Breakaway Beat (Playmaker #2)

Prologue

last shift

ROOK

Thirteen Years Ago…

Iwas going to puke if this game went to overtime.

Not because I was nervous—though I definitely was—but because my legs were completely destroyed and the thought of playing even one more shift made me want to die.

Two periods of championship hockey, scoreboard tied two to two.

and Soren Vale was grinning at me from across the face-off circle like we weren't about to either win everything or lose it in the next eight minutes.

That was the thing about playing with Soren. We didn't need to talk on the ice. We just knew.

I caught the puck off the boards and immediately felt the pressure coming from their defense.

Heavy skater, probably their captain, already angling to cut me off.

I could have forced it, tried to muscle through, but that wasn't the play.

The play was Soren streaking down the right side, already in the perfect position before I'd even looked for him.

I sent the pass hard and flat, and he trapped it clean without breaking stride.

“Nice feed, Rook!” he shouted over his shoulder, grinning like we weren't in the middle of the most important game of our high school careers.

I didn't grin back, but I wanted to. Instead, I followed up the play, reading where he'd go next, because Soren was fast but he wasn't a solo artist. He'd draw the defender in and then he'd need an outlet, and I was already skating into the space he'd leave open.

That was how we worked. He created chaos, I provided structure, and somehow it all clicked into the kind of hockey that made coaches pull us aside after practice to tell us we had real potential if we kept working together.

The period wore on and the ice got meaner.

Their team was good, physical, the type that played right up to the edge of dirty without quite crossing it.

But what started getting under my skin wasn't the opponents.

It was our own guys. I heard it during the line change, caught the tail end of some comment from Jensen, one of our third-line wingers who thought he was funnier than he was.

“—maybe if Vale stopped trying to be such a hero, we'd actually have some offensive zone time.”

Soren was already on the bench, pulling his helmet off to get some air, and I saw the way his jaw tightened for just a second before he forced that easy smile back into place.

He didn't respond, just grabbed his water bottle like he hadn't heard a damn thing.

But I'd heard it, and I knew exactly what Jensen was doing.

It wasn't about hockey. It was never really about hockey with guys like him.

I dropped onto the bench next to Soren, close enough that our shoulders bumped, and kept my voice low enough that only he'd hear me. “Jensen's an idiot.”

“Yeah, well.” Soren shrugged, still watching the ice. “He's not wrong about the zone time.”

“He's not right either.” I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, and tried to catch his eye. “You're playing fine. Better than fine.”

He finally looked at me, and there was that grin again. “You defending my honor, Kincaid?”

“Someone's gotta.” I said it like I was joking, but we both knew I wasn't.

The coach called our line back out before Soren could respond, and we hit the ice with four minutes left and the game still knotted up.

The pressure was crushing now, every shift feeling like it could be the one that decided everything, and I could see the fatigue starting to drag on some of the guys.

But not Soren. He was still moving like the game had just started.

We cycled the puck in their zone, working it around the boards, and I could feel the play building toward the moment before it happened. Their defense was collapsing in too tight, overcommitting to the cycle, and that meant there'd be space. I just had to find it.

Soren got the puck in the corner and immediately took a hit from their defenseman, a big kid who'd been targeting him all game.

He went into the boards hard enough that I heard the impact from the slot, but he kept his feet and somehow managed to chip the puck out to our d-man at the point.

I was already moving, skating hard toward the front of the net, and when the point shot came I knew exactly where it would go.

High glove side, deflection chance if someone was in position.

I tipped it on the way through, felt the puck catch the edge of my stick and change direction, but their goalie got a piece of it and the rebound kicked out to the left.

Right to where Soren was crashing the net, because of course he was.

He didn't hesitate, just ripped the shot before their goalie could recover, and I watched the puck hit the back of the net with two minutes and thirty-seven seconds left in the championship game.

The rink exploded. Our bench emptied onto the ice, the crowd was screaming, and I was already skating toward Soren before my brain fully processed that we'd just taken the lead.

He turned toward me, stick raised, eyes wide and almost disbelieving, and when we crashed together it was hard enough to knock the air out of both of us.

His helmet smacked into mine, his gloves were gripping the back of my jersey, and he was laughing, breathless and loud and completely unguarded in a way he almost never was around the rest of the team.

“We did it,” he said, half into my shoulder, still holding on. “Holy shit, Rook, we actually did it.”

I didn't say anything, just squeezed harder for a second before the rest of the team swarmed us and pulled us apart.

But I felt it, that moment where everything else dropped away and it was just us, just the two of us who'd been working toward this since freshman year, and now we were here. We'd won.

The final two and a half minutes felt like an hour.

They pulled their goalie, threw everything they had at us, and our defense held.

When the buzzer finally went off, I dropped to one knee on the ice, stick across my lap, and let myself feel the weight of it.

We'd done it. Championship. Senior year.

Last game we'd ever play together on this team.

Last game we'd ever play together.

This was supposed to be a good night. The best night. I wasn't going to ruin it by thinking about endings.

We ended up at our spot a few hours later, after the handshake line and the trophy and the locker room where everyone was too loud and too wired to form a coherent sentence.

Soren had grabbed my sleeve on the way out, nodded toward his car, and I'd followed without question because that was what I did.

When Soren said let's go, I went.

The spot wasn't much. A clearing off one of the back roads outside town, far enough from the main strip that nobody bothered driving out here, with a view that opened over the valley and the grid of lights below.

We'd found it junior year, back when he'd first got his license and we'd spent half that summer just driving with no particular destination and no particular plan.

This was where we'd always ended up. Hood of his beat-up car, talking about nothing, staying until it got too cold and one of us had to be somewhere.

Tonight the sky was clear. Stars packed thick across the black, the air smelling like pine and cold ground and the last edge of winter refusing to let go. I leaned back against the windshield and Soren did the same, close enough that our jackets almost touched.

“That goal was sick,” I said. “Goalie had no idea.”

“Had a real good setup.” Soren's grin was in his voice even though I wasn't looking at him. “Someone walked the puck right into my wheelhouse and then tried not to take any credit for it.”

“Someone did all the work and you got the goal. Story of my life.”

He laughed, loose and easy, and for a minute it felt like any other night we'd spent out here.

But then the quiet stretched, and I noticed what I'd been noticing all week without being able to pin down.

Soren was present. But there was a distance in him that hadn't been there before, some space he was holding open that I didn't know how to cross.

“You nervous about graduation?” I asked.

“Nah.” He said it too fast. “I mean, yeah, obviously. But it's just graduation. Show up, don't trip on the gown, done.”

“Your parents coming?”

A pause. Just a beat too long. “My mom is. Dad's got work.”

I didn't push. I'd learned early that pushing Soren about his family was the fastest way to get a joke and a subject change, and I didn't want either. I waited, the way I sometimes did, hoping the silence would do what I couldn't. But tonight he didn't fill it.

“What about you?” he asked instead. “Big Kincaid family dinner?”

“Probably. My mom's been planning it for weeks.” I shrugged. “It'll be fine. A lot, maybe.”

“Yeah, well.” There was an edge under the easy delivery. “That's what you get for being the golden child. Perfect grades, perfect hockey career, perfect family. You've got it all lined up, Kincaid. Honestly a little disgusting how together you are.”

“I'm not that together.”

“You are, though.” His voice went quieter. “You always have been. It's one of the things I—” He stopped. Laughed it off in that way he had, like he was collecting himself mid-sentence and deciding not to go there. “Never mind. Ignore me.”

I looked at him then. He was staring up at the sky, jaw relaxed, expression unreadable in the dark, and he looked like someone who'd already made a decision and was waiting out the clock.

I looked back at the stars.

“You remember when you started calling me Rook?” I asked, mostly because I needed to hear him say my name in a way that didn't feel like goodbye.

He tilted his head toward me, eyebrows up. “Random question.”

“Just thinking about it.”