CHAPTER 13
A wall of solid, aggressive blue and white noise slammed against the reinforced plexiglass.
Twenty thousand hostile throats screamed in absolute, deafening synchronization inside the Toronto arena.
The sheer decibel level bypassed Dorian’s eardrums entirely, battering against his sternum like a localized pressure front.
He stood dead center in the blue-painted half-circle of the crease, his heavy goalie skates biting into the freshly cut surface.
The air inside his fiberglass mask was already hot, saturated with the harsh, sharp scent of his own rapid exhalations and the chemical chill of the rink’s refrigeration system.
He bent his knees to a precise sixty-degree angle. He dropped his hips. He leveled his glove.
Crack.
The opening face-off resulted in a violent, immediate collision. The sound of heavy composite sticks hacking against carbon-fiber shin guards echoed over the crowd. A Toronto center drove an Inferno winger hard into the red boards, the impact sounding like a structural detonation.
Dorian didn't blink. He tracked the small, vulcanized rubber disk as it squirted out of the scrum and slid across the blue line.
The battle for his career survival was no longer confined to municipal offices and luxury hotel lobbies.
It was here. On the ice. The opposing forwards were no longer just athletes; they were physical manifestations of the federal authorities trying to drag him onto a transport plane.
Every shot was an interrogation. Every rebound was a deportation order.
A sudden turnover at the hash marks broke the defensive structure.
A Toronto winger—number eighty-eight, fast, carrying a massive chip on his shoulder—intercepted a blind pass. The forward exploded into a full-speed breakaway, crossing the blue line at twenty-five miles per hour.
Dorian’s central nervous system flooded with ice water.
He didn't retreat deep into the net. He challenged the shooter, taking two aggressive strides forward to cut down the geometry of the shot. Eighty-eight bore down on him, the forward’s eyes flicking rapidly from Dorian’s blocker side to the five-hole.
The Toronto player dropped his shoulder, faking a heavy slap shot, before dragging the puck violently to the backhand.
Dorian read the biomechanical shift a fraction of a second before the blade struck the rubber.
He threw his entire mass downward. His heavy leg pads slammed flush against the ice with a wet, percussive slap. The forward thought he had the far post. The puck left the stick, elevating toward the top left corner of the netting.
Dorian executed a hyper-extended split. The violent lateral stretch tore at the dense muscle fibers of his groin, an agonizing, burning strain that he entirely ignored. He shot his left leg out, extending the heavy leather and foam pad to its absolute maximum reach.
The puck struck the dense outer roll of the pad with a massive, deadening thud.
Dorian didn't just block it. He trapped it. He collapsed his upper body over the trapped rubber, entirely smothering the play before a trailing Toronto forward could crash the crease for a rebound.
The referee’s whistle shrieked.
The home crowd let out a massive, unified groan of fury, instantly followed by a torrential downpour of boos. Dorian remained kneeling on the ice for two seconds, his chest heaving inside the rigid plastic of his chest protector. He had held the line. He refused to be compromised.
As he climbed slowly back to his skates, the heavy scrape of blades stopped directly beside him.
Everett Kane tapped the broad, flat blade of his defensive stick against Dorian’s left shin guard.
A single, solid knock of approval. The captain didn't speak.
He didn't have to. Everett’s massive frame hovered at the edge of the crease, his broad shoulders squared against the Toronto offensive lines, projecting a silent, terrifying perimeter of violence that dared anyone to come closer.
Dorian banged his stick against the ice in return. His pulse was a frantic, heavy rhythm in his throat. He set his jaw and dropped back into his stance.
The first period dissolved into a brutal, grinding war of attrition.
Toronto knew exactly what they were doing.
The scouting reports had analyzed Dorian’s post-to-post speed, but their coaching staff was relying on the massive, glaring psychological vulnerability bleeding out of the Chicago front office.
They knew about the leaked deportation warrant.
They knew about the sudden, highly scrutinized marriage.
They were deliberately weaponizing the external media circus to crack the goalie's concentration.
Every time a whistle blew, a Toronto forward deliberately drifted into the blue paint.
"Have your bags packed, Pike?" a massive Canadian center sneered through his mouthguard during a stoppage, intentionally spraying a heavy wave of shaved ice directly over Dorian’s skates. "They got a cell waiting for you at the border."
Dorian stared straight through the man. He kept his spine locked in rigid, absolute defiance.
He refused to offer them a single micro-expression of the terror that had paralyzed him in the hotel suite hours ago.
He channeled the trauma of his past betrayals, the suffocating pressure of Officer Hawkins’ audit, and the heavy, territorial heat of Everett’s hands into a localized, unyielding athletic fury.
He blocked twenty-two shots in the first period alone. He was a machine. A flawless, mechanical wall that refused to break.
But the physical toll of absorbing high-velocity impacts combined with the psychological weight of the federal net was beginning to fracture his endurance.
By the twelve-minute mark of the second period, the game remained locked in a scoreless, suffocating deadlock. The Toronto roster was growing increasingly desperate, entirely abandoning clean zone entries in favor of chaotic, violent scrums directly in front of the net.
The puck was dumped into the corner. An Inferno defenseman fought a Toronto winger for possession along the boards. The puck squirted out, sliding slowly into the high slot.
A pileup ensued. Four massive bodies crashed together directly on the edge of Dorian’s crease.
Dorian dropped into the butterfly, his eyes frantically tracking the black disc through a forest of composite sticks and heavy skates. The puck slid toward his left side. He lunged, extending his catcher glove flat against the ice to cover the rubber.
The referee raised his arm to blow the whistle.
Before the shrill blast could sound, a Toronto forward—number nineteen, a fourth-line enforcer explicitly rostered to inflict pain—skated hard through the slot. The enforcer saw the puck covered. He saw Dorian’s vulnerable glove hand exposed on the ice.
Nineteen didn't attempt to stop.
He swung his heavy composite stick in a vicious, downward arc, employing the mechanics of an axe chopping wood.
The carbon-fiber shaft crashed directly down across the exposed, unpadded knuckles of Dorian’s left hand.
The physical agony was immediate and blinding. A sharp, localized explosion of white-hot pain ripped through Dorian’s hand, shooting straight up his forearm and into his shoulder joint. The sheer force of the slash caused his grip to fail entirely.
His heavy goalie stick clattered away across the ice, slipping out of his blocker hand as a sharp, fractured gasp tore out of his throat. Dorian collapsed forward onto his knees, his left arm curling instinctively against his chest to protect the shattered digits.
The whistle blew violently, a prolonged, shrieking blast demanding a halt to the play.
The Toronto enforcer sneered, his skates shaving ice as he turned away from the crease, entirely unapologetic. "Should have stayed in Russia, you fraudulent piece of—"
The enforcer never finished the sentence.
The kinetic displacement of air preceded the collision by a fraction of a second.
Everett Kane entered the frame with a speed and mass that defied the basic laws of physics.
The captain had started from the far face-off circle.
He didn't glide. He executed five explosive, maximum-power crossovers, his massive six-foot-four frame accelerating into a terrifying, unstoppable projectile.
Everett didn't target the puck. He didn't care about the whistle.
He targeted the man who had just struck his husband.
Everett lowered his shoulder. He leveled the heavy, reinforced composite plastic of his chest protector directly at the Toronto enforcer’s sternum.
The collision was devastating.
It sounded like a car crash occurring in a concrete tunnel.
The sheer, overwhelming kinetic force of Everett’s body hit the enforcer perfectly square.
Nineteen’s skates physically lifted off the ice.
The Toronto player was launched backward, flying three feet through the air before slamming spine-first into the unforgiving plexiglass above the red boards.
The heavy glass pane bowed outward to its absolute structural limit, groaning violently under the localized pressure before violently snapping the player back down to the ice.
Nineteen crumpled into a heap, his helmet askew, his stick entirely shattered into two jagged pieces.
The Toronto arena went dead silent for exactly one second.
Then, it erupted into a deafening, unified roar of absolute hostility.
The remaining four Toronto players on the ice immediately dropped their gloves, surging toward the corner boards to attack the Inferno captain.
Everett didn't back down. He stood directly over the fallen enforcer, his massive chest heaving, his dark eyes burning with a primal, unbridled violence that promised absolute destruction to anyone who stepped within his radius.
He threw his own heavy gloves onto the ice, entirely prepared to dismantle the entire Toronto offensive line with his bare hands.