Chapter 38 Crew
My legs feel like they're filled with poured lead.
The biological hangover of surviving forty-eight hours of an omega's heat.
Every muscle fiber in my back aches, my jaw is tight, and my baseline temperature is still hovering half a degree higher than normal.
But as I step off the rubber mat and my skates hit the Seattle ice, the exhaustion drops away.
I'm playing.
I sat on the bench in full gear for three periods during Game One and watched my team lose. I watched my defensive partner get targeted because Rider didn't know how to protect his blind side. I watched my mother fly across the country to watch me ride the pine.
Not tonight. Tonight is Game Two of the semi-finals. We’re down 1-0 in the series. If we lose tonight, Seattle goes to the finals and our season is over. If we win, we force a deciding Game Three.
I'm not letting this season end tonight.
I take a warm-up lap, the freezing air of the arena biting into my lungs.
Despite that, I catch the first thread of her scent above the ice and the crowd-sweat and the cold.
Knox flew with Remi on the private jet while Steele and I took the team plane.
I find them immediately. Knox, composed and watchful, stands at the glass behind our bench, and beside him, Remi.
She looks completely recovered, radiant in a way that makes my chest ache, wearing a Scorpions away jersey with Pack Banks-Olivetti stitched across the front and back.
Beside Remi is my mother. Knox flew her out from Boston again, refusing to let her last memory of this season be me sitting on a bench.
God, I love him for that.
The stadium goes dark for starting lineups. The bass of the opening music vibrates right up through my skate blades and into my bones.
"Ladies and gentlemen, your starting lineup for the visiting Scented Scorpions!" The Seattle announcer's voice booms across the arena. "At center, your captain, number sixty-nine, Julius Keane! At left wing, number twenty-seven, Steven Andromeda! On defense, number ninety-six, Crew Banks!"
I skate into the spotlight. The Seattle crowd boos, a wall of sound, but cutting clean through it I can hear my mother and Remi screaming my name, and it's the only noise that matters.
The announcer pauses. I can almost picture him in the booth, staring at the updated roster card with a slight furrow of confusion.
"And starting at right wing, number seven—" A beat of hesitation that crackles over the speakers. "Steele Olivetti."
The murmur that ripples through the crowd is instantaneous. The press box above practically vibrates as reporters reach for their phones.
I look at Steele. He's standing at the blue line, the new jersey sitting perfectly across his massive shoulders.
He doesn't showboat. He doesn't face the cameras.
He turns his head, his dark eyes finding the glass behind our bench and he smiles.
With teary eyes, Remi reaches for Knox's hand and squeezes.
I’m happy for Steele that he is finally bearing his name.
Steele taps his stick twice against the ice. Our signal, six years old, never discussed, never explained. And then his jaw sets.
The puck drops, and the game descends immediately into a brutal, grinding physical battle.
Seattle are fast and hungry, riding the confidence of their Game One win. They come out aggressive, hitting late and checking hard into the whistle.
Steele is a massive, difficult presence during our opening shift, but the same heat-burnout sits in his shoulders that I feel in my legs. It’s a deep, cellular fatigue that no amount of adrenaline fully masks.
We are both running on something closer to instinct than energy tonight.
Ten minutes into the first period, Jackson Smith, a Seattle defenseman with a long reputation for playing dangerously close to the line and occasionally well past it, slams Steele into the boards a full second after the puck has moved up the ice.
Late. Deliberate. A hit that announces his intention for the whole game.
Steele goes down hard.
Before the whistle ends, Steven Andromeda is already moving.
The Seattle crowd picks it up instantly. Get Even Steven. Get Even Steven. The chant rises like a wave, half-hoping, half-goading, and Steven's jaw tightens in a way I know only too well.
I get between them before it goes further, one arm hooking around Steven's chest, physically dragging him backward. He's vibrating with weeks of frustration and fury compressed into a single moment, and now looking for somewhere to go.
"Focus," I bark into his ear guard. "He's baiting you. We need you on the ice, not in the box." I let a beat pass. "Or do you want Marilyn to win her bet?"
Marilyn's running tally on his penalty minutes is the one thread that reliably cuts through the noise.
“Fuck!” Steven curses more than once, but he backs off.
I let him go. He skates, and I follow, and we play hockey.
The game stays ugly. My shifts blur into a cycle of burning lungs and screaming thighs.
Every backward pivot to cover a transition costs me something I'm not sure I have to spare.
When I'm back on the bench I drink water and watch Seattle dominate the neutral zone and try not to do the mental arithmetic on how much I have left in my legs.
By the end of the second period, we are down 3-2.
"We need a coordinated push," I tell Keane as we catch our breath before our next shift. "They're overcommitting on the forecheck. If I pull Smith high, the lane opens for Steven."
Keane nods once. That's enough.
We hop the boards. The play starts deep in our own zone. I intercept a sloppy Seattle pass along the boards and don't look at the puck, I look at the space. I send a cross-ice breakout pass the full length of the neutral zone, hitting Keane exactly on the tape.
Keane draws the defense. Dumps it to Steven. Steven fires a blistering wrist shot past the Seattle goalie's ear before he even has time to set.
Tie game. 3-3.
Our bench erupts. I slap Keane's helmet as we return for the line change. Ten minutes left on the clock. Plenty of time to lose it.
We grind through it, trading shifts, every line holding the tie through stubbornness and desperation in roughly equal measure.
With two minutes left in regulation I'm on the bench, catching what breath I can, while Steele's line cycles through their shift. The puck gets tied up in the corner and turns into a grinding, ugly battle for possession that could go either way.
Steele digs for it, his legs driving hard against the boards.
Jackson Smith flies from his blind side.
The cross-check is high, vicious, and deliberate, catching Steele directly across the back of the neck. The crack of it is audible even over the crowd noise. Steele's helmet slams into the glass with a sound that empties my chest of everything.
And he drops directly below the section where Knox is sitting. Where my mother is sitting.
Where Remi is on her feet, screaming his name.
The rage running through my blood is not a hockey player's rage. It's pure alpha instinct with nothing civilized left in it. My stick hits the bench. I throw half my body over the boards, but—
Steven is already there.
He doesn't hesitate.
He drops his gloves before Smith has even looked up from what he's done, and the crowd roar that follows is enormous.
Before Steven gets the chance to to hit Smith, Keane grabs Smith by the collar of his jersey, yanks him forward off-balance, and delivers a single, bare-knuckled punch that sends Smith crashing onto the ice.
The officials swarm them in seconds.
"You're done, Keane." The referee's whistle cuts through everything. "Five-minute major. You're gone."
Keane doesn't argue. He doesn't even look at the ref. He shakes out his hand. His knuckles are already split and swelling. He looks at Smith on the ice for a long moment. Then he skates to the penalty box with the unhurried ease of a man who has absolutely no regrets.
He did what the situation required. I can't be angry at him for it. But five minutes is five minutes, and we have two of them left and a tied game.
I pull myself the rest of the way over the boards and land on the ice.
Steele is on his feet. He rolls his neck slowly, deliberately, and his eyes when they find mine are dark and furious. The trainers are hovering. He waves them off.
We have been playing together for years. We don't need to speak.
"Banks, you're on," Coach Wallace barks behind me. I'm already gone.
The referee drops the puck. Seattle wins the faceoff clean and begins to cycle, four men hunting for the perfect shot to end our season while we scramble with three.
I don't retreat into the defensive shell. I position myself high, just inside our blue line, watching the Seattle point man set up.
He winds up for the slap shot but the angle is wrong. The passing lane is open. I've seen this setup a hundred times.
I know he's going to pass.
I explode forward. My stick flashes out and intercepts the puck in the air between his blade and the winger's tape.
The arena noise changes with a collective inhale of a crowd realizing what is happening.
Breakaway.
I fly down the ice. My legs are running on something past exhaustion, past adrenaline, something with no good name that is simply the refusal to let this be how it ends. The Seattle defensemen are swarming behind me, closing the gap.
I cross the blue line.
The goalie comes out hard to cut my angle, aggressive, filling the net.
I pull back. Sell the slap shot with everything I have.
He bites.
Drops to his knees and slides out to trace the shot, committing fully.
I don't shoot.
I drop a blind, behind-the-back backhand pass into the slot without looking. I don't need to look. I know where he is. I've always known where he is.
Steele takes the pass on the tape and sends a one-timer tearing into the back of the empty net.
Shorthanded.
4-3 Scorpions.
The horn blares through Strikers Arena.
The buzzer sounds three seconds later.
We win.
The series is tied.
We're going to Game Three.
I don't even manage to raise my hands before Steele hits me, full speed, both arms, driving us both hard into the boards. I'm laughing into his shoulder, my chest heaving, barely able to stay upright while the rest of the bench buries us.
When the pile finally untangles, I skate to the glass.
I find them before I find my breath.
Remi is pressed against the partition, both palms flat against it, and she's sobbing. Knox has one arm around her waist, his chin tilted down toward her, and even through the glass and the noise and the chaos I can read his expression with complete clarity. We're all right. We're still here.
My mother stands beside them with both hands pressed to her mouth.
I blow her a kiss.
Steele skates up to my left. He slams his glove against the glass directly in front of Remi and points at his name and then points to himself, me and Knox.
“Ours,” he yells.
“I am,” she cries back. “I love you both.”
Something in my chest cracks open in the best possible way.
My mother reaches up and wraps her arm around Remi's shoulder. Her eyes are wet and bright and so proud it's almost unbearable to look at directly.
She says something. The crowd noise swallows the sound, but I can read it. I've been reading her face my whole life.
“I'm so proud of you. Not for this. For who you are.”
Steele's arm comes around my shoulders from behind, heavy and certain, pulling me back from the glass. His chin drops to the top of my helmet. For a moment the three of us are just still inside the noise. Me, Steele, and on the other side of the glass, the people who came all this way to watch us.
Knox catches my eye over Remi's head. He holds it for a moment. Then he nods, once, the way Knox communicates everything that matters, without ceremony, without waste.
Then he says, “You both did well. Imagine what you’re going to do in game three if you play like that when you’re fucked”
I laugh and then look at the scoreboard. I look at Steele. I look at Remi still pressed against the glass with my mother's arm around her and her eyes fixed on us as if she's trying to memorize this moment.
This is what we were playing for.
Not the series. Not the scoreboard. Family. And pack mates.
"Game Three," Steele says against my helmet.
"Game Three," I agree.
He pulls me off the glass, and we go celebrate.