I have been sitting with this image for approximately twenty minutes and I cannot stop looking at it.

This is Deacon Worth and Konstantin Andropov. Number 43 and number 27. Portland Pioneers. My boys.

If you have been following along with the PHLu universe, you know Deke and Kon. You know the goal crease and the press conference and the year that changed everything and the specific, particular way these two found their way to each other on the ice and off it. You have lived inside their story with me. And now Paul — our incredible artist who has given visual life to all three of my universes — has given them a face.

I cannot tell you how close this is to what I saw when I wrote them. That is not a thing I expected to be able to say. You write a character and you have them in your head in the specific way that fictional people live in an author’s head — vivid and particular and entirely yours — and then someone else tries to render them and the gap between the interior version and the external version is usually where you learn to manage your expectations.

There is no gap here. None. This is Deke. This is Kon. The way they are standing, the way Kon is leaning in, the specific quality of how they are with each other — this is the book, made visible.

Isolated releases June 15.

Cover reveal June 5.

If you’d like to be notified the moment that cover drops — and I think you would like that, I think you would very much like that — watch this space. I am barely containing myself and I have known what the cover looks like.

You are going to love them. I already do, obviously. I have for quite some time.

🏒 — Bella