32 - Haven
HAVEN
The next ten days didn’t feel like days. They felt like work.
Early mornings. Late nights. Film until my eyes burned, and numbers blurred together. Practice until the sound of skates cutting ice felt carved into my skull.
Routine. Structure. Control.
It was the only way I knew how to keep everything else from unraveling.
“Again!” Mercer barked from the boards.
Groans echoed across the ice, but the guys reset anyway.
No Ares.
That part still felt… wrong.
Two games. That’s what the league handed him.
Deliberate hit, game misconduct. Automatic review.
Two games without our enforcer.
I’d been the one who told him to do it. And he had. The guilt sat heavy, but neither Ares nor Mercer had uttered a single word of blame.
It wasn’t just the physical presence we missed. It wasn’t just the hits, or the way he could shift momentum with a single play. It was something heavier. Something harder to define. We were missing a piece; not skill, not structure.
Something else.
“Angles!” I called out, tapping the tablet against the boards. “You’re giving him the inside lane again, Caleb.”
“I’m not—”
“You are,” I cut in. “Shift half a step earlier and he doesn’t have it.”
A pause. Then:
“Fine,” he muttered.
That was new. Two weeks ago it would’ve been an argument. Now? They listened. Not all the time, not perfectly. But enough that it mattered.
Practice bled into practice. Drills into repetitions. Repetitions into something sharper, cleaner. Less reactive. More intentional.
And through it all — I stayed busy. On purpose.
Because if I stopped? If I slowed down? If I let myself think?
I’d think about Grayson’s hands on me. About the way Ares had kissed me. About the way Sebastian had looked at me on the bus.
So I didn’t stop. I worked.
The house didn’t.
Zack nearly set the kitchen on fire trying to ‘improve’ a frozen pizza. Dorian laughed so hard he choked on a beer and blamed me. Asher watched everything quietly, like he always did — like he was putting pieces together no one even saw.
Life kept moving. Loud. Messy. Unapologetic.
And I stayed just outside of it.
If Grayson walked into a room, I found a reason to leave. If Sebastian sat too close, I buried myself in work. If Ares—
I didn’t think about Ares. Not when I was awake.
The first game without him was… strange. It was quieter. Not literally, because the crowd still roared and the ice still echoed with collisions and shouts.
But something else about it felt different.
We played tighter. Cleaner. Less chaos, and more control. Grayson adjusted fast, because that’s what Grayson did.
“Keep it simple,” he called out on the ice. “We don’t need hero plays.”
We didn’t. We won by one. It wasn’t pretty, and we weren’t dominant.
But the victory felt earned.
Back on the bus, the energy was different. Less explosive, more focused.
“We’re getting there,” Caleb said, nodding to himself.
“Yeah,” Zack added. “Minus our resident psychopath.”
A few players laughed. I didn’t.
The second game came fast, with a short turnaround and long travel. Sebastian was better. Not perfect, but better. His timing was still just a fraction of a second off, like he was reacting instead of anticipating. But the gap between those two things was smaller now.
Mercer saw it, and so did I. But I also saw the way he avoided looking at me. That didn’t feel great.
We lost that one. Close game. Hard-fought.
Still a loss.
“Should’ve had that third,” Dorian muttered in the locker room.
“No shit,” Zack shot back.
“Enough,” Mercer snapped.
Silence followed.
I buried myself in my tablet, not really seeing it. Because across the room, Sebastian stared at the floor. And something about that—
“Flush it,” Mercer growled. “We adjust. We move on.”
His eyes flicked to me.
“Numbers,” he added.
I nodded.
Work. Always work. By the end of the week, the needle had moved. The drills were tighter, the entries cleaner. Communication was sharper than it had ever been.
We were evolving. Without Ares.
The thought of that sat heavy in my chest — especially since I had such a hand in it. I watched those piercing blue eyes track the game from the bench, unable to do anything about it. It brought memories of my senior year. After the injury. I’d been in the same situation. The frustration was real.
Late at night, I found myself back in my room. Warm. Comfortably, perfectly warm, as the radiator hummed softly beside my bed.
It was reliable now. Steady. Fixed.
I stared at it for a long time before looking away, because I knew exactly who’d done that. And I knew exactly what had almost happened, because of it.
Pressing my lips together, I pulled the blankets tighter around myself. Work. Focus. Control. That was the plan. Because the alternative…
The alternative was losing control completely. And I wasn’t ready for that.
Not yet.
The Reavers were getting better. Stronger. Faster.
And yet somehow—
It felt like everything was about to break.