Chapter 31 Beckett
Practice is at six.
I'm there at five forty-five, sitting in the locker room with my gear half on and nowhere to put the thing that's been sitting in my chest since last night.
Adela's face when she hung up the phone. The way her whole body went still in the span of three seconds. The judge's voice came through the phone, saying he's been asking for you, while I had my mouth on her skin.
The bastard’s awake.
I was there when she found out. I held her while she cried and watched her pull herself back together, and walked out when she asked me to. I know what last night cost her. I know she went to that hospital this morning and is probably performing every second of it.
The locker room fills around me — voices, clatter, music from someone's phone. Silas drops onto the bench across from me and starts taping his stick without looking up.
"You sleep?"
"Enough."
He nods once and doesn't push it.
Theo comes in last, which he never does. He drops his bag on the bench, starts pulling on his gear, and doesn't say a word to anyone. His jaw is set.
I watch him for a second.
His jaw is set. His eyes…are like fire. His movements are too controlled. The kind of controlled that isn't calm — it's someone holding something down with both hands that doesn't want to stay down.
Oh, fuck.
He knows.
That’s the thing about Theo. He doesn't explode. That's what people get wrong about him. He doesn't rage. He doesn't break things. He gets quiet and precise in a way that’s far worse than any of that, because you can't see it coming and you can't track where it's going to land.
And this is different from his usual cold.
This is Nessa-level. This is whatever lives in the part of him that was never strategic to begin with — the part that put Cody in a hospital bed in the first place.
I file it away and follow the team out to the ice.
And I make a note to stay out of his way.
Coach runs us through systems first. Breakout patterns, neutral zone play, and defensive zone coverage –– standard stuff. I move through it on autopilot, my body doing what it knows while my mind stays half on last night.
She didn't want to go.
That's the thing I keep coming back to. Not the call, not Cody, not the judge's voice coming through the phone while I had my mouth on her skin.
Just the specific way she said I don't want to go — not performance, not drama.
Just true. Raw and honest in the way she only is when she's not thinking about being watched.
She didn't want to go back to him.
That means something.
The whistle blows, and we move into scrimmage, and that's when Theo becomes a problem.
He hits clean — always clean, Theo is too smart to take penalties that cost the team — but he hits hard.
Every contact drill, every board battle, every puck battle in the corner.
He's moving through practice like he has something to prove to the ice itself, controlled violence in every stride, and I can feel it from across the rink.
Something is eating him alive.
During a line rush, he cuts inside on me — faster than the drill requires, harder than practice warrants — and gets a step on me that he shouldn't get, that I don't give anyone, and fires on the goalie before I can close the gap.
He doesn't celebrate. Just turns and skates back past me.
"Gap's off," he says. Quiet. Flat.
I say nothing.
Two drills later, he does it again. Same move, different angle. Exploiting the same half-step like he's making a point he hasn't bothered to put into words yet.
I catch up to him at the line.
"You want to tell me what's going on?" I say, low enough that it doesn't carry.
He looks at me. His eyes are cold in a way that has nothing to do with the rink temperature.
"Your gap is off," he says again. "Fix it."
"I'm not talking about my gap."
He holds my gaze for a long moment.
And I realize, standing there on the ice at six in the morning, reading his face, that I was wrong.
This is personal.
"Fix your gap," he says one more time.
Then he skates away.
I stand there for a second in the cold and watch him go, and feel the specific sensation of realizing you were never as ahead of something as you thought you were.
The locker room after practice is quiet. Quieter than usual. Whatever energy Theo brought onto the ice came back in with him and settled over the room like weather.
Silas sits beside me, peeling tape from his stick. He leans in slightly.
"What's his problem?" he says under his breath.
I watch Theo across the room, already changed, already somewhere else in his head.
"Cody's awake," I say quietly.
Silas goes still.
He looks at me. Then across the room at Theo. Then back at me.
"When?"
"Yesterday."
Silas absorbs that. He looks at his hands. "Does he—" He stops. Starts again. "How much does Cody remember?"
"I don't know."
We sit with that for a moment. The sound of the locker room moving around us — showers, voices, someone's music — while the thing neither of us is saying out loud takes up all the space.
Theo stands, picks up his bag, and walks out without a word.
The door closes behind him.
Silas looks at me. "We have a problem."
"Yeah," I say.
I look at the door.
"We do."