

Our team’s general manager, Mitch Levoie, was sitting at a long conference table with Gloria from PR. Mitch stood, shook all of our hands, and asked us to sit down.

I rarely met with Mitch. Was I being traded? Or was this about the article?

“I know this came as a shock to all of us,” Mitch said. “But it’s important that no one lashes out in response. I’ll be discussing things with the Nashville GM later this morning.”

“What is going on?” I asked, out of patience.

Mitch exchanged a look with Coach Gizzard, but it was Wes who answered.

“Lars hasn’t read it yet,” he said.

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, and then Mitch looked at Gloria and said, “Will you send him a link?”

“Of course.”

She picked up her phone and typed into it, and my phone dinged with a new message.

“We’ll give you a moment, Lars,” Mitch said.

Next to me, Wes sighed heavily.

I read the headline of the article. “Miller: Mavericks locker room toxic.”

So it was going to be Keegan Miller running his mouth about his former teammates now that he’d been traded. What was the big deal? I read on, and saw that he’d started with Wes.

“Wes Kirby is no Ben Whitmer, I’ll just say that,” Miller said. “Wes isn’t a leader. It’s almost like he enjoys conflict among the team. He feeds it. But without Ben holding him up out on the ice, he’s constantly worried about his spot on the team, and he’ll sabotage anyone to keep it.”

Not one word of that was true. I looked up at Wes, my fury escalating. But there was more to the article, so I decided to finish it first.

Konstantin Volkov, Miller said, is a hothead who gets into physical altercations with teammates about everything from his salary to where to eat for dinner.

“He thinks management is screwing him,” Miller said. “He’s always talking about how he’s better than most of the guys who make more than he does. He thinks it’s because he’s not American, and he’s always saying our GM has it out for immigrants.”

Another teammate, Miller said, made him fearful for his physical safety for other reasons.

“Lars Jansson is like a brick wall, and he’s mentally unstable. He’s a complete weirdo, and I never knew when he was going to explode over nothing. That guy’s got some serious issues. He could keep a team of mental health professionals busy around the clock. Everyone around him knows he’s autistic, but everyone’s afraid to say it.”

My heart was beating fast as I looked up at Wes.

“It’s a bunch of bullshit,” he said. “Don’t—”

“What does that mean? What is autistic?”

There was an uncomfortable silence around me before Wes said, “It’s a developmental disability. But listen, Keegan’s no doctor. He’s got no business running his mouth like that.”

Coach Gizzard spoke up then. “Lars, none of us give any credence to what Keegan said. He’s disgruntled and looking for attention.”

I nodded, squeezing the armrests of my chair to ground myself. I was dizzy. If what Keegan had said was untrue, why had all my teammates been looking at me that way? Why didn’t Nash want me to read the article?

“I’ll be consulting with the team attorneys and Rosa later today, too,” Mitch said, the mention of our team owner reinforcing how serious all this was. “We may pursue legal action. But that stays in this room. Everyone needs to be tight lipped. No comments to anyone whatsoever. Gloria will release a generic statement and that’s all we’re putting out for public consumption at this point, okay?”