39. Victoria
VICTORIA
I didn't sit down for a single second of it.
I stood at the floor-to-ceiling glass of my owner's box with my arms crossed and my coffee going cold on the table behind me and my eyes tracking every single movement on that ice like my life depended on it. Which, in every way that actually mattered, it did.
The arena was deafening. Forty thousand people generating a wall of noise that vibrated the glass beneath my fingertips.
Below me, the ice gleamed under the championship lights, freshly Zambonied and perfect, and on it my team moved like something I had spent three years building toward this exact damn moment.
Brynn stood beside me. She hadn't sat down either.
Dani was on her other side, gripping the railing with both hands, her eyes wide and locked on the ice like she’d never seen a hockey game in her life.
She probably hadn’t. Brynn had flown her in yesterday and I’d caught the two of them at breakfast this morning, Dani asking questions about icing rules while Brynn laughed so hard coffee came out of her nose.
I’d liked her immediately. She had that energy, the kind of person who showed up for the people she loved without needing to understand why it mattered. She just showed up.
"Their left side is locked," she said, her eyes on the ice. "Has been the whole first period."
"I know." I tracked Rhett as he circled back toward center, exchanging a look with Jett that communicated something the rest of the arena couldn't read. "He's waiting."
"For what?"
"For them to get comfortable."
The first period ended one to one. The Dynamites' center, Sokolov, enormous and ruthlessly efficient, had scored their only goal with a shot that Moose simply hadn't seen coming.
Fast. Precise. The kind of shot that came from a man who'd done it so many times it lived in his muscle memory.
I watched Moose shake it off before the period even finished, resetting his stance, rolling his neck, locking back in.
Good.
The second period was where we'd make our move.
I picked up my cold coffee and drank it anyway, my eyes never leaving the ice as the teams came back out.
Down on the bench, Coach paced the length of it with his hands clasped behind his back.
I watched him lean over the boards and say something to Rhett before the face-off.
Whatever it was, Rhett's shoulders dropped half an inch, not in defeat but the way a man relaxed when he'd just been given permission to do what he already knew needed to be done.
The puck dropped.
And Rhett moved.
Not toward the puck. Away from it. A hard cut to the left that pulled two Dynamites defenders with him like he had them on a damn string while Jett collected the puck and immediately drove right.
The right side gap I had found in three games of tape yawned open exactly like I said it would, and Jett hit it at full speed before their defense even registered the switch.
The goal alarm screamed.
The Vipers side of the arena came off their feet.
I exhaled for what felt like the first time in twenty minutes.
"There it is," Brynn breathed beside me.
"There it is," I agreed.
But the Dynamites were not a championship team for nothing.
They adjusted inside four minutes, collapsing their right side, compensating for the gap we'd just blown through.
Their coach was already on his headset, already redirecting.
He was good. Fast. I watched him make three line changes in quick succession and I respected the hell out of it even as I wanted to strangle him.
The second period became a war.
Two to one. Then two to two when Sokolov got a clean look at Moose and took it without goddamn hesitation.
Then three to two when Langley buried a rebound off a scramble in front of the net that had the Vipers bench losing their collective minds.
Then three to three when a Dynamites winger found a seam in our defense that shouldn't have existed and Coach slammed his hand against the boards so hard I heard it from four stories up.
Goddamn it.
With four minutes left in the second period it was three-all and both teams were showing it. The hits were harder. The whistles came faster. The crowd on both sides had reached a sustained roar that didn't peak and fall anymore. It just stayed. Constant. Crushing.
I watched Sokolov line up against Rhett for the face-off and something shifted in my gut.
I couldn't name it. I'd spent enough years in this building to know when something was about to happen before it happened. The air changed.
I uncrossed my arms and pressed my hand flat against the glass.
The puck dropped.
Rhett won it cleanly, flicking it laterally to Jett before driving forward.
He was moving at full speed, cutting toward the Dynamites' zone, when Sokolov changed his angle.
Subtle. The kind of subtle that looked accidental the first time you saw it and deliberate the second.
He drifted wide of the play, wider than he needed to, positioning himself not where the puck was going but where Rhett was going.
No.
Brynn looked at me. "Mom?"
I watched Sokolov accelerate.
The officials were tracking the puck. The crowd was tracking the puck. Coach was tracking the puck. Everyone in that arena was watching Jett collect a pass on the far side of the ice and wind up for a shot.
Nobody was watching Sokolov.
Nobody except me.
"No," I said again, louder this time, completely goddamn useless.
He hit Rhett from behind.
Not a check. Not a bodycheck within the rules of the game where you take your hit and get back up.
This was targeted and deliberate and vicious, all of Sokolov's two hundred and sixty pounds driving into the back of Rhett's left shoulder at full speed, launching him forward and down with a violence that sent him flipping across the ice.
His helmet caught the boards. His neck snapped sideways.
He slid six feet and came to a stop face down on the ice and he did not get up.
The arena went silent.
That silence. The one I recognized. The one that preceded something terrible.
"RHETT!" Jett's voice tore across the ice.
I watched Moose leave his goal (Moose, who never left his goal) and skate the full length of the ice with murder written plainly across his damn face.
I was already moving.
I didn't make a conscious decision to leave the owner's box.
My body just went. Down the corridor, down the stairs, past the security checkpoint where a man in a yellow vest said something I didn't hear, through the tunnel and out into the rink side air where the noise of the arena crashed over me like a wave.
Brynn was right behind me.
I didn't go onto the ice. I gripped the boards with both hands and I looked at Rhett on the ice and I made myself breathe.
The medical team was already there, kneeling around him.
An official was attempting to restore order to the brawl consuming the far end of the rink.
Sokolov had vanished into a pile of bodies and I found I didn't care where he was.
All I cared about was the man on the ice who still hadn't moved.
"He's conscious," one of the medics called out. "Sir, can you hear me? Don't move your head."
I heard Rhett's voice. Low and muffled and slightly slurred but present. Actually present. Something in me that had seized up completely released all at once and I gripped the boards harder just to stay upright.
Thank God. Thank fucking God.
"Mom." Brynn's hand found my arm. "Mom, he's talking. He's okay."
"I know," I said. My voice came out steadier than I had any damn right to expect.
"They're going to take him off."
"I know."
"The game—"
"I know, Brynn." I drew in a long breath through my nose.
I straightened my spine. I turned away from the ice and found Jett being separated from two Dynamites players by a pair of officials, still talking, still chirping, completely undeterred by the fact that he had blood on his lip.
I found Coach at the bench, watching the medics, his face carved from stone.
His eyes found mine across the ice.
He nodded once.
I nodded back.
The official skated to center ice with his microphone. Forty thousand people waiting.
"Following a review of the play," the official said, his voice ringing out across the arena, "number forty-four Viktor Sokolov of the Canadian Dynamites is assessed a match penalty for charging and deliberate targeting of a vulnerable player. He is ejected from the game."
The Vipers side erupted.
The Dynamites side erupted differently.
I watched Sokolov skate off the ice with his head down and his coach red-faced behind the bench and I felt something cold and satisfied settle in my chest that had nothing to do with sportsmanship and everything to do with the fact that the man who put Rhett on the ice was no longer in this goddamn game.
The medics helped Rhett to a seated position. He was upright. He was talking. He waved off the stretcher with one hand in a gesture so characteristically him that Jett laughed out loud from across the ice.
He looked up into the stands.
He found me at the boards.
Even from here I could see the blood on his chin and the way he held his left shoulder and I wanted to cross that ice and check every single inch of him myself. But he looked at me with those ice blue eyes and he shook his head once, deliberately.
I'm fine.
I know you are, you stubborn son of a bitch.
I pressed my hand flat against the boards between us.
They walked him off the ice to a standing ovation from forty thousand people.
I turned back to Brynn. "Get to the tunnel. Stay with him until I get there."
She was already moving.
I turned back to the ice where Coach was rallying the team at the bench.
Where Jett was vibrating with an energy that was going to be either magnificent or catastrophic depending on the next ten minutes.
Where my team was lining up for the face-off a man down in spirit and up in fury, fifteen minutes left in the third period and everything still to play for.
I gripped the boards.
"Come on," I said quietly to nobody and everybody. "Come on."
The puck dropped.
What followed was the kind of hockey I would tell my grandchildren about.
Jett took the first face-off and won it cleanly, driving hard left before cutting back through two Dynamites defenders.
He lost the puck at the blue line but Langley was there, scooping it up and feeding it back to Jett who put a shot on net that the goalie barely got a pad to.
The rebound came out messy. Bodies crashed together in front of the net.
The whistle blew and every person in the building exhaled at once.
The Dynamites were rattled. I could see it from the boards.
They'd come into the third period with a structure and Jett had spent four minutes dismantling it piece by piece, not with force but with that chaotic, infuriating, impossible-to-anticipate style of his that drove opponents absolutely out of their goddamn minds.
Four to three. Then the penalty kill that made my stomach drop.
Four to four with two minutes left and I pressed my hand flat against the boards and I thought about fourteen years. About a Tuesday in April and willow trees and a man who loved this team before I did.
I thought about Ryan.
Not with grief. Not with the weight I'd carried his absence in for fourteen years.
Just him. Just the thought of him watching this, wherever he was.
This city he loved. This team he built. These forty thousand people on their feet in an arena his wife had spent fourteen years holding together through sheer force of goddamn will.
I thought he would have been loud about it.
He always was.
Jett got the puck with thirty seconds left and I stopped breathing.
I watched him make the decision in real time, that split second where every other option disappeared and the only thing left was the one that was either brilliant or insane, and Jett had never in his damn life been able to tell the difference, which was exactly why it worked.
He drove the full length of the ice.
I pressed both hands to the glass.
The shot went up. The goalie got a piece. The rebound kicked left and Jett, who had absolutely no business being in that position, who had followed the play the full length of the ice on pure goddamn instinct, the way only Jett could, buried it.
The goal alarm screamed.
I felt it in my chest before I heard it.
Five to four.
The clock hit zero.
Holy fucking hell.
The Vipers side of the arena became something I had no words for. Forty thousand people in a moment I had spent three years building toward and fourteen years grieving toward and every single day of my life since Ryan died working toward without ever knowing that this was where it was all headed.
Brynn found me somehow in the chaos and I held onto her and I cried.
Not the quiet, controlled tears I allowed myself in private.
The real ones.
The ones Ryan would have laughed at me for, gently and with complete love, before he wrapped me up and told me I did good.
You did good, Victoria.
I pressed my face into my daughter's shoulder and let myself believe it.