Chapter 19
Declan
I’m halfway through my ritual when everything tilts.
Left skate laced. Right skate open. Tape wrapped clean over my knuckles, white bands over bruised skin. Headphones on, no music playing—just the muffled roar of the away rink bleeding through the foam, a low ocean of noise on the other side of the concrete wall.
Breathe.
Cross, pull, cinch.
The away locker room is smaller than ours. Lower ceiling. Harsher light. It smells like someone tried to bleach the failure out of it and didn’t quite manage. The boys are loud—half-dressed, chirping, stick blades knocking the floor. My stall is the eye of it; everything else just swirls around.
I keep my head down and focus on the pattern.
Left pad. Right pad. Velcro tight.
Glove on the bench. Blocker beside it.
Helmet on the hook, catching the fluorescent glare.
It’s the one place my brain shuts the fuck up—usually. Tonight, it keeps flickering.
Talia, on the library path, eyes wild, voice shaking.
Talia, in the dark, telling me I don’t get to stalk her walks home while I let someone else kiss me like I belong to them.
Talia, saying “I’m trying to live” like it’s a declaration of war.
I press my thumb hard into the roll of tape until the cardboard creaks. Breathe. Reset.
The door to the locker room opens. A new smell cuts through sweat and disinfectant—sharp, expensive perfume that doesn’t belong anywhere near gear.
Beatrice.
The talking stutters. A couple guys glance up. I don’t. I stare at the tape and the floor and my own hands and pretend my spine didn’t just go rigid.
Her heels click once on the tile—an impatient, clipped staccato—and then stop. She’s blocked.
“Sorry, ma’am.” Adrian’s voice. Calm. Polite. A line of steel underneath. “You can’t be in here.”
I look up just long enough to catch his eye over the shoulders of the guys between us. He’s planted in the doorway, broad as a wall, one hand on the doorframe, the other on the knob, body angled so she can’t just slide around him.
He meets my gaze. Just a flick. You good?
I give the slightest shake of my head. Don’t.
Beatrice laughs. It’s the same sound she uses for donors who bore her. “I’m not just anyone,” she says. “I’m family.”
“Still locker room, still game time,” Adrian says. His tone doesn’t change. “Coach’s rules.”
She doesn’t like that. I can’t see her face, but I can hear it. The ice under the sugar. The small pause where she re-evaluates whether this fight is worth an audience.
“Fine.” Her voice sharpens. “Tell Declan I wanted to wish him luck.”
Then her perfume retreats, heels staccato-ing back up the concrete tunnel. The door shuts. The room exhales as a whole.
Someone snorts. Someone else mutters, “Damn.” Gio says, “Captain’s got bigger balls than the rest of us,” under his breath.
Adrian just pushes off the door and walks back to his stall, flopping down like nothing happened. The guys go back to their noise. It’s all normal again.
It isn’t.
My ritual is cracked. It shouldn’t matter that she tried to breach my space and was denied. It shouldn’t matter that for three seconds, my body tensed like I’d been called to heel.
I flex my taped hand. The adhesive bites my skin. This is supposed to bind the part of me that breaks. Right now it feels like a leash I put on myself.
Images flicker behind my eyes if I let them.
The gala. Her hand on my jaw. The camera flash. Talia’s face across the room going completely still, then closing like a shutter.
I swallow hard, jaw locking. I didn’t move, then. Didn’t shove Beatrice away. Didn’t wipe her lipstick off my face in front of the photographer. Didn’t go after the only person in that room who looked real.
Control it. Always control it.
My phone buzzes on the narrow wooden shelf by my hip. Short. Insistent. Not a call—just a text.
I don’t check it right away. I finish the last wrap over my knuckles, pressing the edge of the tape down with my thumb until it’s smooth. Then I pick up the phone.
One word.
Talia: In.
My lungs open like I’ve been underwater and just broke surface.
It doesn’t matter that I’m two hours away in a stranger’s rink, sweat already prickling under my undergear. It doesn’t matter that she’s furious with me, that the last thing she said to my face tasted like betrayal. She still texted. She still let that tether stay tied.
She’s safe. In her dorm. Behind a locked door. The path between the library and her building didn’t become a crime scene tonight.
She’s safe.
Because I made a rule.
Because she’s following it.
The thought settles something in me the tape couldn’t touch.
I don’t text back. Not yet. Not here. Not with my gear half on and the ice waiting.
I set the phone carefully in my bag, zip it up, and tuck it into the cubby above my stall. When I slide my helmet off the hook and feel the familiar weight of it in my hands, the noise in my head finally drops into a cleaner frequency.
Her “In” echoes under my ribs, syncing with the thud of my heart.
She’s my new ritual, whether she wants the job or not.
“Alright, boys!” Coach shouts from the doorway, clapping his hands. “Helmet on. Let’s go ruin their night.”
The guys howl. Sticks pound the floor. I pull the helmet over my head, the cage dropping into place. The world narrows to metal bars and the tunnel ahead.
For the first time all day, I feel like I can actually do my job.
Because she’s on the other end of that text.
Because I know exactly who I’m playing for tonight.
Not for donors. Not for my father.
For the man I want to be when she looks at me again.
I step into line and follow the team out to the ice.
We bury them.
By the time the third period rolls around, their student section has gone quiet. Their band keeps trying to rally them with the same tired fight song, but the sound just bounces off the rafters and dies.
The shots come in waves. Breakaway, glove side.
I snag it. Shoulder save, top corner. I eat it.
Bodies in front of me, screens layered like traffic, and I still manage to track the puck through a forest of legs and sticks.
They get desperate; they start throwing garbage at the net. I turn it all away.
I play angry.
Every save is a rejection. Every rebound I clear is me shoving back against the hands on my throat. I channel the rage from the gala, the shame of the parking lot, the heat of Talia’s anger, and I feed it into the ice.
The scoreboard keeps climbing for us. Zero for them. Ten minutes left. Six. Four.
The buzzer finally blares. The horn is loud enough to rattle my cage, but it’s nothing compared to the roar that goes up from our bench. Sticks bang. Gloves hit the ice. Someone slams a hand into the back of my helmet hard enough to shove my head forward.
“Fucking wall, Reid!” Adrian yells in my ear, voice hoarse and bright. “That’s a shutout, baby.”
For a second, all I can hear is my own breathing, loud and steady. The ice under my blades, scarred and carved and honest. The clean math of saves and shots and angles.
I wish she could see this.
Not the scoreboard. Not the stat line. Me, like this—dialed in, useful, good for something other than breaking faces and wrecking donor photos.
We do the handshake line. The locker room is a chaotic, dripping mess when we pile back in—music blasting, guys half-undressed and yelling over each other.
Coach pushes through the bodies, claps me once on the shoulder. “Hell of a game, Reid,” he says. No big speech. No lecture. Just that.
I look up at him. There’s pride there. Not ownership. Not calculation. Just a coach happy his goalie played out of his mind.
It hits harder than any praise my father has ever given me.
“Thanks, Coach,” I manage.
He squeezes my shoulder once more, then turns to lay into the boys about the couple of stupid penalties they took.
The hallway to the locker room is cleared of media; the reporters have gotten their sound bites, their quotes. Most of the parents who made the trip are waiting in the hallway or already gone.
But standing just at the end of the entrance, in a little pocket of artificially polite space, are Alistair and Beatrice.
He looks exactly the way he did at the gala—perfect suit, perfect tie, expression carved out of stone. She’s in a dark coat over a silver dress, lipstick still bulletproof.
They drove two hours on a Friday night.
They drove two hours just to remind me who owns the leash.
“Declan,” my father says, like an order. “A word.”
The room dips. The music seems to get quieter. A couple guys glance between me and the door and quickly look away.
I strip my chest protector off, hang it on the hook, and step toward the hall. Adrian catches my arm as I pass, his fingers closing around my taped wrist. Quick squeeze. You got this. Then he lets go.
The hall is bright and cold, concrete sweating under the fluorescent lights.
My father doesn’t bother with small talk. “Why wasn’t the photo in the Chronicle?” he asks. No preamble. Just that.
My stomach drops, but my face stays numb.
“What photo?” I say, because I want him to say it. I want to hear him name the thing he thinks he owns.
“Don’t be cute,” Beatrice says, voice knife-sharp. “The gala shot. The one from the terrace. The one the Chronicle photographer took for the donor spread.”
The one where you let me kiss you, she doesn’t say, but it’s there. Her eyes are sharp, bright with humiliation she’s trying to disguise as irritation.
Before I can answer, footsteps echo down the hall. Maya and Cole appear around the corner, moving in a loose, easy step together.
Maya sees us, takes in the three of us in a single glance. Her gaze flicks from my taped hands to Alistair’s suit to Beatrice’s too-bright lipstick. Her eyes sharpen, the way they do when she smells a story.
Cole shifts immediately. He moves closer to her, angling his body so he’s slightly in front, shielding her. Not hiding her—standing with her.