Chapter 4
FOUR
TREY
March
The clock showed the dwindling chances of a team that started the season as the clear pick to make it to the Frozen Four. I stared up at it as I waited to be released from my latest stint in the timeout chair, as a commentator called it during the post-game analysis for the Maulers’ last game.
They’d actually said I had been sent to timeout for my most recent tantrum.
Tantrum.
As if I were a fucking toddler.
I was the captain of this fucking team.
But I knew I didn’t act like it.
I acted like the problematic child they accused me of being.
The box official opened the door, and I swore he said, “See you soon,” when I stepped out onto the ice. A game misconduct for flipping the guy off wasn’t worth it.
“And the Maulers survive yet another of Malachek’s trips to the sin bin. His fourth of the night. Eight total minutes in the box.”
Shut up, fuckers.
Snow flew from my skates as I tore down the ice toward the puck, watching the lanes, looking for the play, any play. Ethan Ruggers had the puck, but CU had him penned in.
“Pass!” I yelled, tapping my stick.
The puck spun across the ice toward me. CU’s huge ass defenseman chased after it.
Smirking at him as I scooped it up, I spun around him, calling out, “Not today, Neanderthal!” as I barreled up the ice. Zane Tyler, my right winger, moved into place. Ethan shouldered the CU player, who was humping his back, out of the way.
The puck danced around my stick as I waited.
Hold.
Hold.
Damn! Zane and Ethan both got blocked in. With a quick spin to miss the defenseman coming at me head-on, the clock came into view. Less than five minutes. Down by one.
Another spin put the guy from CU behind me.
C’mon!
Twitch, fucker!
Faking a shot, I pushed the puck back instead of forward…
Yes!
Flipping to my backhand, I let the puck fly.
Horns sounded. Lights flashed.
“Hell, yeah!” I screamed.
The cheers of the crowd enveloped me. The guys surrounded me. Shook me. Screamed and cursed in relief at the goal that tied the game.
“NO GOAL! Five-minute major, number twenty-one Maulers, elbow to the face.”
Like a vacuum had sucked it up, the sound disappeared.
Turning slowly, I looked, and sure enough, the defenseman I’d dangled stood where I’d left him in my snow, holding his face, blood dripping through his fingers to splatter on the ice like a modern art canvas gone wild.
Closing my eyes, I sighed. Fuck my ever-loving life.
“Fuck this shit!” Ethan said.
Isaiah skated toward the ref to plead for a minor instead of the major, but I knew it would do no good. The guy was fucking bleeding. No way would they downgrade it.
Turning to Isaac, Zane, and Ethan, I said, “You guys got this. I know you do. Sink the puck and send us to OT.”
I gave knucks all around, including to Isaiah, who skated over to me as I made my way back to the box.
“I tried, man,” Isaiah said.
“I know you did. It’s fine. Looks like I broke his fucking nose.”
The box official welcomed me back with a hateful sneer.
Four minutes, seventeen seconds later…
Pandemonium broke out.
Sticks dropped.
Gloves flew in the air.
Helmets hit the ice.
Players jumped in the air, skated the perimeter, waved to fans, dogpiled their teammates.
Meanwhile, I sat in the sin bin.
My eyes slid shut to block it all out.
The roar of the crowd was so loud my ears rang. The glass behind me bounced and vibrated from the force of the fans beating on it.
Wish I could close my ears the same way I could my eyes.
Because the celebration in the barn? In The U’s barn? In my team’s barn? It wasn’t for my fucking team.
Now, it was all…fuck. It was over.
The season.
Our chance at the title.
My shot at the show.
My junior year.
Well, not so much the last one, but all the others? Yeah. Those were probably all true.
Since Coach Storm and Aiden left a few weeks ago after Storm warned me, the season plummeted into a dark, shitty abyss. Not that I blame them, because I didn’t. They weren’t to blame.
There is only one person to blame.
Me.
And my fucking father and grandfather had made sure I knew it.
Every game—win or lose—ended the same way, with a multitude of text messages from each of them detailing all the ways I disappointed them, all the ways I fucked up, all the things I could’ve and should’ve done differently, and all the ways they had done all the things better than me.
At the start of the season, I’d hoped that even if the Wardens left me on the bench for the start of the season, they would pull me from the team as they ramped up for the playoffs.
But it didn’t happen.
That hope grew when they lost one of their centers to rib fractures a couple of weeks ago.
It still didn’t happen.
They called up an AHL player instead. The guy had great stats. I watched several of his games, trying to see what he had that I didn’t.
Those videos hammered home the dread I felt. There was no hope of New York signing me now. That wasn’t fucking happening.
The guy they called up, Dylan Kahun, had zero major penalties, and the minor penalties were utter accidents.
So, no, New York calling me up this year wasn’t happening.
Which means my NHL prospects just got tanked.
Because my stupid ass had allowed my fucking daddy issues—who was I kidding, I had daddy issues, mommy issues, and granddaddy issues—to affect me so much that I threw away a lucrative professional career.
“Did he fall asleep?”
Opening my eyes, my linemates and some of the team huddled around the door to the penalty box.
“Nah, just trying to figure out how the fuck this game went to shit.”
They looked at each other, but every one of them held their tongue. I appreciated them not pointing out that it all pointed back to my thirteen penalty minutes. Skates pressed into the floor, I lifted myself from the bench and shouldered my way out onto the ice. The guys followed behind.
My eyes met those of the man I had noticed weeks ago. The one I showed off for during warm-ups. I didn’t know his name, but I knew several things about him.
He’d been at every home game since that night. Always sitting in the same seats. Sometimes alone. Other times with the guy from the first night, I noticed him. Sometimes with another guy.
He cleaned up after himself after every game.
He had a beautiful fucking smile.
He jumped to his feet when I scored, cheering and high-fiving those around him.
He seemed to know Coach Grigor. Coach waved at him a couple of times, anyway.
Other than that, I knew…
He made me curious.
And horny as fuck.
I nodded at him, wishing he and the rest of the fans hadn’t just watched our season end on a shitty fuck-up by yours truly.
He nodded back and turned to head up the stairs.
With that, I stepped into the tunnel. The locker room should’ve been rocking. Instead, the mood mimicked a funeral, complete with tears and anger. Plenty of that to be found, too.
Hockey gear flew across the room, smacking off the floor and walls.
A folding chair branded with the Mauler logo lay mangled on the floor.
Not a great way to cope with a loss, but who was I to talk about coping mechanisms? I coped with shit by acting out like a fucking toddler, and I had no fucking clue how to stop.
Or if I even wanted to.
I stripped down to my gitch, leaving the base layer on while I sorted my gear, and dropped my dirties in the hampers.
A deep breath in, I turned back to my cubby and pulled my undershirt over my head, peeled the gitch bottoms off my legs, whipping them toward the laundry being collected. My eyes traveled casually around the room, and the eyes meeting mine darted away quickly.
They were better guys than I. Breaking shit while screaming at the culprit for the loss would probably be more likely how I would react.
Coach Grigor entered the room. Breaths held for the red-faced, spit-flying rant, but it never came.
He made his way around the room, gripping shoulders, patting faces and arms as he went.
He ended the trip with me. His hand landed on my shoulder.
I only barely kept from flinching. He gave me a soft shake, then dipped, disappearing into his office.
Relieved tears pricked at my eyes. I couldn’t…fuck. I couldn’t lose it here. As I moved, I turned away from the team, yanked off my boxer briefs, and dropped them in my bag.
“Tough loss, boys.”
Eyes wide. A silent FUCK growled in my head.
Please, God. Not here. Not now.
Snatching up my shower caddy, I ducked into the showers without so much as a ‘I’ll be quick, Dad’ called out over my shoulder.
I’d pay for the slight. That was a given. There was no way I wouldn’t. He’d stack it on top of all the other shit he would punish me for tonight. I’d given the prick a season’s worth of ammunition to use against me for the rest of my goddamn life.
Oh well. It wasn’t as if being perfect granted me any slack. He still found something. From how I tied my laces to what I ate. As if a teenage hockey player needed to worry about watching their diet.
The shower sputtered to life as I twisted the knob. The tears that threatened in the other room made tracks down my face. I buried my face in the water, praying it would wash away the pain, the grief, praying even harder for it to wash me away.
That would be ideal. If the water turned to acid, it could melt the flesh from my bones, and I could melt away into nothingness.
A sob pinched my chin, but I swallowed until it lodged in my chest, along with the rage and fear and fucking agony. I hated feeling like this. I fucking loathed it. I wanted out. I loved hockey, but I hated playing with the black cloud of Malachek expectation following me through life.
As scared as I was of not getting signed, I knew, fucking knew in my guts and deep in my bone marrow, that if I signed with the Wardens, I would never, ever be free. Not that signing with another team would cut the stays that imprisoned me, but it would be better.
Right?
“You okay, Cap?” Ethan asked from my right.
I dropped my chin, opening my mouth and letting it fill with water from the shower head. My head dipped a few times in response as I swished and spat to rid myself of the mucus; the emotions I held onto by the barest grip of my fingertips caused.
“You sure?” Zane pressed from the left.
I loved these guys. I loved all the guys on the team, but these guys were my boys. We’d probably lose Zane over the summer. Anaheim drafted him last year, and they clearly needed him. We all knew it.
Looking at Zane, I sighed. “I’m sorry it ended the way it did.”
“Me too. You’ve had a rough year. I don’t know what triggered it. You were a menace last year. I thought—”
Cutting him off, I said, “Yeah, me too. I don’t know what the fuck happened. I really can’t explain it.”
I could. But I wouldn’t.
No one needed to know what the fuck happened behind the gates of the Malachek compound.
Without looking to confirm, I knew they were looking at each other, trying to figure out what to say or do. Shampoo dumped into my hand as I avoided their gazes and focused on getting clean and getting the fuck out of here. I hoped that if I took enough time, my old man would disappear.
Hopefully, from the planet.
But I’d settle for the locker room.
I tilted my head back once I had rinsed the suds away. I chanced a glance at the guys. Ethan’s eyes met mine.
“Aiden texted.”
“Yeah. How’s Mercy doing?”
“Great. They have a game in two days. He offered us tickets if we wanted to make the trip.”
A grin spread across my face—a matching one spread across Zane’s. Then Ethan’s.
“Road trip!” we cried, high-fiving.
“Did someone say road trip?” Riordy, aka Ryan Riordan, asked.
“What better way to drown our sorrows, boys?”
“Fuck yeah,” Isaiah said.
“Nash Vegas, look out! The boys are back!”