Chapter 20
Ryder
The arena smells like popcorn, sweat, and every dream I've ever had.
Game five. Championship game. Winner takes the regional title and a shot at provincials.
Loser goes home and starts planning next season.
The scouts—three of them today, clipboard guys in expensive suits who've been watching me fail and succeed in equal measure—sit in their usual section.
Same row, same seats, same expressionless faces that give away absolutely nothing.
I've been playing hockey for twenty-one years, and my hands still shake before big games.
Coach gathers us in the locker room twenty minutes before warmups. The usual pre-game speech—play smart, trust your line, don't do anything stupid. His eyes land on me when he says that last part, and Jax snorts into his glove.
"Real subtle, Coach," I mutter.
"Wasn't trying to be subtle, Lockwood." He grips my shoulder, his hand solid and reassuring. "This is your game. Take it."
The weight of those words settles across my shoulders like my gear. My game. My chance. Everything riding on the next sixty minutes.
Tommy leans over from his stall. "You good?"
"Yeah." The lie comes automatic. My phone buzzed twenty minutes ago with a reminder from Chief—lieutenant promotion answer due Friday. Preston's been texting since yesterday about NHL meeting logistics. Two futures, both waiting for me to choose. "I'm good."
He doesn't look convinced, but the buzzer sounds for warmups and there's no more time for feelings.
The crowd's roar hits first when we take the ice. Biggest attendance all season—every seat filled, people standing along the back wall, the noise bouncing off the metal rafters like thunder. I scan the stands automatically, looking for—
There. Front row. Sage is on her feet screaming, arms waving like she's trying to signal aircraft. Next to her, Piper claps with her hands above her head, and even from here I can see she's grinning.
Pride and terror hit me at once.
Gage and Trace are there with Tessa and Patrice. Grayson strapped to Gage's chest, Trace holding Brooklyn. The whole town turned out. Dotty waves from Section C. Diane's bedazzled jersey catches the arena lights like a disco ball.
This town. These people. All the things that matter packed into one building to watch us play a game with a rubber disk.
No pressure or anything.
Warmups pass in a blur of drills and stretches. Muscle memory takes over—wrist shots, passing patterns, skating loops that I could do blindfolded. The opposing team from Fairbanks looks good. Big defensemen, fast forwards, a goalie who moves like water. This won't be easy.
The buzzer sounds. Time for the opening ceremony.
The lights dim, spotlights hit center ice, and someone cues up "Footloose."
Oh no.
"I'm not doing it," I announce to exactly no one who's listening. "We're in the championships. This is serious."
Jax throws his arm around my shoulders, nearly knocking me over. "It's tradition, Captain. You gonna break tradition before the biggest game of the season?"
"I hate you."
"You love me." He's already skating to center ice, and the team's forming up, and the crowd's starting to clap because they know what's coming.
Fine. If I'm going down, I'm going down committed.
The routine starts the way it always does—synchronized stick raises, some questionable hip movements that would make a choreographer cry.
Jax attempts some kind of backwards skating spin move and nearly takes out two guys.
Someone tries a jump that ends in a near-faceplant.
The crowd eats it up, clapping along, the noise building.
Then comes the sprinkler.
I commit fully—arms bent, rotating at the elbows like a broken lawn sprinkler, moving across the ice with the kind of dedication usually reserved for actual firefighting.
The absurdity of doing this in full hockey gear, on skates, in front of scouts who could make or break my career, is not lost on me.
I catch Piper's eye mid-move and wink.
Her laugh reaches me even over the music and crowd noise—bright and real and exactly what I needed to hear.
We finish with the drop to one knee, arms spread, and the arena loses its mind. Three hundred people on their feet, whistling and cheering and making enough noise to wake the dead.
"THAT'S OUR CAPTAIN!" Diane's voice cuts through the chaos, and I can't help grinning as I skate back to the bench.
"You're an idiot," Tommy says, but he's smiling behind his mask.
"Yeah, but I'm your idiot." I tap his pads with my stick.
Coach gathers us one more time before the anthem. "Remember why you're here. Remember who you're playing for."
I look at my teammates—Jax with his ridiculous pre-game superstitions, Tommy already in the zone behind his mask, the guys who've become family over years of early morning practices and late night games. We're not the flashiest team. We're not the biggest. But we're ours.
"Let's go win this thing," I say, and the team roars agreement.
The puck drops, and the world narrows.
First period is a war. Back and forth, neither team giving an inch. Their center is quick—too quick—and he blows past our defense twice before I can adjust. We trade chances, trade hits, trade everything but goals. The ice gets chewed up. Bodies get bruised.
I take a hard check into the boards that rattles my teeth. Get up. Take the puck. Push forward. That's the game—get hit, get up, keep moving.
Zero-zero going into the first intermission.
Coach's speech in the locker room is short. "You're playing their game. Start playing yours."
Second period, we find our rhythm. Jax scores first—a beautiful wrist shot that beats their goalie glove-side. The arena erupts. We're up one-nothing, and for exactly forty-three seconds, this feels easy.
Then Fairbanks scores. Then they score again.
We're down 2-1 with twelve minutes left in the second when their enforcer catches me with an elbow I don't see coming. The hit sends me spinning, skates going out from under me, and I go down hard enough that my helmet bounces off the ice.
The arena goes silent.
Flat on my back, staring up at the metal rafters and the fluorescent lights, everything goes fuzzy around the edges. My shoulder screams. My ribs protest. The ref's whistle sounds distant, like it's coming from underwater.
For just a second, lying there on the ice, I think about Dad.
The roof collapse. The thirty seconds he had to decide—go back in for the family or get himself out. The choice he made that cost him everything.
But also gave them everything.
Getting up is what Lockwoods do. We get knocked down, and we get back up. Not because we're tough or stubborn or too dumb to stay down. Because people are counting on us. Because the job isn't finished. Because someone has to.
I take a breath—ribs aching—and push myself to my knees. Then my skates. The arena noise comes rushing back like a wave, people on their feet, Sage screaming my name, Piper with both hands pressed to her mouth.
The ref skates over. "You good, Lockwood?"
"Yeah." My shoulder's going to hurt like hell tomorrow, but nothing's broken. "I'm good."
Five-minute major penalty for Fairbanks. We get a power play.
I should go to the bench, let the trainers check me out, sit for a shift and recover. That would be the smart play.
Instead, I take the next faceoff.
We don't score on the power play, but we own the momentum now. The crowd won't shut up, the energy building with every shift. We tie it 2-2 with four minutes left in the second. Going into the third period all even, all to play for.
Third period is pure chaos. Both teams throwing everything at each other, the game getting chippy, refs losing control of the tempers. Jax gets a roughing penalty. Their center scores on the power play. We're down 3-2 with eight minutes left.
Then Tommy makes a save that defies physics—a point-blank one-timer that he somehow gets a pad on, the puck bouncing wide. The crowd roars. Our defenseman clears it up the boards. I'm already moving, reading the play three steps ahead.
I get the puck at center ice with six minutes left. Two defenders between me and the goal. Their center chasing from behind.
Time slows down the way it does sometimes.
Everything crystallizes—the angle, the space, the opening that exists for maybe two seconds before it closes.
Dad used to say firefighting was about reading the building, understanding what it would do before it did it.
Hockey's the same. Read the ice. Trust your instincts.
I cut left, split the defenders, and the goal opens up.
One shot. That's all I've got before their goalie closes the angle and the defenseman catches up.
The puck leaves my stick clean. Top shelf, blocker side, exactly where I aimed.
It hits the back of the net with that perfect sound—mesh and rubber and every dream I've ever had.
Goal.
The arena ERUPTS.
The noise is deafening—people screaming, stomping, the metal rafters shaking with the sound. My teammates mob me at center ice, gloves and helmets and everyone yelling at once. Jax nearly tackles me. Tommy skates down from the crease to pound my back.
3-3 with five minutes left. Still got a game to win.
Those last five minutes last about seventeen years. Both teams know what's at stake. Every shift matters. Every puck battle. Every second. The scouts lean forward in their seats, watching everything, and I try not to think about them, about what this means, about anything except the next play.
Regulation ends tied 3-3. We're going to overtime.
Sudden death. Next goal wins.
Coach pulls me aside before we take the ice. "You've got this."
"How do you know?"
"Because you're your father's son." He grips my shoulder—the one that doesn't hurt. "He'd be proud of you, no matter what happens out there."
The words lodge somewhere behind my ribs.