7
Easton
The second Aura walked out, the room changed around me.
One minute, the party was a living thing—music, bodies, cheap beer, and heat rolling off too many people packed into Hockey House like we were all still stupid enough to believe winning our first real game meant the night couldn’t turn ugly.
Then the front door shut behind her, and every sound in the room landed wrong.
I stood there with Brinley’s lipstick probably still smeared near my mouth, my chest heaving and my hand flexing at my side like it wanted a throat, a wall, anything solid enough to take what I couldn’t say without making the whole room worse.
Bliss moved first.
She shoved past Cade, her face pale and furious as she reached for her phone. Charm followed, tight-lipped and shaking in a way she would never admit to, her perfect posture barely holding. Neither of them looked at me on the way out.
It should have been fine—exactly what I deserved—but it still stung like another blade between my ribs.
Cade said my name from somewhere too close. “East.”
I turned on him so fast the room blurred. “Fuck you.”
He didn’t flinch, which pissed me off more. Cade rarely flinched. He got quiet and controlled, dangerous in a way that made people listen without realizing they had lowered their voices first.
Ryan came in from the hallway, his jaw locked and his gaze sweeping over me, then the door, then the kitchen where half the team pretended not to watch.
Briggs was right behind him, his hair shoved back and his face stripped of every joke he usually carried like armor.
Rider stood near the edge of the living room, quiet as hell, hands in his pockets, eyes moving over everything like he was already collecting evidence for a trial nobody wanted.
“Upstairs,” Ryan said.
I laughed beneath my breath, and it came out wrong. “You giving orders now?”
“I’m giving you one.”
“Cute.”
Briggs stepped into my line of sight. “East, come on.”
That made my teeth grind.
Normally, Briggs made jokes, talked shit, and turned every disaster into a story with terrible timing and worse metaphors. He didn’t look at me like I was something cracked open in the middle of the house and bleeding onto the floor.
Tonight, he looked worried.
Briggs was the heart of us all, whether any of us said it out loud or not. If one of us hurt, he felt it. He might wrap that feeling in bullshit and bad jokes, but he would stand for it every time.
I hated him for seeing mine.
“I’m good,” I said.
“You’re standing in the middle of the living room looking like you’re deciding whether to chase her or put your fist through something,” Rider said, calm enough to make me want to turn on him too. “So, no, you’re not.”
Every muscle in my body reacted before I gave it permission because I wanted to fight her until she relented. I wanted to keep going until she finally admitted losing me mattered.
Ryan saw it. His expression hardened. “That’s exactly why you’re going upstairs.”
“She left,” I said, like saying it might make it smaller.
“She got in an Uber,” Cade said. “Bliss and Charm went after her.”
I smiled, but there wasn’t a damn thing alive in it. “Congratulations to everyone on surviving the threat.”
“Don’t do that,” Cade said.
“Do what?”
“Act like the only reason anyone cares where she went is to protect her from you.”
My jaw flexed. “Isn’t it?”
The silence answered before anyone else did, and something hot and ugly rolled beneath my skin.
Ryan stepped closer, his voice low. “Move.”
I looked at him. “You planning to force me?”
“If I have to.”
“I’m a fight you don’t want, Ry.”
His face didn’t change. “You’re a fight I’ve already seen, and you’re boring when you’re bleeding.”
Briggs released one humorless breath. “That almost sounded poetic.”
“Don’t encourage him,” Rider muttered.
For one second, the old rhythm of the four of them, the house, and the team tried to surface. It was the stupid, damaged version of family we had built through too many workouts, late nights, and too much blood on the ice with not enough sense off it.
Then I saw the front door again and Aura walking through it.
Aura looking at me like I had put her beneath a spotlight and asked the whole room to clap.
My stomach twisted hard enough that I nearly folded with it. I turned before any of them could read my face and shoved past Ryan toward the stairs.
Nobody celebrated the win or said it was a good call. They followed me, heavy footsteps behind mine, while the party tried to stitch itself back together below us.
I made it to the upstairs hallway before I put my fist into the wall.
I didn’t hit hard enough to break the plaster because the guys would kill me and Cade would probably send me an invoice with interest, but I hit hard enough to hurt.
That was the point.
Pain with a clean source made sense. Split knuckles, bruised bone, torn skin—anything honest enough to admit what it was doing to me.
I could handle hockey hits, stitches, blood in my mouth, a puck off the ankle, a forward trying to take my head off, or a fight in the corner boards with three thousand people screaming for someone to fall.
I could not handle her looking at me like she had finally realized I mattered after making damn sure I knew I didn’t.
I braced both hands against the wall and lowered my head between my shoulders, breathing through my teeth. Downstairs, the party continued in uneven bursts, but the hallway felt airless, narrow, and too familiar.
Like I had walked over the grave of someone I used to be and discovered the body was still warm.
“Not really in the mood for company,” I said.
Ryan answered behind me. “Yeah, we gathered that from the public self-immolation.”
Briggs muttered, “I thought it was more of a hostage situation with tongue.”
“Lawson,” Cade said.
“What? I’m processing through metaphor.”
I turned around.
Ryan stood at the top of the stairs with his arms folded and his jaw set like he had driven back from whatever semi-pro fantasy he lived in now just to be disappointed by me in person.
Briggs came up behind him without a smile, which made him look younger and more dangerous at the same time.
Rider leaned against the opposite wall, quiet and observant, his beer gone and his hands shoved into his pockets.
Cade stood last, his expression carved from that familiar Mercer control that meant he was furious and deciding how much of it I was stable enough to survive.
I looked past them toward the stairs. “She leave?”
“If you mean Brinley, yeah,” Ryan said.
We all knew I didn’t care whether Brinley had left. I wasn’t sure I had even known her name before tonight, and that made me feel worse because she hadn’t deserved being used as a weapon.
None of them had.
I knew that.
I hated knowing it.
“Good,” I said, and meant it. “She didn’t deserve that.”
Cade’s mouth tightened, but his voice remained even. “No, she didn’t.”
My whole body reacted before I could stop it.
Ryan’s eyes sharpened. “This is bad, East.”
I laughed and looked away. “Relax. I already gave the monster speech downstairs.”
Briggs stepped forward. “East.”
“Don’t ‘East’ me.”
He stopped.
That was how I knew it was bad. Briggs stopped moving because I told him to. There was no dramatic hand to his chest, no whining about my tone violating friendship law, no joke about my tragic hallway era.
He simply stopped and looked at me like he was scared of how close I was to the edge.
Ryan’s gaze dropped toward my hand. “You hit the wall?”
“No. Wall hit me.”
“Funny.”
“I’m hilarious.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“Theme of the year.”
Cade stepped closer, his eyes on my knuckles. “This can’t keep happening.”
I looked at him, and something mean moved through me because mean was easier than whatever lived beneath it. “Which part? Her? Me? The part where everyone looks at me like I’m the problem because I finally stopped letting her make me one?”
Rider’s voice stayed quiet. “Nobody said you’re the problem.”
“No?” I pushed away from the wall, anger rising fast enough to give me somewhere to put my hands. “It sure as fuck feels like it.”
Ryan’s jaw worked. “You use these girls to hurt Aura, and tonight it backfired.”
“Yeah, well, Aura used everything to hurt me.”
Cade shook his head. “I don’t think she was trying to hurt you at first.”
I laughed, sharp and ugly. “That makes it better? Calling me pathetic and a beggar?”
“No,” he said. “It makes it complicated.”
“Right. Her damage is complicated. Mine is inconvenient.”
Briggs’s jaw flexed. “Fuck that. She was trying to hurt him tonight.”
Cade looked at him. “That doesn’t make what East has done clean.”
“I didn’t say it did,” Briggs snapped.
There it was—the first visible crack in a line that had been running through all of us for months.
“I’m saying I’m not going to stand here and pretend she didn’t spend a year turning him inside out before slamming the door in his face.
” Briggs dragged both hands through his hair, then pointed at the floor like he needed all of us to understand the weight of what he was saying. “Metaphorically. Mostly.”
“Briggs,” Rider said.
“No.” Briggs looked at me, then at Cade. “No, I’m sorry, but no. We watched it. We watched him wait around for crumbs like he was fine with it, watched her act like he was embarrassing for giving a shit, and now everyone’s shocked he’s pissed? Come on.”
Cade’s expression hardened. “Being hurt doesn’t give him a free pass to be cruel.”
“I’m not asking for a pass,” I said.
All four of them looked at me.
My voice came out lower than I expected. Rougher. “I’m asking for five fucking minutes where someone doesn’t tell me to be the better person for the girl who made me hate being one.”
The hallway went quiet.
Ryan looked away first, his jaw ticking. Briggs stared at the floor like he wanted to tear it apart one board at a time. Rider’s face shifted in a way I couldn’t read.