Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
playoff static
ROOK
Montreal in March was fucking cold. The hotel room overlooked downtown, glass and steel and traffic noise muted by double-paned windows, and I'd been awake since five watching the city wake up while my brain refused to shut off.
Game One. Best of three series. Montreal Maples on their home ice with a crowd that would be screaming for our blood the second we stepped onto the rink. No pressure.
I'd gone through my usual pre-game routine twice already—stretched, showered, gone over systems in my head until I could call every play blindfolded—but the static in my brain wouldn't settle. Soren kept threading through my thoughts in ways I couldn't control.
A knock on the door pulled me out of my head, and I opened it to find Tess standing there with her medical bag and an expression that said she was already evaluating me before I'd said a word.
“Morning, Cap,” she said, walking in without waiting for an invitation. “Pre-game check. You know the drill.”
Tess had been the Wolves' Head Athletic Trainer for longer than I'd been captain, and she knew every player's body well enough to spot tension, injury, or bullshit from across a room.
She was good at her job in ways that went beyond just patching people up after hits, and I trusted her more than I trusted most people in my life.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and let her run through the standard checks—range of motion in my shoulders, flexibility in my hips, pressure points along my spine that would tell her if I was carrying tension I hadn't admitted to yet. I'd done this enough times that it should have felt routine.
Except Tess had a way of reading me that went deeper than muscle and bone.
“You're tight through here,” she said, pressing between my shoulder blades hard enough to make me wince. “When's the last time you relaxed?”
“I'm fine.”
“That's not what I asked.” She moved to check my neck, fingers digging into the knots that had taken up permanent residence there. “You carrying an injury you haven't told me about?”
“No.”
“Then what's got you this tense on game day?” Her voice went quieter, more careful. “This isn't pre-game nerves. This is your head eating you alive and your body trying to keep up.”
I didn't answer right away, because admitting that my brain was a fucking mess felt like weakness I couldn't afford. Tess had seen me at my worst before, knew things about my past that most people didn't, and the fact that she was asking meant she'd already clocked that I was spiraling.
She'd been there during the worst of it with my ex.
Had seen bruises I'd explained away too easily, had noticed the way I'd flinched when people moved too fast near me, had eventually put the pieces together in ways that had forced me to admit out loud that the relationship I'd been in was destroying me from the inside out.
She'd helped me document everything when I'd finally gotten out, had made sure I had medical records that proved what had happened, and she'd never once made me feel like less of a man for staying as long as I had.
“I'm just distracted,” I said finally, because that was close enough to the truth without opening doors I didn't want to walk through right now.
“Distracted by what?”
“Personal shit. Nothing that's going to affect the game.”
Tess pulled back and came around to face me, arms crossed in a way that meant she wasn't buying what I was selling. “Rook. Look at me.”
I met her eyes, and the concern I saw there made my chest tighten.
“Is this about her?” she asked quietly. “Your ex? Is she trying to contact you again?”
“No. God, no.” The denial came out fast. “I haven't heard from her in years. This isn't about that.”
“Then what is it about?”
I could have lied. But Tess had earned honesty from me in ways most people hadn't, and the exhaustion of carrying everything alone was starting to wear me down.
“There's this guy,” I said, and the words felt awkward and too vulnerable. “Old friend from high school. We reconnected recently, and it's complicated, and I can't stop thinking about him even when I need to be focused on hockey.”
“Complicated how?”
“He's got a lot going on. Family shit, money problems, a drinking issue he won't admit is a problem. And I'm trying to help, but I don't know if I'm making things better or just getting in too deep with a situation I don't know how to fix.”
“Does he make you feel unsafe?” The question was careful, deliberate, and I could hear all the weight of my history sitting underneath it.
“No. Nothing like that.” I rubbed at my face with both hands, trying to organize my thoughts into coherent sentences.
“He makes me feel—I don't know. Grounded, when I'm with him.
Like I'm more myself than I've been in a long time.
But he's also a fucking disaster who needs help I don't know how to give, and I'm scared that if I don't figure it out fast enough he's going to spiral into worse shit than he's already dealing with.”
Tess was quiet for a long moment, and I could see her processing what I'd said against everything she knew about my past and how badly I'd been hurt the last time I'd tried to save anyone.
“You can't fix people who don't want to be fixed,” she said finally. “You know that, right? You can support them, you can be there when they ask for help, but you can't carry their recovery for them.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because the last time you got involved with someone who needed saving, it damn near destroyed you. I'm not watching you do that again. Not for anyone.”
“This is different.” I said it with more certainty than I felt, because Soren wasn't my ex and the situations weren't remotely comparable except for the part where I was getting emotionally invested in ways that scared the shit out of me.
“Soren's not dangerous. He's just hurting, and I want to help.”
“Wanting to help is fine. Losing yourself in the process isn't.” She sat down next to me on the bed, and I could feel the shift from athletic trainer to friend happening in real time.
“I need you to promise me that you're taking care of yourself too.
That you're not putting his needs so far ahead of your own that you forget you matter.”
The words hit harder than I'd expected, and I had to look away before she could see how much they'd landed. “I'm trying.”
“Try harder.” She stood up and grabbed her medical bag, all business again.
“You're cleared to play. Physically, you're in great shape.
Mentally, you need to get your head out of whatever spiral it's in and focus on the game.
The Wolves need their captain today, not a guy who's too busy worrying about someone else to lead.”
“I know.”
“Good.” She headed for the door but stopped before leaving, turning back to look at me with an expression that was equal parts concern and determination.
“And Rook? If you need to talk about any of this—the guy, the past, whatever—I'm here.
Don't let it eat you alive just because you think you're supposed to handle everything alone.”
She left before I could respond, and I sat there in the quiet hotel room trying to figure out how the fuck I was supposed to lock all of this down long enough to get through Game One without my head betraying me.
The arena was a wall of noise the second we hit the ice for warm-ups, thousands of Montreal fans screaming themselves hoarse before the puck had even dropped.
The Maples' home crowd was infamous for being loud and hostile and absolutely relentless when they smelled blood, and I could feel the energy pressing down on us like a physical weight.
I went through the warm-up routine on autopilot—skating drills, passing patterns, a few shots on Saint to get my timing dialed in—but my brain kept slipping sideways into thoughts that had nothing to do with hockey.
The puck dropping for real snapped me back into focus, but the static didn't disappear. It just got quieter, humming underneath everything else like white noise I couldn't fully tune out.
The Maples came out fast and aggressive. I read the play developing and called for a line change, but I was half a second too slow and they capitalized on it, forcing Saint into a save that should have been routine but felt too close.
“Tighten up!” I shouted to the bench, but I could hear the frustration in my own voice.
Their center was fast, mouthy, and talented enough to be dangerous when we gave him room. He chirped at me during a face-off, grinning like he knew exactly how to get under my skin.
“Heard you guys barely made it past the first round last year,” he said. “Guess we'll see if you learned anything since then.”
I won the draw and sent it back to Dmitri without responding, because engaging with trash talk when my head wasn't in the game would only make things worse. But the comment sat there anyway, adding to the noise already crowding my brain.
The first period dragged on in a blur of missed chances and defensive scrambles that made my jaw ache from clenching.
We weren't playing badly, exactly, but we weren't playing well either.
The Wolves needed to come out swinging in this series, and instead we were barely holding even against a team that was reading us too fucking easily.
I kept drifting. Kept losing half-seconds to thoughts that had no place on the ice.
A hit from behind knocked me into the boards hard enough to rattle my teeth, and I came up swinging before I'd fully registered who'd delivered it. The Maples' defenseman backed off with his hands raised, grinning like he'd accomplished exactly what he'd set out to do.
“Easy, Captain,” the ref warned. “Keep it clean.”
I skated away before I could do anything stupid, but the anger was useful. Better than the drift. Better than the static eating up space in my head while we were supposed to be taking control of this game.