Chapter 28 #2
“Five out of twenty-three. The two who moved first were depth players—fourth-line minutes, situational deployment, replaceable within the existing roster’s flexibility.
The two who hesitated were mid-tier talents whose commitment was already questionable and whose departure removes a loyalty vulnerability rather than creating a capability gap.
” I lifted my head. Looked at the wall. “We still have the numbers to make it through. The eighteen who stayed are the core. The foundation. The men who looked at the split and chose us, and that kind of loyalty is worth more than five defectors whose best contribution to this team was apparently surveillance and sabotage.”
Luka’s voice was immediate. “You need a goalie.”
The statement was factual, clinical, carrying the specific, professional authority of a man identifying the single, non-negotiable gap in the formation he’d just been presented with.
Five departures were manageable. A goaltender’s departure was catastrophic.
The crease was the position that an entire defensive strategy was built around—the last line, the final barrier, the single body whose performance had a disproportionate impact on the outcome of every game and whose absence from the roster was the equivalent of removing the foundation from a building and expecting the floors to maintain their positions through optimism.
I looked over my shoulder.
Met his eyes.
Green on gray. The exchange lasted one and a half seconds, and in that compressed window, the communication that traveled between us was denser than any sentence either of us had spoken since entering the room.
I see you. I know what I’m asking. I know what it costs.
I’m asking anyway, because you’re the only man in this building I trust between the pipes, and trust is the only currency that hasn’t been devalued by the events of the last twenty minutes.
“Am I not looking at one?”
He opened his mouth to argue.
I watched the objection assemble itself in his expression—the eyebrow climbing, the jaw squaring, the posture stiffening into the you-can’t-be-serious configuration that preceded a verbal protest. The argument was predictable: I’m a substitute.
I transferred as depth. I’m simultaneously serving as Octavia’s figure skating partner.
The dual-discipline demand is already testing the limits of athletic feasibility, and adding starting goaltender to the portfolio would turn a challenging arrangement into a physically unsustainable one.
The argument never arrived.
Because his eyebrow froze mid-climb. His green eyes narrowed.
The argumentative posture dissolving, replaced by the focused, alert, something-is-wrong scan of a man whose goaltender’s awareness had just detected an anomaly in the environment and whose body was routing processing power from the debate to the detection.
“Why the fuck are you so pale?”
The question arrived with genuine, unfiltered concern—not the performative kind that men deployed when social convention demanded an acknowledgment of another man’s condition, but the raw, I-am-worried-about-you frequency that Luka Petrov used exclusively with people he cared about and that he deployed so rarely that its appearance functioned as a diagnostic in itself.
I huffed.
“It’s fine.”
The dismissal was automatic. The same two-word, ego-first, I-am-handling-this response I’d been producing since childhood in response to every inquiry about my physical, emotional, or psychological state.
The verbal equivalent of a door being closed in a concerned face—polite enough to avoid confrontation, firm enough to prevent entry.
Except the door wouldn’t stay closed. Because my body, which had been managing the cumulative stress of the last twenty minutes through the sheer, willpower-driven, refuse-to-fold discipline of a man who had been doing this since childhood, decided in that moment that the discipline was no longer sufficient for the load it was carrying.
I wavered.
The locker I’d been bracing against became less a support surface and more a requirement—my hands gripping the metal edge with a force that whitened my knuckles as the world developed a tilt that had not been present thirty seconds ago.
The fluorescent lights overhead pulsed. Brightened.
Dimmed. The rhythm unrelated to any electrical fluctuation and entirely produced by a visual processing system that was receiving insufficient oxygen because the breathing pattern driving it had deteriorated from shallow to inadequate.
My legs were informing me, through the tingling, lead-heavy, we-are-going-offline sensation that preceded genuine weakness, that vertical posture was a service they were considering discontinuing.
Luka was at my side before I finished processing the vertigo.
His hand on my arm. Shoulder beneath mine.
The rapid, instinctive, I-will-be-the-structure-when-yours-fails positioning of a man whose crease instincts translated seamlessly to contexts where the thing needing protection was not a net but a person, and whose body responded to the need with the same lightning-fast, no-thought-required reflex that made him lethal between the pipes.
“It’s not a big deal,” I managed.
The words came between breaths that were too fast and too shallow and too close together, the verbal output of a man whose respiratory system was running a protocol it had not executed in years and whose conscious mind was struggling to override the automation.
My chest was tight. Not the metaphorical, I-feel-stressed tightness that people invoked in casual conversation, but the literal, physiological, bands-contracting-around-the-ribcage constriction that happened when the autonomic nervous system initiated a panic response and the muscles of the thorax complied with the directive by reducing the available volume of the lung cavity.
I couldn’t breathe.
Not properly. Not in the deep, measured, diaphragm-engaged pattern that fifteen years of athletic training had embedded in my respiratory mechanics.
The air was entering in short, sipped, insufficient quantities that reached the upper lobes of my lungs and stopped—the lower regions, where the real gas exchange happened, starved of input while the body’s demand for oxygen escalated with the panic that the oxygen deficit was producing in a vicious, self-perpetuating loop that I recognized, intellectually, as a textbook anxiety spiral but could not interrupt from inside it because the interruption required the calm that the spiral was preventing.
I couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t meet the green eyes that I knew were tracking me with the specific, devastating, I-see-what’s-happening-and-I’m-not-going-to-let-you-pretend-it-isn’t focus that Luka brought to every situation where the composure I maintained was failing in front of him—because looking at him would mean acknowledging the failure, and the acknowledgment would make it real in a way that the physiological experience alone did not.
He cursed.
Low. Vehement. The single, compressed syllable carrying the specific, I-know-exactly-what-this-is recognition of a man who had witnessed this event before.
Not recently. Years ago. During the months when our orbits had overlapped and the things shared between us had included not just hotel rooms and late-night conversations and the specific, complicated, refuses-to-be-categorized intimacy that I’d spent years denying, but also the uglier, more vulnerable, harder-to-admit moments where the composure failed and the man beneath it was exposed and someone else had to hold the structure until the owner could reassemble it.
He pulled me against him.
Not gently. Not with the careful, calibrated, is-this-okay hesitance of a man requesting permission.
With the absolute, nonnegotiable, you-are-coming-here-now authority of someone who had identified a crisis and was executing the response protocol without consulting the patient’s pride.
His arms found the positions they’d occupied years ago during episodes that I’d believed were buried deep enough in our shared history to be functionally inaccessible—one across my back, the other at the base of my skull, pulling me forward until my forehead rested against his.
“Fucking breathe,” he said.
Contact.
Forehead to forehead. The specific, deliberate, I-am-here-and-you-are-going-to-match-me configuration that was not Luka’s invention.
That predated our dynamic by decades. That belonged to a woman whose name had been invoked as a weapon on competition ice twenty minutes ago and whose legacy, in this moment, was not the insult but the technique—the physical, behavioral, passed-down-through-love method for managing the panic attacks that her son had been experiencing since childhood and that she had treated not as a weakness to be hidden but as a mechanism to be managed with patience and proximity and the simple, revolutionary instruction to breathe.
Mom.
She used to do this. Kneel on the kitchen floor beside me when I was seven, eight, nine—however old I’d been when the attacks had started, when the hyperactive Alpha biology that would later be diagnosed as hyperstimulation syndrome had first begun producing anxiety responses that a child’s coping mechanisms couldn’t manage.
She’d take my face in her hands. Press her forehead against mine.
And breathe. Slowly, deliberately, creating a rhythm with her exhales that my panicking body could lock onto the way a drifting vessel locked onto a lighthouse—not by choice but by instinct, the organism recognizing a stable pattern in the chaos and following it because following was easier than drowning.
Luka watched her do it once.