Epilogue #3
“This is the part where I tell you what I see every night,” Holt said. “You don’t get to decide your worth for me.”
I swallow now. My throat tastes like tape, glue, and coffee.
Game 1 sits like a bruise. Brutal overtime. Edmonton Eagles celebrated on our ice. Their bench spilled over the boards, and our building went so quiet it made my ears ring.
We can’t do that again. Not tonight. Especially not tonight, because she’ll be watching.
Thompson elbows my shoulder pad from the side, grin half-built. “Hey, Cas. You gonna make it weird or are we skating?”
“I make everything weird.”
“That’s your brand.”
O’Neill slides in behind him, already chewing on his mouthguard. “Boys, boys. Big smiles. We’re on the jumbotron.” He points his stick toward the tunnel mouth. “And try not to get emotionally attached to the puck, Cas. That’s how you get hurt.”
I snort, then the sound dies in my chest when the announcer draws out my name in a long, arena-sized vowel.
Cameras tilt. Phones lift. Twenty thousand people lean forward like they can pull the game into the right shape by wanting it hard enough.
I roll my shoulders once and step through.
Light slams into my eyes. The ice throws it back, bright and clean, and my blades bite on the first stride. The sound—steel carving—cuts through everything else and brings my head down into my body where it belongs.
Warmup lap. Wind in my ears. Pucks clacking off the boards. Sticks knocking shins. The goalie crease looks like a small war zone already—snow spray, tapped posts, Forsberg’s breath puffing against his mask.
I sweep the glass the way I always do.
And there she is.
Section behind our bench. Ivy’s hair is shoved under a beanie. Her jacket unzipped halfway to reveal what’s underneath. My old, faded Capital City Crows hoodie, the one I left on her chair. It shouldn’t look good on anyone. It looks stupidly perfect on her.
Her hands grip the ledge at the top of the glass. Eyes bright. She meets my stare like she’s holding a line and daring me to cross it.
I glide closer, coast in with my knees bent, and stop with a spray of ice that dusts the boards.
Her mouth moves, forming words I can’t make out.
I lift my glove to my chest and tap it once, then point at her.
Her grin cracks wide, unfiltered. Just Ivy.
She slaps the glass, mouthing, Go.
The weight in my chest unclenches, shifts. The game still matters. The building still shakes. But the playoffs don’t feel like they’re trying to crush me into a headline anymore.
I push off. Thompson feeds me a puck at the top of the circle, and I one-touch it on net out of habit, just to feel my hands work. Forsberg gloves it, drops it, moves on. Nobody’s keeping score yet—that’s the mercy of warmups. All this speed and nothing riding on it.
I take another lap. The cold sorts me out the way it always has, stride by stride, until the noise overhead is just weather and the only real thing left is the six feet of ice in front of my blades.
The horn calls us in.
I skate to the gate and step off onto the rubber runner. The bowl’s roar goes muffled and huge behind me as I drop down the tunnel.
That’s when I see him.
Westfield’s near the VIP corridor. Credentials still around his neck—owner, on paper, until the papers clear in June. Doesn’t look like it means much anymore.
I haven’t stood this close to him since the review. Since Brock and I sat in that boardroom and put it all on record. Easier that way. Westfield looks smaller than I remember.
He clocks me and shifts, blocking the path.
“Gabriel.” Warm. Paternal. Like nothing happened.
I stop.
“You didn’t have to let the lawyers do the talking for you.” Mild. The voice from before every leadership-means-discretion talk. “Ten years I had your back. Luca made sure of that. I kept my word.”
Dad’s name. In his mouth. It doesn’t land.
“You kept what worked for you,” I say.
His jaw works once. The old tell.
“Nothing’s signed yet,” he says. “I could still make this difficult. For a lot of people.”
“You could.” I look him over. The coat’s too sharp for a man with nowhere left to wear it. “But you won’t. That takes someone who’s still scared of you. Nobody here is.”
His hand tightens on the lanyard. One second. Gone.
“You’ll regret how you’re speaking to me,” he says. Quiet.
Maybe.
I roll my shoulders. Stick tip taps the rubber once.
I step around him.
“Enjoy the game, Martin.”
Nothing comes after me. No hook, no last word.
I don’t look back.
Third period.
The bench feels like a vise with skate laces. My thighs burn hot under my gear, and my mouth tastes like pennies. The score sits tied.
Thompson drops beside me, shoulders pumping, sweat stringing off his chin onto the rubber. “Whole city’s holding its breath.”
“Good. Let ’em hold it,” I say, my eyes locked on the corner.
He barks a laugh that turns into a cough. O’Neill leans over the boards, muttering in Gaelic like he’s willing the puck free.
On the ice, Edmonton finishes every check—bodies thudding into the glass, sticks raking gloves, the boards rattling under the weight of two pissed-off teams. Every whistle brings the cameras closer. Long lenses hunting faces. Producers begging for a villain, a hero, a collapse.
Holt hops over the boards for his shift, and the whole bench straightens without meaning to. Habit. The captain on the ice changes the air.
He takes two strides, shoulder to shoulder with their winger, and the puck rims behind our net. Holt reaches to pin, the Edmonton guy spins off the wall, and Holt’s stick catches his hands. The winger sells it—head snaps back, arms up like a stage bow.
The whistle cuts the air like a lash.
Holt freezes. He doesn’t look at the Edmonton forward he just tied up along the boards. He looks at her.
Referee Jenna Cross glides into the circle, arm up, stripes stark against the white ice. Same ref. The same one who pointed to the center in Game 1 and handed Edmonton the penalty shot that buried us.
He’s vibrating.
The captain skates straight at her, uses every inch of his six-foot-three frame to crowd her space.
The referee plants her feet. “Two minutes. Hooking.”
Holt stops inches from her, practically breathing the air she exhales. “You’re calling a hook in a tied playoff game? After Thursday?”
She stares straight ahead at his chest protector, face set like she’s carved from it. “Two minutes, Captain.”
Holt laughs—sharp, humorless. Then he leans down, cage nearly scraping her visor, and snaps something lethal through the bars. I can’t hear the words. I see his neck cord.
Cross waits him out without blinking, then chops her hand toward the penalty box.
Holt holds one beat longer—just long enough to make it a choice—then shoves off and stalks toward the box.
I watch him go, then look back at Cross, smoothing her jersey like she’s bored.
Thompson nudges my shoulder pad. “That’s a lot of feelings.”
“More like foreplay with a whistle,” I say. “But sure.”
The penalty kill is two of the longest minutes of my life. Forsberg holds the fort—one glove save, one post, one long exhale from the crowd when Andersson sweeps the rebound into the corner and the horn sounds.
Penalty killed.
Coach Wilson’s hand clamps my shoulder pad before the echo dies.
“Next shift. No cute bullshit. North.”
I hop over the boards.
Thompson wins the draw clean.
Andersson collects it without ceremony and snaps it up the wall like he’s throwing a rope—one motion, no hesitation, the kind of pass that trusts you to be exactly where you said you’d be.
Thompson’s already moving.
“Wheel!”
Edmonton’s defenceman pinches. Bad angle. Hungry.
Thompson chips the puck past him with a little touch of disrespect and wears the shoulder that comes for him. Glass rattles. The ref’s arm stays down.
I’m gone before the puck fully clears.
The ice opens up and everything else drops away—the crowd noise flattens to a hum, the bench disappears, the cameras go blind. It’s just the geometry of it. The angle. The five seconds left on the clock that I can see burning red on the scoreboard in my peripheral vision.
The puck finds my tape and my hands go soft—receive, cradle, protect.
Edmonton’s last defenceman angles across to cut the lane. I drop my inside shoulder, push the puck wide, feel him reaching. His stick catches my shin pad and slides off.
The goalie backs into his crease. Knees bent. Glove up. Showing me the high short side like an invitation I’m not taking.
I let my feet talk—two cuts, hard left, watch his weight shift—then drag the puck across my body on the toe, one long pull, enough to open the five-hole for the half-second I need.
I snap it low and hard.
The puck hits the inside of the post with a sound like a door slamming shut—
—and the red light fires—
—and the horn screams—
—all of it at once, simultaneous, one single detonation of noise and light that blows through the building.
I don’t think. I don’t calculate. I don’t do the approved thing.
I wheel away from the net, throw my arms wide, tilt my head back toward the rafters, and let it rip from somewhere I forgot I had.
Awoo.
Rough. Ugly. Mine.
Awoo.
Sharper.
Awooo.
The arena comes back at me like a wall. Twenty thousand voices, one sound, the whole building howling in unison, and the noise gets into my chest and shakes something loose that’s been stuck there for years.
Then Thompson hits me.
Shoulder into my chest, full speed, nearly knocking my helmet sideways, and then O’Neill is grabbing my jersey from the other side, then Andersson is there with that calm Swedish face and burning eyes, and Holt skates in last and grips the back of my neck with one heavy, grounding hand and they drive me straight into the glass.
Right in front of her.
Ivy is already there, both palms flat on the plexiglass, wearing a grin she’s never let anyone else have—wide, wrecked, nothing held back.
I find her eyes through the chaos and the gold light pouring down from the rafters. Her palm is right there against the barrier, and I slam my glove over it.
For us.