38. Rhett
RHETT
I heard them before I even got through the locker room door.
Not the team. The crowd outside. The damn city.
Las Vegas had lost its collective mind overnight, and not entirely because of the championship game.
My phone had been blowing up since five a.m. with notifications I kept swiping away without reading.
Jett had texted me seventeen times before eight o'clock, which was a personal record even for him, and the string of emojis alone told me everything I needed to know about what he was texting about.
I walked into the locker room and the noise dropped to a dead stop.
Thirty sets of eyes found me at once.
Then Jett stood up from his bench, slow and theatrical, and started clapping.
"Gentlemen," he announced to the room, "our captain. Our center. The hub that keeps the spokes together." He gestured at me like a goddamn gameshow host. "And apparently, the man who's been quietly cuffing the boss lady for God knows how long while the rest of us sat here completely in the dark."
The locker room erupted.
Half the team was laughing. Moose had his face buried in his hands.
Langley was shaking his head with a grin that spread ear to ear.
Someone in the back row started slow clapping, which immediately became actual applause, which became the entire team on their feet making more noise than they made when Jett sank the wildcard winner.
I stood in the doorway and let it wash over me.
"Are you done?" I asked.
"Absolutely not," Jett said cheerfully. "Stone. Brother. Captain. My guy. How long?"
"Jett."
"Ballpark. I won't hold you to it."
I crossed the room, dropped my bag in front of my locker, and sat down.
"We've got the Canadian Dynamites in four hours.
Their center is six-foot-nine and their coach runs a locked left side defense with an open right that we need to exploit in the second period before they adjust. That's what we're talking about right now. "
Jett dropped into the seat next to me. "We'll get to that. How long, Stone?"
I looked at him sideways. That grin of his was practically splitting his face in half. Three years of me growling at him every time Victoria walked by and the son of a bitch knew it. He'd always damn well known it. He just waited.
"Three years," I said.
The locker room lost its goddamn mind all over again.
"THREE YEARS!" Jett shot to his feet. "This man has been suffering in silence for THREE YEARS while I had to watch him glare at every single one of us for existing near her in a fifty foot radius—"
"Sit down, Jett."
"—and not ONE of us knew—"
"Jettson." Coach's voice cut through the chaos from the doorway like a blade through ice.
Dead silence.
Coach Mercer walked into the locker room with the same expression he always wore before a big game.
Jaw set. Eyes forward. That kind of stillness that came right before something loud.
He crossed the room without looking at anyone and stood in the center of it, hands in his pockets, and let the quiet build until it was damn near uncomfortable.
Then he looked at me.
"You good?" he asked.
"Yes, Coach."
He held my gaze for one more second before he nodded and turned to address the room.
"Then we're not talking about anything that happened outside this building.
Not today. Today we talk about Canada." He looked around at all of us.
"The Dynamites have been waiting for this game since September.
They've watched every single one of our games.
They know how we play. They know our patterns.
They know our tendencies." He paused. "What they don't know is what we're capable of when someone gives us a reason to be angry. "
The room was completely still.
"The whole country is going to be watching this game," Coach said.
"Every sports network. Every analyst. Every person who spent this entire season telling us we were a joke.
A charity project. A disgraced coach and his roster of castoffs.
" His voice didn't rise. If anything it got quieter, which was somehow goddamn worse.
"Every single person who has written something about this team in the last twenty-four hours that had nothing to do with hockey is going to be sitting in that arena tonight watching us play. "
He let that land.
"So let's give them something to write about," he said. "Something that has everything to do with hockey. Understood?"
"Yes, Coach," the room answered.
He nodded once and stepped back. "Calloway. Walk us through what we know about their defense."
I stood up.
I walked to the center of the room.
Thirty men staring back at me. Some of them had been on this team longer than I had.
Some of them I'd broken in myself, running them through drills in the weight room until they puked and then handing them a water bottle and making them go again.
Some of them I'd sat with in hospital waiting rooms and airport terminals and dive bars at two in the morning after losses that felt like they'd never stop hurting.
Every single one of them was mine.
"Sokolov," I said. "Six-foot-nine, two-sixty. Three PHL championships. Never lost a final. His face-off percentage this season is sixty-two percent which means he wins almost two out of every three puck drops." I let that land for a second. "Which means we don't give him the damn puck drop."
Jett raised his hand. "How exactly do we—"
"He favors his right shoulder on the draw. Every time. Pull tape on any face-off he's ever taken and you'll see it. He dips that right shoulder a half-second before the puck falls." I looked at Jett. "Which means you'll see it coming before he does it."
Jett's grin spread. "So I'm taking the face-offs."
"You're taking the face-offs," I confirmed. "Not all of them. But the ones in their zone, yes. He won't be expecting a winger on the draw and it'll throw his timing."
"And what are you doing while I'm stealing his lunch?" Jett asked.
"Moving right." I looked around the room.
"Their left side defense is the tightest in the PHL this season.
Locked down, aggressive, well drilled. Their coach runs it as his primary formation any time they're protecting a lead.
But the right side?" I shook my head. "Three games of tape and that gap opens up like a goddamn door every single time.
They've never been challenged there because Sokolov dominates the center so completely that nobody bothers trying. "
"Until us," Moose said from the back.
"Until us," I agreed.
I looked around the room one more time. At Langley, who'd come further this season than any of us expected.
At Moose, who'd taken a puck to the face for this team and showed up anyway.
At Jett, who somehow managed to be the most annoying person I'd ever met and also the best damn linemate I'd ever had.
"They're going to come hard," I said. "They're going to be physical. They're going to be disciplined and fast and they're going to want this more than they've wanted anything this season." I paused. "So do we."
Coach's whistle pierced the air behind me.
"Gear up," he said.
Four hours later, I skated out onto the championship ice and the noise hit me like a goddamn freight train.
Forty thousand people. Every seat filled. Half of them ours, a sea of Vipers gold and black that rippled from the floor seats to the nosebleeds. The other half a wall of Canadian red that booed loud enough to rattle the glass. Noise makers churning. Fog horns blaring.
I'd been in Caldwell Arena for three years and I'd never once heard it sound like this.
Holy hell.
Forty thousand people in a championship game was something else entirely.
The noise didn't build. It didn't start low and climb.
It was already at maximum the second we hit the ice, a wall of sound that pushed back against you physically, that you felt in your sternum and your teeth and the soles of your damn skates.
The confetti cannons had already gone off.
The lights were down to championship configuration, gold and black beams sweeping the upper decks.
I did my backwards lap and let myself feel every single inch of it.
This was what we built it for.
This was what she built it for.
The Jumbotron above cycled through player introductions in flashing gold light and somewhere up in the owner's box, I knew Victoria was standing with her arms crossed and her jaw set and those gray eyes tracking every single thing happening on that ice.
I looked up.
She was already looking at me.
She didn't wave. She didn't smile. She just held my gaze from four stories up, and I felt the steadiness of it run straight through the center of my chest.
I'm right here.
I know.
The Dynamites were introduced to a thunderous roar from their side.
Their center came out last. Viktor Sokolov, six-foot-nine, two-sixty, three-time PHL all-star, had never lost a championship game in his career.
He skated out onto the ice with the kind of ease that came from knowing exactly how good you were.
He did one slow lap, deliberate and unhurried, and when he passed our bench he looked straight at me.
I stared back.
Not tonight, asshole.
Jett appeared at my elbow. "He's big," he said conversationally.
"Yep."
"Like, very big."
"I noticed."
"You're sure about the right side gap."
"Victoria pulled three games of tape on it."
Jett was quiet for exactly one second. "I love that woman," he said sincerely.
I shoved him away from me before I lined up for the opening face-off.
Sokolov skated into position across from me. Up close he was even bigger, which I hadn't thought was goddamn possible. He rolled his neck once, cracked his knuckles around his stick, and looked down at me with the confidence of a man who had never once doubted himself on a patch of ice.
I thought about a flat tire changed in the dark. About a woman in a silk robe flipping her phone face down on a kitchen counter. About Ryan Caldwell's team and what it meant to the woman who rebuilt it from nothing.
About forty thousand people watching and every damn one of them waiting to see what we were made of.
The official skated into position between us.
The puck went up.
I rolled my shoulders back and fixed my eyes on that rubber disc.
See a puck.
Sink a puck.
The puck dropped.
The first period was a war.
Sokolov was everything the tape said he was and then some. He moved through our defense with a patience that told me he wasn't worried about the first period at all. He was setting something up. I could feel it in the way he didn't push when he had openings, just filed them away.
Smart. Disciplined. The kind of opponent you respected even while you were trying to take him the fuck apart.
I kept Jett on a short leash. He wanted to chirp, wanted to get in Sokolov's head early, and I let him do a little of it because Jett without an outlet was worse than Jett with one.
But I pulled him back every time he started pushing too hard.
We didn't need Sokolov rattled in the first period.
We needed him comfortable. Comfortable meant predictable.
Predictable was something we could damn well work with.
Moose took the first goal on a shot none of us had seen in the tape.
Clean and fast and gone before any of us could react.
I watched Moose pull the puck out of the net and flip it to the official with that flat expression he always wore when he was furious at himself, and I skated past him on the way to the bench.
"One shot," I said. "That's all he got."
Moose just nodded.
We went into the second period down one, which was exactly where I'd told the team we might be. Down one was nothing. Down one was exactly enough to make us angry without making us stupid.
I looked up at the owner's box before the puck dropped.
Victoria hadn't moved.
Good.
Neither would I.