Chapter 23 #2
I couldn't do that. Not now. Not with eighteen thousand hostile fans, a one-goal deficit, and a season hanging by a thread.
But I could do this.
The whistle blew. The puck dropped. Nashville's center won it cleanly, drawing it back to the point, and their defenseman wound up for a slap shot that I'd been a half-second late on all night.
I wasn't late this time.
I read the release before his stick made contact.
Shifted left, dropped into position, and caught the puck in my glove with a snap so clean it echoed off the glass.
The crowd noise dipped, confused, because that save hadn't looked difficult.
It hadn't been difficult. It had been instinct, pure and immediate, the cold channeling through my body the way it was supposed to when everything was aligned.
I set the puck down for a faceoff and tapped my posts. Left. Right. Crossbar.
This time, they answered.
Nashville came again. They always did. Their second line cycled low, working the puck along the boards with the grinding patience of a team protecting a lead.
A forward tried to jam it through my five-hole on a wraparound.
I sealed the post with my pad and kicked the rebound into the corner so hard it startled their winger.
Another shot, high blocker. I punched it out of the air.
Another, screened from the slot. I found it through their skaters, tracked it through four bodies, and smothered it against my chest before it had time to think about crossing the line.
Max skated past during a stoppage and glanced at me, then at the bench. He grinned. Slapped my pad with his stick and said, "There you are."
Cole tied it six minutes into the second period.
A breakaway so fast the defenseman was still turning when Cole snapped it over the goaltender's glove.
One-one. The Dragons' bench erupted, and I banged my stick against the crossbar three times because the sound felt right again, felt like it belonged to me.
I didn't look at Cinder. Not directly. Just once in the tunnel and wished for telepathy.
But I could feel him, and his second smile was stronger.
The bond, the thing I'd been trying to starve by distance and silence, hummed steadily beneath my ribs like a frequency I'd been tuned to my entire life without knowing it.
I mattered to him. Even after everything I'd done. Even after I'd let a stranger in a hallway convince me that the safest thing I could do for the people I loved was to stop loving them where anyone could see.
Nashville pushed back in the third. They were desperate now, their coach shifting their top line, throwing everything at a tied game in their own building. The shots came in waves. I stopped them all.
A one-timer from the circle that I kicked away with my right pad. A deflection from the crease that I caught. A wraparound attempt that I denied by pressing my entire body against the post and refusing to give an inch.
Thirty saves. Thirty-one. Thirty-two.
And then Sorin, our veteran D-man, scored when Nashville was too busy worrying what Cole or Keegan were going to do.
We lost the faceoff. The puck bounced free, and I saw the play forming before anyone else did—the way you saw a car accident half a second before it happened.
Nashville’s center grabbed the puck and fired it across the ice to a winger already flying through the neutral zone. Suddenly there was nothing between him and me but open ice.
Declan tried to catch him. He backchecked hard, but he came in at the wrong angle, cutting toward the middle instead of forcing the play to the boards. It was a rookie mistake, and it gave the winger a clear lane straight to the net.
The winger pulled the puck to his backhand.
I shifted to cover for the gap Declan had left, sliding toward that side to cut off the shot, but it put me half an inch out of position.
The puck slipped between my pad and the post.
The horn blasted.
The red light flared behind me while Declan’s eyes found mine across the crease—wide, already knowing exactly what he’d done.
Two-two. End of the second period.
I didn't slam my stick. Didn't swear. I tapped my posts, looked at the scoreboard, and skated to the bench for the intermission with the grim acceptance of a man who knew the next twenty minutes would define the season.
In the room, Coach didn't yell. He adjusted. Told us to play smart and tight and wait for our moment. Cole sat with his eyes closed, that preternatural stillness he got before big shifts, and I wondered if the dragon under his skin was as restless as mine.
I caught Cinder's eye in the tunnel on the way back out.
He was standing against the wall with his tablet, doing his job, being exactly where he was supposed to be, and the look he gave me was not a smile this time.
It was something steadier. Something that said I'm not going anywhere, and if you want to talk about it later, I'll be here, and also, you need to stop the goddamn puck.
I loved him so much it was physically painful.
The third period was a knife fight.
Nashville came out swinging, desperate to protect home ice, desperate to extend their streak.
We matched them shift for shift, hit for hit, the game degenerating into the kind of grinding, chaotic hockey that turned pretty systems into brawls and brawls into moments of individual brilliance.
The refs lost control around the eight-minute mark when Ash and Nashville's enforcer got tangled up after a whistle and both benches emptied in a shoving match that took four officials to sort out.
Penalties. Offsetting minors. Then more penalties. A roughing call on Ember. A slashing call on Nashville's center. The penalty boxes filled and emptied and filled again, and the clock ground down with the merciless patience of something that didn't care about anyone's hopes.
With ninety seconds left, both teams had fought themselves into matching penalties, leaving us four-on-four with the score knotted at two and the building so loud I could feel the vibrations in my teeth.
Nashville's coach called timeout with sixty-eight seconds remaining. When play resumed, their goaltender skated to the bench. Five Nashville skaters. Empty net. All-in.
The faceoff was in our zone. Max won it, barely, scraping the puck back to Ash, who fired it along the boards. Nashville's defenseman intercepted, kept it in, fed it to the point. Shot. I caught it clean, squeezed it, felt the whistle blow for a stoppage.
Thirty-nine seconds.
Another faceoff. Our zone. The linesman dropped the puck, and Nashville's center won it this time, pulling it back to the point.
Their defenseman held it, surveying, looking for the lane.
Bodies everywhere. Five Nashville skaters clogging every inch of available ice, sticks down, screening, tipping, doing everything they could to get one more past me.
The shot came from the top of the circle. I blocked it with my chest. The rebound kicked to the half-wall. A Nashville forward collected it and fired again. I got my blocker on it, sent it spinning into the air, and it landed on the ice in front of my crease.
Three Nashville players converged on it.
I didn't think. I didn't calculate. I did something I'd done maybe twice in my entire career, something that went against every instinct a goaltender possessed, every lesson about staying in your crease and trusting your defense and not playing the puck unless you were absolutely certain.
I swung my stick.
Not a pass. Not a chip. A full, two-handed baseball swing that caught the puck and sent it rocketing off the ice surface with a velocity that surprised even me.
The cold channeled through my arms and into the shaft and through the blade, and the puck screamed down the ice like it had been fired from a cannon, rising slightly, humming, carrying every ounce of frozen desperation I had left.
It cleared the Nashville players. Cleared the blue line.
Cleared center ice. It was still rocketing when it crossed the far blue line, when it passed over the empty crease where Nashville's goaltender should have been standing, and then it hit the back of the net with a sound that was swallowed instantly by something far louder.
Silence.
One heartbeat of absolute, disbelieving silence.
Then the arena came apart.
Not the Nashville fans. They sat in stunned, horrified quiet, eighteen thousand people processing the impossibility of what they'd just witnessed.
The sound came from our bench. From our guys.
From every single Dragon who was already climbing over the boards before the horn finished sounding, sticks and gloves flying, a tidal wave of bodies pouring onto the ice and converging on me with a force that should have knocked me flat.
Max hit me first. Then Cole. Then Ember, who was screaming something completely incoherent and crying and laughing simultaneously.
Ash piled on. Sorin materialized from somewhere.
Declan, the kid whose turnover had let Nashville tie it, wrapped his arms around my waist and buried his face in my jersey and shook.
I couldn't breathe. Not because of the bodies crushing me but because the scoreboard read 3-2 and the clock read 0:00 and I had just scored a goal from my own crease in a game that kept our season alive.
The broadcast team had lost all pretense of objectivity.
"TARANIS REES! THE GOALTENDER SCORES! I HAVE NEVER—IN TWENTY-THREE YEARS OF CALLING HOCKEY—"
"Dave, I don't even know what to say. The goaltender just won the game. From two hundred feet. Into an empty net. With thirty-five saves and a performance that—I don't have words. I genuinely do not have words."
"The Colorado Dragons win three-two in Nashville, and their playoff hopes are ALIVE!"
I was somewhere at the bottom of the pile, helmet knocked sideways, gloves gone, my teammates' weight pressing me into the ice in a way that should have been uncomfortable but felt instead like being held.
Like being claimed. Like belonging to something bigger than the cold and the fear and the four days I'd spent trying to convince myself that distance was the same thing as safety.
When they finally let me up, I stood on shaking legs and looked across the ice toward the bench.
Cinder was on his feet. His tablet was on the floor. His hands were pressed over his mouth, and even from this distance, I could see that his eyes were bright and his shoulders were trembling.
He wasn't smiling. He was trying not to fall apart.
That made two of us.
I raised my hand. Just once. A small gesture that could have been for the crowd, for the team, for anyone watching. But it wasn't. It was for him. Only for him.
And when his hands came down from his face and he pressed one palm flat against his chest, right over his heart, I felt the cold inside me crack open and bloom into something that wasn't cold at all.