Chapter twenty-two
Own goal - When a team accidentally causes the puck to enter its own net, resulting in a goal for the opposing team.
Dante
I couldn’t think. My mind seemed to freeze when the footsteps died away and the silence pressed in. I only warranted one guard—one guard because I wasn’t a threat, just some kid who learned to play a stupid game instead of firing a gun, or even learning how to use a knife.
What use was I to Theron?
And then everything went to hell.
The building shuddered with a massive explosion—a concussive blast that cracked concrete walls. Lights flickered and died, plunging us into darkness until a sickly red emergency glow bathed the hall. Alarms screamed. Somewhere beyond the smoke, something huge moved.
The guard at the door swore and reached for his radio. “What the fuck—”
Then fire roared down the corridor toward us—wrong-colored flames of blue, purple, and gold that twisted the air. Dragon fire. I knew even though I’d never seen it.
The guard lifted his gun, but he froze at the threshold as the blaze thundered forward without consuming him.
Through the inferno strode a man I recognized even though my brain told me it was impossible—my captain—Max my brain insisted.
Behind him, our goaltender emerged from the firestorm, and the guard bolted.
Taz sighed and flicked a finger and what looked like a wall of ice encased the guard, freezing him still.
Max grinned as he stepped through the flames, bent down, and ripped my ties as if they were tissue. “Theron,” I croaked, voice breaking, as he lifted me like I weighed nothing.
“We’re getting him,” Max said. “Ready to go home?”
His massive frame shielded me from the worst of the heat, the fire parting around him like it recognized him. In a moment we burst into the central hub—
And my world collapsed.
Ignatius stood there, cradling what used to be Theron, and my stomach dropped so violently I thought I’d be sick.
Theron’s body was a ruin of blistered, blackened flesh—skin hanging in shreds where radiation had burned it away.
His hands were nearly detached, hair singed to stubble, chest barely rising. He wasn’t moving.
“No.” The word was a rasp. “No, no, no—” My voice cracked, and I struggled to free myself. To go to him.
“Stay with me,” Max said, tight and calm despite the chaos. Then we heard a sound, and Odin emerged and raised a gun.
Cole didn’t hesitate—he turned his head and raw, uncontrolled fire poured from his mouth. Odin didn’t scream. He didn’t have chance. One heartbeat later he was nothing but ash on the concrete.
“Keegan!” Ignatius’s voice cut through alarms and gestured to Theron. “Can you try to heal him?”
Keegan hovered nearby, hands glowing faintly. “I wish I could, and you know I can only heal Drake. The damage… it’s too severe. There’s nothing I can do.”
I pressed my shaking hand to my mouth to stop a sob. Radiation had ravaged him beyond any ordinary healing.
Then Taz moved silently and gently took Theron from Ignatius. My chest slammed as frost bloomed over Taz’s skin, crystalline ice engulfing him in a ghostly cocoon. The ice crept from Taz into Theron’s battered body, sealing every shred of damage in a frozen shell.
“What’s happening?” I whispered, voice strangled.
“His dragon needs time,” Max said into my ear. “Ice will lock the damage in place—buy his dragon time to heal.”
“How long?” I choked out.
“Hours… days,” Max admitted, eyes haunted. “I don’t know. None of us expected this.”
“Put me down.” I stood trembling next to Max, my eyes glued to Taz at the center of the room, ice gleaming under the emergency lights. The fires had died. The alarms were silent. Only my ragged breathing filled the void.
Ignatius ended a phone call, face grave, silver glow in his eyes. “Cleanup crew’s incoming. The authorities won’t show. We need to move. I know a safehouse.”
Taz’s frost faded and he looked human again. I reached out, but he shook his head—soft warning in his eyes. “You can’t touch either of us yet.”
It was my fault. If Odin hadn’t used me as leverage, Theron would never have gone in there. He never would’ve been poisoned by that radiation.
The drive back was a nightmare. Taz and Theron were in Keegan’s car—Keegan could alter his body temperature enough he could withstand the car with them inside to drive them, and keep the engine warm enough to function.
The safehouse was somewhere past O’Hare, but I didn’t track where. I didn’t care. All I cared about was the dark SUV ahead of us where Keegan was driving Theron and Taz, and that I couldn’t see inside.
When we finally pulled up to a sprawling cabin tucked into the pines, Ignatius was barking orders before the engine died. Doryu had gone ahead—the lights were already on, a room prepared, a large bed.
I trailed after them like a ghost. Someone—Max, I thought—kept trying to steer me toward another room where I could lie down.
“No.” My voice came out cracked, barely there. “I’m not leaving him.”
“Dante—”
“I’m not leaving him.” I turned to look at Max, and whatever he saw in my face made him stop arguing. He just nodded once and stepped aside while I headed for a chair in the corner. Doryu eventually pressed a hot drink in my hands and tucked a blanket around me.
Taz didn’t move. Just sat on the bed with Theron in his arms and froze them both. I knew they had to be touching. In my head I knew that. I knew Taz was Cinder’s mate. I knew that Taz was trying to save his life.
But I wanted it to be me. I wanted to be the one that held him.
Hours passed. I knew because the windows went from black to gray to pink and then the sun started dipping again.
Someone put a glass of water in my hand.
Someone else brought a sandwich I didn’t eat.
I was angry at myself when I realized I must have dozed off because when I woke, Max stood holding Theron while Cole and Doryu changed the bed.
I looked up and Taz was shoulder to shoulder with Ignatius.
“That’s all I can do,” Taz said quietly.
His voice sounded raw, like he’d been swallowing ice.
“His skin is intact. Hair will take time to grow back, but it will.”
I stood up too fast and had to grip the back of the chair. “Is he—”
“He’s alive.” Taz’s gray-blue eyes found mine. “But Dante—”
“He’s healed?” I stepped toward the bed. Theron’s skin looked pink and new, like a baby’s, but it was skin again. Not the ruined horror it had been. His chest was rising and falling, deeper now, steadier.
“On the outside.” It was Ignatius who spoke, and his voice was careful in a way that made my chest tighten.
“Taz can only do so much. He’s stopped the surface damage, given Theron’s dragon a stable shell to work inside.
But what that radiation did to his organs, to his blood, to the deeper tissue—we won’t know until he wakes up.
His dragon has to do that itself. And we have no way to tell, from the outside, whether it’s working. ”
I stared at Theron’s face. He looked like he was sleeping. Just sleeping. Like he might open his eyes any minute and tell me I was overreacting.
“What can I do?” I whispered.
Taz hesitated. He glanced at Ignatius, then back at me.
“He’s cold,” Taz said finally. “He needs to be warmed up gently. Body heat will work really well.” I didn’t need telling twice, simply stripped to my shorts and got in bed, curling myself around him. I heard the door close and started talking.
“I love you,” I whispered against his neck, finding a patch of new skin where I could press my lips without hurting him. “I love you so much, Theron. Do you hear me? You don’t get to leave me. Not after telling me you love me. Not after that. That’s not fair, you stubborn ass.”
My voice cracked, but I kept going. Words spilled out of me like water through a broken glass—everything I’d held back, everything I’d been too scared to say.
“I’m moving in with you. I hope you know that.
I’m not even asking. The second you wake up, I’m getting all my stuff out of that apartment and I’m moving into that ridiculous house of yours with the kitchen you don’t use and the bedroom that’s bigger than my whole life.
And I’m going to cook for you every single day.
Even when you’re being impossible. Even when you’re growling at me about line combinations and skating drills. ”
I pressed closer, careful but desperate, trying to push every degree of warmth from my body into his.
“And I don’t care about hockey.” My voice broke on the word, because it wasn’t entirely true and we both knew it, but it was true enough.
“I don’t. If I never play another game, I don’t care.
If they trade me, if they release me, if the whole league finds out about us tomorrow and blacklists me forever, I don’t care.
Do you hear me? You’re worth more than all of it. You’re worth everything.”
He didn’t move. Didn’t make a sound. But his chest kept rising and falling beneath my arm, and I clung to that like a prayer.
“You can be whatever you want. A dragon, a coach, a hundred years old, a thousand—I don’t care what you are. I just need you to be. That’s all. Just be here. Just stay with me.”
I didn’t know how long I talked. The light shifted again outside the window, going from gold to gray to something darker.
My throat went raw. My eyes burned and refused to close.
Every time I felt myself drifting, I’d jolt awake, convinced his chest had stopped moving, only to feel it rise again beneath my arm.
“You promised me you’d explain everything,” I murmured at one point, my voice barely there. “You can’t break that promise. That’s bad form, Coach,” as my dad would have said. “Real bad.”
The arm beneath my cheek twitched.
I froze. Held my breath. Convinced myself I’d imagined it.
Then his chest shifted in a way that wasn’t just breathing—an inhale that was deeper, sharper, conscious. His hand, the one I’d been afraid to touch, lifted slowly and came to rest on the back of my head. Heavy. Warm. Real.
“Dante.” His voice was a wreck. Barely a voice at all. More like gravel dragged across stone.
I burst into tears.
“You bastard,” I sobbed, fisting my hand in the sheet by his hip because I was terrified of squeezing him too hard. “You absolute bastard. Don’t you ever—don’t you ever—”
“Shh.” His fingers moved weakly in my hair. “I heard you.”
I lifted my head. His eyes were open. Just barely, just slits, but open. And the copper was there, faint but present, alive.
“How much did you hear?” I asked, hiccupping.
A ghost of a smile pulled at the corner of his mouth. “Enough. You’re moving in.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t care about hockey.”
“No.”
His eyes drifted closed again, and panic spiked through me, but his hand stayed steady on the back of my head. When he spoke again, his voice was barely a thread.
“You can’t quit. Got a game seven to win first.”