Dante and his Dragon (Colorado Dragons #3)

Chapter one

Checking from Behind - A dangerous hit delivered to an unsuspecting player.

Dante - two months earlier

I was twenty minutes early to O’Hare because that was who I was—the guy who showed up first, stayed latest, and never gave anyone a reason to question my commitment.

I hitched my bag higher on my shoulder and scanned the private terminal for the rest of the guys.

A few were already clustered near the gate—Briggs and Kowalski arguing over something on a phone screen, Martinez half-asleep against his carry-on.

Normal pre-flight chaos. We were headed to Winnipeg for a Saturday-night game, and I’d been visualizing my shifts all morning, running through plays in my head while I packed.

I was having the best season of my life.

Twenty-three years old, second year in the league, and I’d already matched my rookie point totals with two months left to play, and that was just the regular season.

Six months ago, the hockey media had started throwing around words like breakout and franchise cornerstone, and for the first time since I was a terrified five-year-old on Taylor Street—back in Chicago, where I grew up—I felt like I belonged somewhere.

I felt like I’d earned it.

And yeah, okay, so my last few games hadn’t been perfect.

I’d lost a little confidence. If I was honest, I’d started second-guessing myself, but Antoine had assured me all the younger players went through that, and he’d been trying to help.

In fact, it had been Antoine who convinced me to keep my head down for the last few games.

Flashy shots were inherently risky, and Coach and the guys needed to know I was a team player, not someone just out for glory.

“Russo.”

Coach Hendricks materialized at my elbow like he’d been waiting for me. That should have been my first warning. Hendricks didn’t wait for anyone—he expected you to come to him, hat in hand, grateful for whatever scraps of ice time he decided to throw your way.

“Coach.” I straightened up instinctively. “We boarding soon?”

He didn’t answer. His expression was the same flat mask he wore during blowout losses—controlled, distant, already past whatever conversation he was about to have.

“Come with me. Bring your bag.”

The second warning. I ignored that too.

He walked me to a small conference room tucked behind a priority lounge, the kind of beige, windowless box airports kept for delivering bad news to people who didn’t know it was coming yet.

There was a woman inside I didn’t recognize—team operations, maybe, based on the lanyard—and she had a folder open on the table in front of her.

I stood because no one told me to sit.

“Dante,” Hendricks said, and the use of my first name was the third warning, the one that finally landed. He never called me Dante. I was Russo, or kid when he was feeling generous. “There’s no easy way to do this. You’ve been traded.”

The words hit me the way a clean check does—full contact, no time to brace. One second you’re moving forward, and the next the world tilts sideways and you’re trying to remember which way is up.

“Traded,” I repeated. The word didn’t sound real.

“To the Colorado Dragons. The deal was finalized about an hour ago.”

An hour ago, I’d been standing in my apartment listening to a podcast about neutral zone transitions. An hour ago, I’d still had a life here.

“I don’t—” I started, then stopped. My throat felt tight, like I’d swallowed something sharp. “The deadline’s today.”

“That’s why we’re telling you now,” the woman said.

We. As if the woman with the folder was somehow part of this, as if she’d had any say in ripping my entire world out from under me with the casual efficiency of someone filing paperwork.

“Can I ask why?”

Hendricks’ jaw tightened. Just a fraction—just enough for me to see it. “The organization feels it’s the right move for both parties.”

“Both parties,” I echoed. “I’m having the best season on this team. My numbers are—”

“This isn’t about numbers, Dante.”

And there it was. The thing underneath the thing. The reason Hendricks wouldn’t look at me straight on, the reason the operations woman was studying her folder like it contained the secrets of the universe.

It was about something else. And clarity hit me harder than a high stick to the face.

Antoine Devereaux. Thirty-one years old, alternate captain, two-time All-Star, and the man I’d been stupid enough to fall in love with.

I didn’t know it then—not the full scope of it, not the specific lies or who he’d whispered them to.

That would come later, in fragments, like pulling shrapnel out of a wound.

What I knew in that moment was simpler and worse: the ground I’d thought was solid had been hollowed out beneath me for weeks, maybe months, and I’d been too blinded by the way Antoine smiled at me behind closed doors, and whispered things in my ear, to notice the sinkhole forming.

“The Dragons,” I said quietly. “They just had that betting scandal.”

Hendricks at least had the decency to flinch. “They’re rebuilding. They need young talent.”

They need bodies, I thought. And I’m the most expendable body you’ve got, because someone made sure of that.

“My agent—”

“Has been notified. There’s a flight to Denver in two hours, so grab a coffee. The team will handle logistics and pack your apartment.” He paused, and for one brief second, something that might have been regret flickered across his face. “For what it’s worth, I think you’ve got real talent, kid.”

Kid. Back to kid. The conversation was over.

I nodded because I didn’t trust my voice.

I picked up the folder the woman slid across the table—new team contact info, travel itinerary, relocation details—and I walked out of that conference room with my spine straight and my face blank, because that was the one thing Antoine had actually taught me that was worth keeping: never let them see you bleeding.

Briggs caught my eye from across the terminal and raised a hand in a lazy wave. He didn’t know yet. None of them did. By the time they landed in Vancouver, my name would be scrubbed from the roster sheet, and Antoine Devereaux would have one less problem to worry about.

I’d been so stupid. He’d seemed distant and told me he was focusing on getting to the playoffs, and that I should too.

And I’d believed him.

I found a seat at an empty gate two terminals away—because I didn’t warrant a private plane now—set my bag on the floor between my feet, and stared at the departure board without seeing it.

Colorado. The Dragons. A franchise that had become a punchline two seasons ago when seven players and half the coaching team got caught up in a sports betting ring that made national news.

Half their roster had been gutted. Their fan base was furious.

The league had come down on them like a hammer, and now they were scrambling to fill seats with warm bodies who could skate in a straight line and not embarrass anyone further.

And I was one of those bodies now.

Although that wasn’t strictly true, I allowed. Their front line was on fire, and their goalie was like a wall. We’d played them twice so far this season and won both times, but you could tell they were improving, and I didn’t doubt they’d climb out of the wildcard spot.

My phone buzzed. Then again. Then a third time in rapid succession. I pulled it out and saw the notifications already stacking up—a text from my agent, two from my mother, a push alert from TSN Sports with my name in the headline.

I opened the text from my agent first.

Dante. Just got the call. I know this is a shock. Don’t talk to media. Don’t post anything. Call me when you land in Denver. We’ll figure this out.

Figure this out. As if there was something to figure. A trade was a trade. The deal was done. My locker in that arena was already being cleaned out by some equipment manager who’d pack my gear into boxes with the same indifference he’d use for old tape and broken sticks.

I’d hoped to always play for the Grizzlies. Chicago was my home, where my family lived.

My phone buzzed with a good-luck message from my mom, assuming I was headed to the game and who wouldn’t know yet her baby was moving nearly a thousand miles away.

I locked the screen and put the phone face-down on the seat beside me.

I couldn’t call her yet. Not here, not in this terminal with its overhead announcements and its smell of chain restaurant coffee and its streams of people moving past me like I was a rock in a river.

Not when I didn’t yet have the right words to explain what had happened.

My mother would cry. She’d try to hide it—she’d been trying to hide things from me since my father died, tucking her real feelings somewhere behind her eyes and offering me the steady version of herself instead while she worked three jobs back then.

But I’d always been able to hear the effort in her voice, the way she breathed a little too carefully when she was holding something back.

I couldn’t put her through that without at least understanding it myself first.

And my brothers. God. Marco would want to fly out.

He’d say it casually, like it was nothing, like driving to the airport and buying a same-day ticket to Denver was something a guy working two jobs and raising three kids could just do.

He’d offer anyway. That was Marco. Nicky would be angrier than I was, which somehow always made things worse; his outrage on my behalf had a way of making the thing more real, more final, more something-that-actually-happened-to-you. I wasn’t ready for either of them.

What I wanted, in a way that felt almost childish, was to sit at my mother’s kitchen table on Taylor with a cup of coffee I hadn’t made myself and let her not-quite-hide her feelings while I not-quite-showed mine.

That was the comfort of home—not that anyone fixed anything, but that you could be broken in a familiar place among people who had already decided to love you regardless.

Denver was eight hundred miles from that kitchen table.

I picked up the phone again and scrolled to my mother’s contact.

Her photo was from last Thanksgiving. She was laughing at something off-camera, her dark hair escaping from a clip, looking younger than fifty-seven had any right to look.

I’d taken the photo myself. I remembered the exact moment, the way the kitchen light had caught her just right, and I’d thought: I need to remember this.

I put the phone back down without calling.

What was I supposed to say? Mom, I got traded because I was sleeping with Antoine Devereaux and then I started outscoring him and he decided I was more useful gone than here, so he told people things about me that weren’t true, and the team believed him because he’s Antoine Devereaux and I’m twenty-three and nobody?

She didn’t even know about Antoine. Nobody in my family did. That had been the first condition of whatever we were. Antoine had laid it out early, calmly, with the same measured authority he used on the ice.

I didn’t call my agent. I didn’t call my mother.

I opened Antoine’s contact instead and stared at it for a long time—the photo I’d never changed, the one I’d taken of him laughing on the balcony of his condo with the city lights behind him, his hair still wet from the shower we’d shared twenty minutes before.

My thumb hovered over the call button.

What would I even say? Did you do this? Was it you?

I already knew. I just wasn’t ready to make it real.

I deleted the contact, powered off my phone, and sat in that plastic airport chair until my flight to Denver started boarding.

Two months later, I still hadn’t played a single game.

I wanted that to sink in, because it still hadn’t fully sunk in for me.

Two months. Sixty-some days of practices, team meetings, video sessions, travel days, hotel rooms, arena tunnels, and warm-ups—all of it leading to the same result every single night: my name absent from the lineup card that Coach Kincaid posted outside the locker room exactly ninety minutes before puck drop.

I was a healthy scratch. Every game. Without explanation.

The Dragons had brought me in during the final hours of the deadline, ostensibly because they needed scoring depth for a playoff push, and then they’d proceeded to treat me like I was radioactive.

I practiced with the team. I traveled with the team.

I wore the jersey with the dragon crest on the chest and the number forty-one on the back.

But when the lights came on and the anthem played and twenty thousand people in the arena screamed themselves hoarse, I sat in the press box in a suit and watched from behind glass like a kid with his nose pressed against a window.

Nobody told me why. That was the part that made me want to put my fist through drywall.

Kincaid was a wall. Not hostile—never hostile.

Just impenetrable. He’d nod at me during practice, bark corrections at my positioning the same way he did with everyone else, and then post the lineup without my name on it as though the contradiction didn’t exist. I’d asked him twice in the first two weeks.

Both times I got the same answer delivered in that low, gravelly voice of his: “When you’re ready, you’ll play. ”

Ready for what?

It was clear someone had made sure my reputation arrived in Denver before I did.

I didn’t know exactly what Antoine had said, or who he’d said it to, or how far the poison had spread.

What I knew was the shape of the lie, visible in the way certain front office staff avoided eye contact, in the careful distance my new teammates maintained, in the fact that a twenty-three-year-old with a forty-point rookie season was being treated like a liability instead of an asset.

Whatever story Antoine had constructed, it had followed me across state lines like a shadow I couldn’t outrun, and worse, it was affecting my game, making me second guess myself.

So I did the only thing I could do. I kept showing up.

I arrived first and left last. I did every drill at full speed, finished every conditioning session, watched film until my eyes burned.

It didn’t matter, and I was starting to wonder if it ever would.

I’d even thought about leaving hockey. Maybe my worth had really all been in my head?

Then the Dragons clinched the third playoff spot on the second-to-last day of the regular season, and everything changed.