11. The Tryout
CHAPTER ELEVEN
the tryout
The Gladiators’ practice facility in El Segundo smells like every rink I’ve ever bled in—a thick cocktail of cold rubber, Zamboni exhaust, and the lingering ghost of a thousand collisions.
It’s the only scent that has ever truly made me feel like myself.
Standing at the edge of the ice with my skates laced tight, I begin the ritual I’ve kept since I was sixteen.
I wind the white athletic tape in thin, precise loops around the base of each finger, weaving it through the webbing to keep my knuckles free and mobile.
It’s a specialized armor that leaves the joints loose but the grip reinforced, eventually crossing back in a tight X over the palm.
It isn’t for the team; it’s a prayer in white strips, a silent reminder of exactly what these hands are for.
When I look up, Coach Marcus Callahan is waiting at center ice.
Built like a man who never stopped playing and simply forgot to go soft at sixty, his jaw carries the history of at least two breaks.
He watches me with the flat, clinical assessment of someone who has seen a thousand players and buried most of their dreams before lunch.
To his left, a handful of Gladiators are already stretching and running light drills.
They aren’t pretending to ignore me; instead, they watch openly, the way predators track something new entering their territory.
Number 91 is the first to catch my eye. Jaxon Monroe, the team captain, is a study in controlled violence and economy of movement—the kind of center who makes the ice look smaller than it actually is.
He isn’t looking at me with hostility, but with calculation, trying to figure out what I am before deciding how to use me.
Nearby at the blue line stands Colton Harrison, Number 5.
The alternate captain's expression suggests he’s already decided I don’t belong here and is merely waiting to be proven right.
Good. That’s a language I speak fluently.
Then there’s Number 44, Viktor Petrov. At six-foot-four and built like a man who lifts trucks for therapy, he looks exactly how that mountain felt—the mountain I already survived.
I step onto the ice, and the cold hits me with a familiar weight, like coming home to a house that’s been waiting to eat you.
As my edges find the surface with a familiar bite, my hip protests with a hot pulse of old damage.
I file it away immediately; pain is just information, and it doesn’t get a vote.
Callahan doesn't say a word, simply lifting two fingers toward Petrov.
Petrov skates at me, surprisingly fast for his size. Most men telegraph their hits with a shoulder drop or a weight shift, but Petrov just arrives. He is two hundred and forty pounds of Russian certainty coming at me like a change in the weather. I drop my shoulder and take it.
The impact rattles every bone I cracked on that mountain.
Since this is open ice, there are no boards to absorb the force—there is only me.
My ribs shout, and my bad shoulder wakes up screaming, but I stay on my feet.
Petrov pulls back, looking at me with a short, honest nod—a soldier’s acknowledgment—before Callahan’s voice cuts across the rink:
"Again."
We go seven more times, each pass harder than the last as Petrov tests the seams in my armor, searching for the place where I’ll break.
I don’t break; I bend. I eat the hits the way the mountain taught me to eat everything—by deciding the pain belongs to me, not the other way around.
On the eighth pass, I stop absorbing and start answering.
Meeting Petrov at full speed, I angle my shoulder into his chest and drive. He outweighs me by thirty pounds of solid muscle and doesn't move easily, but I don’t need to move him. I just need him to know I’m here. He feels it, letting out a short, surprised bark of a laugh.
"Da," he says, as if confirming something to himself.
Callahan skates over, stopping six feet away. He plants his stick and reads me like a contract, checking the fine print.
"You tape your hands," he observes.
"Yeah."
"That’s unusual for a hockey player."
"I do."
A long pause follows as his eyes drift to the tape, where the scar tissue is still visible at the edges of the white wrap.
"How many fights this season?"
"Fourteen. Before the bus accident."
"Penalty minutes?"
"A lot."
"That's supposed to impress me?"
"No," I reply. "Just answering the question."
Something shifts in his face—not approval, but a form of recognition.
"Harrison!" Callahan calls out.
As Harrison skates over with the confidence of a man who’s always been the hardest thing in the room, Callahan sets the stage.
"Full contact drill. Monroe runs the play. Vale, you’re defending."
Monroe drops his chin in a way that functions as a nod between people who understand the same kind of work, and the puck drops.
He’s smart, reading the ice three seconds ahead of everyone else.
He threads through the neutral zone like he’s invisible, but I track him.
I take the pass, eat the hit from Harrison, and clear the zone.
We do it again and again for forty minutes until my hip is on fire and my shoulder is a cathedral of old ache. Every breath costs something, and I pay it in full. When Callahan finally blows the whistle, I’m bent over my stick at the blue line, heaving air as sweat freezes on my face.
Callahan skates up beside me and waits a long moment before speaking.
"You survived an avalanche, two wolves, and Viktor Petrov. You tape your hands, and you don’t explain yourself." I say nothing.
"Number 18," he says, finally.
"You’re on the roster."
As he skates away, I straighten up, my breath fogging in the cold air.
I look at the Gladiators logo at center ice—the helmeted soldier, ready for battle—and realize I know the feeling.
In the stands, I see Clara. She’s wrapped in black against the cold, watching me with that same fierce, focused expression she had when she stitched my hand in the shack.
She looks like she’s daring the world to argue with what she made.
I skate to the bench and pick up a roll of white tape from the trainer’s kit. Turning it over in my hands, I prepare for the ritual once more.
I belong here.