Chapter 39
Hunter
I know the Christmas season has started purely because of the influx of Christmas and winter-themed cards I’ve received in the mail.
Thanksgiving is still a few days away, and yet the glut of holiday cards, smiling photos of the Havoc management, my dentist’s family, and my agent has filled my inbox.
Juliet is gone, at the arena, working with the new social media team. My lips twitch as I think about her.
Should we do a Christmas card together? The opportunity to take over-the-top, cheesy photos in Christmas sweaters and mail them to people I hate – namely Patrick Delacroix – appeals to me. I guess it all depends on how Juliet is feeling about us at the moment.
We’ve been together for four months now. The original contract was only for five. Juliet has made quiet comments about our time running out. Does she plan to stay?
That’s the question, isn’t it? I need to figure out how to convince her I’m serious about trying to make a relationship work.
I’m standing in the foyer, sifting through a stack of mail, when I see it. Another package addressed to Juliet, same careful handwriting as before. Same local postmark. No return address.
Darla Huxley.
What could she be contacting Juliet about this time?
I don’t even want to know. I take it straight to the patio and burn it without opening it.
Watching the flames grow, consuming whatever poison my mother thought she could spread this time.
The smoke smells acrid, wrong. I stay outside in the freezing air, watching the flames burn and gutter, until there’s nothing left but a pile of ash.
There’s a knot in my chest that won’t loosen, no matter how much coffee I drink or how long I stare at the ceiling. My thoughts are a mess.
Mom. Juliet. My hockey career. Everything good in my life feels like it’s balanced on a knife’s edge. It’s so fucking precarious.
I need to hit the ice. The cold, the quiet, the rhythm of blades cutting through silence can soothe this ache in my chest.
My feelings for Juliet have grown so broad and so deep. I refuse to lose her. Not now, not ever.
I text my brothers.
Rink. Now. Just us.
The arena is empty except for the Huxley brothers. No coaches, no cameras, no expectations. Just three brothers and an ice rink that has carried us through everything.
“What’s up?” Jett asks, scanning my face.
“Here.” I drag two resistance sleds onto the ice, tossing the belts to my brothers. “Suicides.”
“Shit.” Silas sighs. “Are you serious?”
“Yep.” I grab the third sled and loop the belt over my head, strapping myself in. My brothers do the same. “Let’s go from the halfway mark.”
“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather just talk?” Jett whines.
I ignore him, dragging my sled to the center red line. Silas mutters something to Jett as they line up. I glare at both of them.
“Are we gonna do this or not?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Silas leans down, eyes forward. “Say when.”
“Go.”
We push off, hauling the heavy sleds. I stacked them with thick metal plates, so every stride burns. At the blue line, we stop and pivot back to center. The starts and stops are brutal, the sleds yanking against us.
My lungs are on fire by the end.
Silas doesn’t even wait for me to call it. He pushes off again, relentless. By the time we finish a full set, my legs are shaking, sweat dripping into my eyes.
Jett drops to his knees, bracing his hands on them. “Bet you wish you’d just talked now.”
“We needed the cardio.” My chest heaves, heart pounding.
Silas shakes his head. “You dragged us here for a reason. Spit it out.”
“Later.” I tug at my straps. “One more set.”
Jett groans but he sets up again. That’s him in a nutshell.
He’ll complain, he’ll crack jokes, but when it matters, he’ll do it anyway.
Jett has always been that guy. Loud, reckless, the friendliest face in the room, a fuckboy without shame.
But he was also the one who kept us alive when Dad died, smiling through it so Silas and I didn’t see how much it wrecked him.
Silas is the opposite. Moody, gruff, with eyes that cut through everything. He never says much, but when he does, you listen. Growing up, he’d sit in the locker room, daring anyone to test him. He still does. He’s a wall.
We finish another round, and I unstrap, bent over and gasping. Sweat soaks through my shirt. Jett sprawls on his back on the ice, arms wide, dramatic as hell.
“God, I missed this,” he says. “Just us.”
That hits me harder than I expect. Just us.
It has been too long since we were only brothers and not teammates with the weight of the world on us.
Too long since we remembered how the rink saved us after Dad died.
We’d sneak in before school, skate until our legs gave out, and collapse on the bench in silence. That silence was safety.
“Remember Dad yelling from the stands with that busted thermos of coffee?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Jett says instantly. “He’d scream like every scrimmage was the Cup Final.”
“Best part of the day,” Silas adds quietly.
The words hang between us, heavy.
“After he died… this was all we had,” I say.
“Yeah.” Jett huffs a humorless laugh. “I hated feeling like I had to be him. Like I had to hold it all together. I was a kid too.”
“You held it together,” I tell him. “If it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t have made it.”
He shakes his head. “And you, Hunt, you ate up Mom’s bullshit until she turned on you. Silas had to live with her for five more years. None of us got out clean.”
Silas shrugs. “I stayed at the rink. Pretended she didn’t exist.”
The truth of it settles on me like a stone. Jett’s grin, Silas’s silence, my temper. We all built armor to survive. None of it saved us.
“I keep waiting for Juliet to see it,” I admit. “To realize I’m not okay. That I’m just a mess in a jersey.”
“She already sees it,” Silas says flatly. “And she doesn’t care. That’s the difference.”
Jett pushes himself up, smirking. “She looks at you like you hung the moon. She’d fight anybody who tried to hurt you. Including Mom.”
The words stick deep.
We sit there for a long time, sweaty and raw, saying things we’ve never said before. For once, I don’t feel like I’m carrying it all by myself.
When we finally leave the ice, I feel lighter. Not fixed. Just less alone.
We clomp off the ice, skates grinding against the rubber mat in the tunnel. None of us bother unstrapping the sleds from where we ditched them by the boards. My shirt sticks to me, sweat cooling fast in the drafty corridor.
The locker room feels almost too quiet without the rest of the team around. Just the three of us again. I drop onto the bench with a groan, chug half a bottle of Gatorade in one go, and tip my head back against the wall.
For a while, the only sounds are us breathing, bottles cracking open, water dripping somewhere in the background.
Jett finally breaks the silence. “Remember that night Dad died?” His voice is low, not playful for once. “We went straight to the rink. We skated until the sun came up.”
I swallow, throat tight. “Yeah. It was the only place that made sense.”
Silas kicks his feet out, still in his gear, arms folded across his chest. “I was a kid. I didn’t even know how to process it. You two kept moving, so I did too.”
“You looked pissed the whole time,” Jett says.
“I was,” Silas admits. “At everything. Mom. God. At the fact that Dad wasn’t coming back. Hockey was the only thing that didn’t lie to me.”
We sit with that. The ache of it never fully goes away.
“You know what I remember?” I say. “That you both showed up for me. Even when Mom was feeding me bullshit about being her golden boy. Even when she turned it around and tried to break me. You never left.”
Jett shrugs, but his eyes are sharp. “We’re the Huxleys. We don’t leave each other.”
Silas nods once. “We survived because we had each other. That’s not nothing.”
For a second, I can’t breathe around the lump in my throat. The three of us are scarred as hell, but we’re still here. Still together.
I look at them, really look, and feel it settle in my chest like solid ground. Whatever else happens, I’m not alone in this world.
After a quick shower, I drive home wrung out emotionally but clearer than I’ve been in weeks. When I walk into the apartment, Juliet’s in my bed reading a paperback, wearing one of my old team shirts.
My heart does something funny in my chest at the sight of her.
She looks up when she hears me. I can see the exact moment she registers that something’s different.
“Everything okay?” she asks, setting her book aside.
I’m in my jeans and Henley, my hair still wet, but I climb into bed beside her and pull her close.
“It’s been a long day.” I say against her hair.
She doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t push for details. She holds me, her fingers tracing patterns on my chest.
“You’re different,” she murmurs. “Are you okay?”
“Different how?”
“Quieter. But not in a bad way. It seems like you’re actually here instead of thinking about seventeen other things.”
I push her hair back from her face. “Talking to my brothers helped.”
Her lips quirk. “Good. They love you, you know. Even when you’re being impossible.”
“I know.” I press a kiss to her temple. “And I have you. You tolerate me.”
“I do more than tolerate you. I would say that I like you.”
“Yeah?”
She shifts in my arms and she whispers, “You make me feel too much and it scares me. I hate it. I need you and I don’t know what to do with that.”
The vulnerability in her voice, the admission that she needs me, breaks something open in my chest.
“You’ve never trusted me,” I sigh, the words coming out harsher than I intended. “Not really. You’re always waiting for me to prove you right and run away.”
She pushes back immediately. “That’s not true!”
“Isn’t it? You’re always braced for me to let you down.”
Juliet sucks in a breath, her brown eyes impossibly dark. “That’s not about you; that’s about me. Patrick and my parents and everyone else who made promises they didn’t keep broke me.”