Epilogue #3
“I'm okay,” I tell him. Quietly. Meaning it.
He nods once. Looks back at the ice. “Your man better not lose.”
“He's not going to lose.”
“Hope not, darlin’.”
“He's not going to lose, Carn.”
Harper leans across me. “Hi, Carnage.”
“Harper.” He nods. Then, to me, “I still think the jersey's ridiculous.”
“I think you're going to be a wonderful godfather,” I say.
He does the thing where he very deliberately does not react but the corner of his jaw tightens in a way I have learned means he's deeply moved and will never admit it. I pat his arm, face forward and think about how strange and specific and entirely right it is that this is my life now.
The teams come out.
I feel him before I see him. Old habit now, the particular way my whole body orients toward him in a room the moment he enters it.
He skates out with Cas at his shoulder and the crowd does what crowds always do when Xaden Devlin steps onto the ice, which is take a collective breath, because even here, even in a city that doesn't know his name the way Stormsend does, there is something about the way he moves that makes people stop and look.
He scans the front row.
He finds me.
His eyes drop to the number five on my chest, then come back up to my face and something in the hard lines of him shifts, just for a second, before he looks away and drops into warm-up and I press my hand flat over the jersey and breathe.
Game day. My game day tradition.
The game is brutal and gorgeous and entirely them. Cas sets up two of the first three goals with the kind of passing that makes the scouts in the upper tier lean forward in their seats. I know the scouts are there, Xaden told me last week, flat and certain.
“The NHL offer is coming. Cas has one too.” He said it without celebration, just fact, then he went back to reviewing the footage from their last game and I sat with it for a long time afterwards, that sentence and what it meant.
The life that is opening up ahead of us that is nothing like the life either of us expected to be living.
Xaden is everywhere on the ice. Faster than everyone else.
Hungrier. He plays the way I know he feels things, completely, no half-measures, every shift like it might be the last one.
He scores twice in the second period and the third goal is the kind that makes the building detach from its foundations entirely, a move so fast and precise that the goalie doesn't even move because he doesn't have time to register that it's already over.
The crowd loses its mind.
I lose my mind. I'm on my feet, or as close to on my feet as I can get at thirty-four weeks with my hand braced on Harper's shoulder whooping in a way that my eighteen-year-old self would find completely unrecognizable and my current self finds entirely appropriate.
Harper is screaming beside me. “That's my best friend's man!” she yells at nobody in particular.
“Harp—”
“That is my best friend's man!”
The final buzzer sounds.
They win.
Of course they win, they were always going to win.
This team with its two players who grew up fighting for everything they had and never once considered the alternative won.
The ice erupts in the usual chaos, helmets, sticks, the particular joy of people, who have been wound up tight for sixty minutes, are finally allowed to release it.
I'm expecting the usual post-game sequence. Celebration on the ice. Locker room. The long wait that I have learned to bring a book for.
I don't get the usual sequence.
I get Xaden breaking away from the pile of his celebrating teammates and skating directly toward the boards.
Toward me.
Harper makes a sound beside me that I will generously describe as a noise.
From my other side, Carnage says nothing at all. I don't look at him. I don't need to.
He stops at the boards, right in front of where I'm standing, still in full gear, helmet pushed back on his head, breathing hard from sixty minutes of everything he has.
He looks at me from the other side of the glass, at the jersey, at the pendant, at the hand I have pressed over my stomach and the look on his face is the one I keep in the back of my chest for the days when things are hard.
The one that is entirely unguarded and entirely his and entirely for me.
He takes his glove off.
Presses his bare hand flat against the glass.
I press mine against it on my side. Our hands, separated by the glass, and the whole rink carrying on around us, while neither of us pay the slightest attention to any of it.
Then he moves toward the benches, I follow. He leans around the glass.
And kisses me.
In front of the scouts. In front of the crowd. In front of however many people are in this building who have no idea who Xaden Devlin is, or what it costs a man like him to do something like this without the privacy of a dark room or the cover of there being no audience.
It's not a short kiss either. It's the kind of kiss that makes Harper scream, makes someone nearby wolf-whistle and makes me completely forget that we are in a public place and I am the approximate size and shape of a harvest moon and I have at least two of the scouts' assistants filming this on their phones.
When he pulls back, he looks at me with those gray eyes and says, quietly enough that it's only for me, “That's for everyone who ever doubted you meant something.”
I stare at him.
“You're going to make me cry in the middle of a hockey rink,” I say.
“You're already crying.”
“I'm not—”
“Tink.” He touches my face briefly through the gap in the glass, thumb grazing my cheek. “You're crying.”
I press my lips together. I am absolutely crying. I have been crying at completely unreasonable things for two months and a hockey rink in Colorado in front of several hundred people is apparently not beneath my threshold.
“Go celebrate,” I manage. “Your teammates are watching.”
He glances back at the ice. Cas is standing ten feet away with his stick held loosely at his side and the expression of a man watching something he has been waiting a long time to see. He gives Xaden a look that says exactly what it says.
“Go,” I say again. Softer. “I'll be here.”
He looks at me for one more second.
“I know.”
He pushes away from the boards and skates back to his team. I stand there with Harper's arm around me and the pendant warm at my sternum, his jersey over my stomach and my hand pressed flat against the glass where his hand just was.
After a long moment, Carnage speaks.
“Alright,” he says. Gruff. Quiet. Entirely to himself.
I look at him. His jaw is working. His eyes are fixed on the ice where Xaden has rejoined his teammates.
He has the expression of a man who has just watched something he has been waiting for a long time and is processing it the way Carnage processes everything…
quietly, thoroughly, without letting anyone see how much it matters.
“Alright?” I echo.
“He'll do,” Carnage says. And then he looks at me, and the look on his face is the one I will carry with me for the rest of my life, pride, love and something bittersweet underneath, the look of someone who would have gone to war for you and is genuinely glad that someone else got there first. “You'll do too, darlin'.”
I am absolutely crying again.
“You're going to make me cry at a hockey game,” I say.
“You're already crying.”
“That is the second time tonight someone has said that to me.”
“Because it's been true both times.” He reaches over and tucks me briefly under his arm, the way he has done since the first night I called him from Colorado and he got in the car without asking why. Then he lets go. Sits back. Returns to watching the ice. “Now stop it, you're making a scene.”
“You love me,” I tell him.
“Without reservation,” he says.
Harper is making the noise again on my other side.
I look at the ice. At the man with number five on his jersey who just kissed me in front of an entire building because I meant something and he wanted everyone to know it.
I look at the pendant at my throat and the jersey stretched over my stomach and the man at my side who came a long way to sit in a plastic seat, watch and be here.
I think about Em and the promise I kept.
I press both hands over my stomach.
We're going to be okay. That was the promise I made in a kitchen, at four in the morning when I was brave enough to choose myself.
We're going to be more than okay.
I am Toren Kellar and I have survived my last name and my father's war and a year in a place designed to break me.
I had to puck around and find out, dropped into enemy territory with nothing but a last name I was ashamed of and a grief I didn't know how to carry. I learned fast. I learned hard.
I spent a year pucking with the enemy, sleeping under his roof, fighting his wars, falling for the man who was supposed to be my destruction and somewhere in the wreckage of all that, I found out exactly who I was.
And then I pucked around and found out what happened when you finally stopped running. When you drove to Colorado alone and built something quiet and yours and waited to see if the most dangerous man you'd ever loved was brave enough to come find you.
He was.
He drove through the night. He put his heart in a box with no ribbon and he sat down across from me in a corner coffee shop and he stayed.
I have survived all of it. The enemy, the war, the love and the loss and the long, brutal work of becoming someone who knew her own worth before she let anyone else decide it for her.
And I am standing in a hockey rink in Colorado, pregnant, crying in front of several hundred strangers, wearing a jersey with his name on the back, flanked by my best friend and the man who once held my hair while I was sick on the worst nights and never once made me feel alone for it.
Still standing.
Still his.
Still mine.
Ours.
— End —