Chapter 12
ALOIS
The locker room was louder than it needed to be.
Every sound carried sharper than usual—the scrape of skate blades against rubber flooring, the rip of tape, the hollow knock of a stick hitting the bench.
Even the ventilation hummed wrong, a low mechanical buzz that sat at the base of my skull and refused to fade.
The air smelled like sweat that hadn’t fully dried, damp cotton, menthol, and the faint chemical edge of fresh laundry detergent that never quite masked what this room really was.
I sat at my stall with one skate laced tight and the other loose, elbows braced on my thighs, fingers working the tape around my wrist with steady, practiced pulls. The motion was automatic and comforting.
Across the room, a laugh cut through the noise—too loud, too deliberate. “Ah, there he is,” Marco De Luca announced, already performing. “Our favorite headline. Tell me, Müller, how is it that you royally fuck up and instead of getting the boot, you get a press conference make-out session?”
A few guys chuckled. Not all of them. I didn’t look up.
The tape tightened around my wrist. I pulled it once more than necessary, feeling the pressure bite into the joint before smoothing it down with my thumb.
Marco wasn’t done. “I mean, the commitment alone,” he continued, gesturing vaguely in my direction. “The intensity. The mystery. Bravo.”
As Marco started a dramatic slow clap, Cam Dunne’s voice cut in, flat and unamused. “Marco, enough.”
Marco held his hands up in mock surrender, grin still in place but dimmed just enough to acknowledge the line. “What? I’m applauding the man.”
Cam’s gaze slid to me then, sharp and assessing. “You done making this about you?” he asked.
I lifted my head. Cam held my gaze for a beat longer than most people would’ve been comfortable with, then looked away first, already turning back to his stall like the conversation had served its purpose.
“You know,” Marco added, unable to help himself, “most people try to avoid being the story before a road game.”
“I’m not most people,” I huffed.
Marco’s grin flickered, satisfaction passing through it before he dipped his head in acknowledgment.
The room settled back into motion around us, but it didn’t return to normal. Not completely. Conversations restarted in pockets. Gear shifted. Someone tapped a stick twice against the floor, the sound echoing briefly before getting swallowed by everything else.
I finished lacing my skate and pulled it tight, locking it down with a firm tug that grounded through my forearms. The pressure felt right.
Familiar. Something I could hold on. I stood, testing my weight, the blade biting slightly into the rubber mat beneath me.
My hands flexed once inside my gloves, leather creaking faintly, the padding pressing against my knuckles.
Across the room, Zee said something too fast, too loud, trying to fill space that didn’t need filling. Buzz laughed. Someone else told him to shut up. It blurred together, background noise I didn’t need to track.
I exhaled slowly through my nose and grabbed my stick, the familiar grip settling into my hand. Tape rough, worn exactly where it needed to be. The balance of it sat clean through my palm, an extension of something that had always made more sense than anything off the ice ever had.
“Five,” Coach called from the doorway. “We’re moving.”
Benches creaked. Gear snapped into place. Conversations cut clean. The room shifted from loose to locked in seconds.
I stepped forward with the rest of them, blades clicking against the floor as we filed toward the tunnel, the noise compressing into something tighter, more focused with every step.
As I passed the threshold, the air cooled, the concrete beneath my skates less forgiving. The sounds changed—echoed sharper, voices bouncing off the walls in clipped bursts.
Ahead, the tunnel opened toward the ice, light spilling in cold and bright, the distant roar of the crowd already building, thick and alive.
I didn’t look back. Whatever was off—whatever had shifted—stayed buried where it belonged.
The arena noise came down on us all at once, a full-body impact—twenty thousand voices layered over each other until it stopped sounding like people and started sounding like pressure.
It vibrated through the glass, skittered across the ice, straight into my chest as I pushing off to take my first stride, legs opening up into something that should have felt automatic.
I circled once, scanning without thinking, tracking movement in patterns I’d read a thousand times before. Jerseys, spacing, angles, weight shifts. It was all there, all familiar, all predictable in the way high-level hockey always was.
And yet—something sat half a step out of place.
The Otters didn’t warm up like a team going through motions. They moved like a unit.
Pucks changed clean, no hesitation, no wasted touches. Lines rotated without needing direction. Communication happened without voices—shoulders shifting, heads turning, small adjustments that kept everything connected.
There were no gaps. No one trying to do too much. No one compensating for someone else.
I slowed near the boards, rolling my head slightly, grip tightening slightly on my stick as I watched them cycle through another drill without breaking rhythm.
“Enjoying the show?” Oliver muttered as he skated past, bumping my glove lightly with his.
“Always,” I snickered.
He huffed a quiet breath that might have been a laugh, might have been something else, and pushed off toward his line.
The horn cut through the ice a second later, sharp and final.
The first shift told me everything I needed to know.
They came out fast. Not frantic. Not reckless. Unwavering in the way that came from knowing exactly where everyone was supposed to be before the puck even dropped.
Face off snapped back clean to their defense. No bobble. One touch to the weak side, immediate pressure up the boards, and we were already reacting instead of initiating.
I skated in to close the lane, angling my body to force the play outside, but the puck was gone before I finished the move. Quick give-and-go through the neutral zone, their winger cutting across with speed while their center filled the space I’d just vacated.
“Switch,” someone called behind me.
We were already late.
I pivoted, digging in hard, chasing the play as it crossed our blue line. Their entry was clean—too clean. No dump. No hesitation. Just controlled possession straight into our zone like we’d opened the door for them.
Vestergaard squared up in the crease, tracking, pads set. He collapsed. Save.
They cycled immediately, low to high, then back down again, forcing us to shift, to adjust, to move in ways that felt half a beat behind every decision they made.
I stepped into the corner to cut off the pass, shoulder dropping into Gret Hayes with enough force to separate him from the puck.
It should’ve ended the play. It didn’t. The puck was already moving again—kicked loose, picked up, redirected before my weight even settled back onto my skates.
“Clear it,” Cam barked.
I got a piece of it this time, stick angling under the puck, lifting just enough to disrupt the pass and send it rattling along the boards. It slid past the point, out into the neutral zone.
Relief came quick and fleeting. They were back on it before we could reset.
Shift after shift, it stayed the same.
We chased.
They controlled.
Every breakout we tried got pressured early. Every zone entry got challenged before we could establish anything. Their sticks were always in lanes. Their bodies were always in the right place.
There was no space.
No clean look.
No rhythm.
By the end of the first, my legs already felt heavier than they should have. Not from effort—from inefficiency. From having to fight for every inch instead of taking what was there.
We went into the room tied at zero, but it didn’t feel like it. Not even close.
The second period cracked the game completely open.
We lost the puck high in their zone—sloppy, forced, the kind of play that happens when a team starts pressing for something that isn’t there.
Their winger hit the line with speed, Hayes cutting through the middle lane like he owned it, stick down, calling for it without saying a word. The pass hit him in stride, tape to tape, and suddenly it was a two-on-one coming straight at us.
I pushed hard to close, angling in from behind, trying to take away the option, but he read it before I got there. Hayes shifted his weight, pulled the puck just enough to sell the shot, then slid it across at the last second.
Vestergaard dropped.
Too late.
The puck snapped into the back of the net with a clean, hollow pop.
1–0.
The building came alive. By the time we hit the bench, the noise pressed in, layered with momentum that wasn’t ours.
I dropped onto the boards, breath hitching, eyes scanning without focusing on anything in particular. And then—I looked up. Didn’t mean to. Didn’t think about it.
The PR box sat above the far side of the rink, glass catching the arena lights in fractured reflections that made it hard to see clearly unless you knew where to look.
Bea stood near the railing, headset looped around her neck, one hand braced lightly against the ledge as she leaned forward, watching the ice. Not the crowd. Not the screens.
Her posture was composed, but there was something sharper in her focus. Intent. Locked in. Like she was reading the game in her own way, processing, adjusting, already thinking three steps ahead of whatever came next.
For a second, everything else dropped.
The noise dulled.
The bench blurred.
It was just—her.
I clenched my jaw. Focus.
The next few shifts got uglier.
Every time we tried to force something through the middle, it died on a stick or got picked clean and turned the other way. Their defense didn’t overcommit. Their forwards didn’t cheat. They trusted the system—and each other—to hold.
We didn’t.