Bonus Epilogue
WES
The apartment was dark except for the kitchen, which was the only room I'd bothered to make livable.
Professional-grade oven. Marble countertop I'd installed myself.
A stand mixer that cost more than my first car.
Everything else in the apartment was functional and forgettable, the furniture of a man who expected to move at any time and didn't want to leave anything behind that mattered.
The kitchen mattered. The kitchen was the one room where my hands did something other than hurt people.
I was making sourdough. The starter was three years old.
I'd kept it alive through two trades, a stint in the AHL, and a stretch of my life I don't talk about.
The starter was the most consistent relationship I'd ever maintained, which said something about me that I didn't like thinking about, so I didn't think about it.
I just fed the starter and kneaded the dough and let the rhythm of it quiet the noise in my head.
The noise tonight was louder than usual.
I'd been in a fight during today's practice.
A scrimmage that got chippy, a rookie who ran his mouth, the usual escalation that ended with my fists doing the thing they were paid to do.
I won. I always won. The rookie apologized.
The team moved on. Everyone moved on except me, because moving on required the shaking to stop, and the shaking had not stopped.
My hands trembled against the dough. I pressed harder. Folded. Pressed. The gluten developed under my palms and the tremor became part of the rhythm and I could almost pretend it was intentional.
I thought about Cole and Mik at The Crease tonight.
The way they sat together. Shoulder to shoulder, no space between them, like the idea of distance was something they'd outgrown.
I was happy for them. Genuinely. In the way that you're happy for people who have found the thing you don't believe exists for you.
I thought about Jonah, who had blushed when Cole's brother came up in conversation and then changed the subject so fast he nearly gave himself whiplash. I'd clocked that. Filed it away. Not my business. But I'd noticed.
And I thought about Luca.
Luca Moretti, the new equipment manager, who had been on the job for three weeks and had already reorganized the entire equipment room and memorized every player's stick specifications and shown up on his first day with homemade biscotti like a man who believed that sugar and butter could solve structural problems.
He was wrong about that. But I'd eaten three of the biscotti, which was two more than I'd intended, and they were excellent, and I was annoyed about this.
He'd touched my arm at the bar tonight. A nothing touch.
Casual. Friendly. The kind of contact that normal people exchanged without thinking about it.
But I was not normal people. I was Wes Chen, enforcer, the man with broken hands and a reputation for silence and a kitchen full of bread that nobody knew about.
And when Luca Moretti's fingers landed on my forearm, I had felt something move in my chest that I could not identify and did not want to examine.
I was not attracted to men. I had never been attracted to men.
I had been attracted to women my entire life, had dated women, had done the things that men who are attracted to women do, and none of it had ever felt like anything worth writing home about, but that was just me.
That was just how I was built. Functional.
Efficient. Low-bandwidth in the emotional department.
So the thing that had happened when Luca touched my arm was not attraction. It was a response to unexpected physical contact from a person I was not accustomed to being touched by. A neurological event. A misfire. The human equivalent of a static shock, meaningless and unrepeatable.
I kneaded the bread harder.
The dough was overworked. I could feel the gluten tightening past the point of elasticity, the texture going from smooth to dense.
I was ruining it. I was putting too much force into something that required gentleness, which was the story of my entire life condensed into a ball of sourdough at 2 AM.
I stopped. Put the dough down. Stood at the counter with flour on my hands and looked at the dark apartment beyond the kitchen light.
My phone was on the counter. I picked it up.
No notifications. No texts. No one checking in at 2 AM to see if the enforcer was okay, because the enforcer was always okay.
The enforcer did not require checking in on.
The enforcer was a tool, and tools did not have feelings, and the fact that I was standing in a dark kitchen with shaking hands and flour on my shirt and a heart rate that still hadn't returned to normal four hours after a practice fight was not evidence that anything was wrong.
Everything was fine.
I put the dough in the proofing bowl and covered it with a towel and washed my hands in water so hot it turned my knuckles pink.
The scars across my fingers caught the light.
Eleven years of fighting had left a map on my hands that a doctor could read like a medical chart.
Fractures healed and rehealed. Scar tissue layered on scar tissue.
The hands of a man who had turned his body into a weapon because that was the only way the world had made space for him.
I dried my hands and turned off the kitchen light and stood in the dark.
Luca Moretti's biscotti had been excellent. His laugh was loud and specific and arrived without warning. He had a sister named Sofia who texted him memes in Italian. He smelled like dryer sheets and something warm that I could not name.
These were facts. Neutral, harmless facts that I had collected without meaning to and could not delete.
I went to bed. The shaking stopped around 3 AM. I know because I was still awake when it did, staring at the ceiling of an apartment that had never felt like home, thinking about nothing.
Thinking about bread.
Thinking about biscotti.
Thinking about nothing at all.
Keep reading for a preview of brEAKAWAY, Power Play Book 2.
brEAKAWAY