Chapter 23
Chapter twenty-three
Empty Net - When the goalie is pulled for an extra attacker, leaving the goal unguarded.
Taz
Both Max and Cole had tried to get me talking, but in the end, they’d both left me alone.
Coach was stoic, but we all knew that if we lost tonight, we could probably kiss any chance of catching the top three in the division goodbye.
Those teams were streaking ahead.If we won, we still weren’t guaranteed anything, but at least we weren’t completely out of it.
I hadn’t attempted to call Cinder again.
I’d even ignored Nancy’s call this morning then turned my phone off.
To make it worse, the Nashville Outlaws were one of the top three, and currently on a six-game winning streak.
Their top line was practically unstoppable, and the one time we’d played them in Denver at the start of the season we’d lost 5-1.
I’d done everything I could to get my head straight, but even my dragon was sulking.
I just felt like this huge black cloud was hanging over me, and if Levin had been available, I wouldn’t have played even if Coach had wanted me to.
The locker room was quieter than it should have been before a game this important.
Guys sat in their stalls, going through their routines with the mechanical focus of players who knew the math and didn't like what it said.
Tape jobs. Stick checks. The particular ritual of lacing skates that every hockey player treated like prayer, whether they admitted it or not.
Ember had his headphones in, eyes closed, bouncing one knee.
Ash sat perfectly still, staring at the wall with the concentrated blankness of a man who'd already played the game three times in his head.
Cole was beside Max, the two of them murmuring in low tones I couldn't catch.
Keegan was trying to coax Declan into not throwing up.
Both our rookies looked like they were wishing they could be anywhere else.
I sat in my stall and felt nothing. Not the cold. Not the nerves. Not even the dull, persistent ache behind my sternum that had been my constant companion for four days. Just a flat, gray absence where everything used to be.
Coach Kinkaid walked in.
He didn’t slam the door. Didn’t raise his voice. He just stood in the center of the room with his hands at his sides and waited until the last of the guys finished taping their sticks and the headphones came off.
The man had a gift for commanding attention without demanding it—the kind of quiet authority that came from decades of earning respect instead of insisting on it. According to his bio, he’d spent seven years in the AHL before getting his NHL shot.
He’d actually been an assistant coach in Nashville before the betting scandal gutted our staff. When the league finished its investigation, half the organization was gone and Kincaid somehow ended up in the top job with the Dragons. Probably because no one else wanted it.
Which meant tonight, and our loss against them at the beginning of the season, was going to be particularly brutal.
"I'm not going to stand here and tell you this is a must-win," he said.
His voice was even, conversational, like he was talking to us over coffee instead of in a locker room before the biggest game of our season.
"You know the standings. You can do the math.
I'm not going to insult your intelligence by pretending the stakes aren't real. "
He paused. Let the silence work.
"What I will tell you is this: I watched you claw this franchise back from the dead.
Every single one of you. I watched you show up in September when half the league had written us off.
I watched you fight through injuries, through bad calls, through road trips that would've broken teams with twice our depth.
I watched you get close to a possible playoff berth that nobody outside this room thought was possible. "
His gaze moved slowly around the room, landing on each player long enough to make it personal.
"Nashville is good. They're hot. They're at home, and they're going to come at us with everything they've got.
" He nodded. "Fine. Let them. Because the team I've coached all season doesn't back down from good teams. This team runs toward the hard games.
That's who you are. That's who you've been since day one. "
He stopped in front of Cole, held his gaze for a beat, then moved on. When he passed my stall, he didn't pause, didn't single me out, but his hand landed briefly on my shoulder pad. A touch so quick anyone watching might have missed it. I didn't.
"Play your game tonight," he said. "Not theirs. Not the scoreboard's. Not the internet's. Yours. The game that got you here." He straightened. "Now go show them why they should be scared of us."
The room erupted. Sticks slammed against the floor. Gloves pounded stall walls. Ember let out a howl that probably registered on seismic equipment. Max stood and the rest followed, the energy shifting from tension to something fiercer, something hungry.
I stood too. Pulled my mask on. Felt the familiar weight settle against my skull and tried to let it become what it had always been: a barrier between me and everything that wasn't the next shot.
It didn't work. But I walked out anyway.
The tunnel was a blur of noise and light. Nashville's building was loud in a way that felt personal, the crowd already on its feet, already hostile, feeding off their team's winning streak like it was something they'd built themselves. The ice gleamed under the arena lights, pristine and merciless.
I skated to my crease. Tapped my posts. Left, right, crossbar. The ritual that had anchored me for fifteen years, the three points of contact that told my body where it was in space, that narrowed the world to a six-by-four rectangle of painted ice that was mine to defend.
The posts didn't answer.
The puck dropped.
Nashville came in a huge unstoppable wave.
Their top line moved with the telepathic chemistry of players who'd been together for years, cycling the puck through our zone with a speed and precision that made our defensemen look like they were skating through sand.
The crowd roared with every completed pass, every shot that got through traffic, every moment that brought them closer to the goal I was supposed to be guarding.
I saw the shot before it happened. Their center won a board battle along the half-wall, spun, and fed it to the point.
Their defenseman one-timed it without hesitation.
Low, hard, through a screen that I never had a chance of seeing through.
The puck was past my blocker before my brain finished processing the release point.
A minute fifty-three seconds. They'd scored in a minute fifty-three seconds.
The horn sounded. The building shook. I heard the roar wash over me like a physical thing, pressing against my chest, and I stood in my crease and felt the scoreboard change and thought, with the terrible clarity of a man who'd run out of ways to lie to himself: I can't do this anymore.
Not just the game. Not just goaltending. Not just hockey.
This. The hollow, grinding emptiness of performing without purpose. Of going through motions that used to mean everything and now meant nothing because the person who'd given them meaning was in Denver, in an apartment that smelled like lavender, because I'd let him go.
The faceoff was at center ice. I had a few seconds while the linesman sorted out a delayed icing call at the far end, players coasting, the brief administrative pause that punctuated every game like a comma in a sentence nobody wanted to read.
I looked at the bench. Not because I expected anything.
I knew his place would be empty like the rest of the times I’d checked.
Just the automatic sweep of a goaltender checking his surroundings, the same way I checked my posts, the same way I checked the clock, the same way I checked everything except the thing that actually fucking mattered.
Cinder was sitting on the bench.
My heart stopped. Not figuratively. Not poetically.
It seized in my chest like a fist had closed around it, and for one suspended, airless second the arena went silent, the crowd vanished, the scoreboard disappeared, and there was nothing in the world except a man in a staff jacket sitting exactly where he was supposed to be, watching me with dark, exhausted eyes that held something I didn't deserve.
He smiled.
Small. Tentative. The kind of smile that cost everything to give because it came with no guarantee of return.
The kind that said I'm here, not as a declaration but as a question.
The kind that a man who'd been left by everyone he'd ever trusted offered like an open hand, knowing it might get slapped away.
The cold inside me detonated.
Not outward. Not dangerously. Inward. It flooded through my veins like a river breaking through a dam, and everything it touched came alive.
My fingers tingled inside my gloves. My legs, which had felt like concrete since the opening faceoff, suddenly remembered what they were for.
The crease beneath my skates sharpened into focus with a clarity so acute I could see the individual scratches in the ice, could feel the texture of every groove through my blades.
The dragon roared awake behind my ribs. Not the agitated, pacing restlessness of the last four days.
Something older. Something fundamental. The deep, resonant hum of recognition that I'd felt the first time Cinder had put his hands on me in the medical room and the cold had bent around him like it had been waiting.
He was here. He was here, and he was looking at me, and the smile on his face was terrified and brave and so goddamn beautiful that I wanted to skate off the ice, cross the bench, take his face in my frozen hands, and tell him every single thing I should have had the courage to say.