Chapter 17
ALOIS
By the middle of the second period, the building had stopped waiting for us to screw it up.
You could feel the difference. It lived in the sound first.
Not louder—not exactly. Talon Arena was always loud when the crowd had enough beer in them and something to believe in. But this was different. The kind of noise that came when people leaned forward instead of sitting back. When they finally stopped bracing for disappointment.
Every rush got bigger. Every clean breakout pulled more of them to their feet. Every time we forced a turnover through the neutral zone, the air inside the building tightened and lifted, anticipation rolling through the lower bowl in waves that made the glass hum.
My skates bit hard into the ice as I angled back into our zone, tracking the puck carrier through the right circle while the other team tried to force a lane that wasn’t there. He dropped a shoulder and looked middle, telegraphing the pass before he ever moved his stick.
I stepped into the lane and cut him off clean, shoulder to chest, the hit solid enough to jar through my own frame. Not open ice. Not highlight-reel violence. Just enough. A hard stop. A reminder. His breath left him in a rough grunt as the puck kicked loose along the boards.
Jonah was already there. He scooped it up and turned, smooth and efficient, sending it ahead before the pressure could settle back on us. The puck snapped tape to tape to Marco through center, and suddenly the whole play flipped—defense becoming attack in the space of a heartbeat.
That was what had made tonight feel different from the first drop of the puck.
We were connected. No scrambling. No hesitation.
No one chasing the game half a second behind where it had already gone.
We moved like a team that trusted the next man to be where he was supposed to be.
Like all the pieces that had spent weeks grinding against each other had finally decided, for one night at least, to fit.
Marco crossed the blue line with speed, dragging coverage wide before feeding it off to Boris on the far side. Boris ripped the shot without breaking stride.
Pad save.
Rebound kicked low into the crease.
A mess of bodies crashed in after it, skates carving up white spray, sticks hacking and reaching while the crowd surged to its feet in one violent swell of noise that shook the boards and rattled under my ribs.
I was already moving before the whistle. Not because I thought the puck was in. Because their defenseman had put both hands in Zee’s back and driven him straight into the goalie after the shot.
The old instinct rose fast and ugly. Searing hot. A short, brutal line of heat from spine to jaw. I was three strides in before I fully felt it, my body recognizing the threat before my brain finished processing the details.
Then Zee caught himself on the side of the net, shoved back on his own, and the refs got in between it before anything could turn into something worth hundreds headlines and another hearing.
I pulled up hard.
Snow sprayed from my edges.
The defenseman glanced at me once over the official’s shoulder and looked away just as fast.
The whistle blew late. The puck had already been frozen under a pile of limbs and bad decisions, but the crowd didn’t care. They were roaring now—half for the chance, half because they’d seen me coming.
I could smell it before I even turned toward the glass. That shift in the noise. That strange current that had followed me all night. Recognition sharpened by appetite.
My name started somewhere low in the bowl—not a full chant, not yet, just one voice, then another, then enough of them strung together that it became impossible not to hear.
“Mül-ler.”
I looked away from the stands immediately.
The linesman skated past me with a pointed stare, warning already loaded into the angle of his mouth even though I hadn’t done a damn thing.
I didn’t bother acknowledging him. My chest rose once beneath my gear, slow and controlled, while Zee circled back toward the hash marks with that twitchy rookie energy he still hadn’t learned to hide.
“You were about to kill him,” he muttered as he passed me.
Zee looked over.
I adjusted my grip on my stick and stared out toward the dot. “Keep telling yourself that, slapdick.”
That got a quick huff out of him before the insult soaked into his cauliflower ears. “What the fuck you just call me?”
I was about to have a little more fun with their linesman but the game was moving and I wasn’t looking to end up with five minutes in the box.
The ref dropped the puck.
Oliver tied up his man long enough for the draw to kick loose behind us, and I turned immediately, shouldering through traffic to rim it out along the wall. It took one lucky bounce off the boards, skipped past their pinching defenseman, and landed right on Ty’s tape in stride.
Buzz took off like he’d been shot out of a cannon, all long limbs and chaos and filthy acceleration, drawing the crowd up again as he tore through center ice with Liam trailing high and wide.
The entire building seemed to tilt with the rush, thousands of bodies rising together, breath catching collectively in that split second before a play either became magic or died ugly.
Ty cut inside at the top of the circle and dished it across.
Liam buried it clean.
The red light went on so fast it almost felt delayed, like the arena itself had needed a second to understand what it had just seen. Then the place exploded.
Sound boomed from all sides at once, massive and physical, a wall of it crashing down from the rafters and rolling across the ice in a way that made everything inside me lock tighter instead of loosening.
Gloves slapped against helmets. Sticks hammered the boards.
Ty threw his head back and screamed something lost completely in the noise while Liam got mobbed near the circle by half our bench spilling over the boards.
I coasted backward toward the blue line, scanning the ice automatically while the celebration unfolded in front of me.
Three-one.
Halfway through the second.
And for the first time in a long time, it didn’t feel fragile.
I turned toward the bench on the change, lungs pulling in cold air so sharp it burned all the way down.
Sweat had collected under my pads, along my spine, behind my knees, trapped heat meeting arena chill until my body felt split in two—freezing and overheated at once.
The shift had been long enough to leave my thighs humming, that deep, familiar ache settling into muscle and tendon, but it was clean pain. Honest pain. The kind I never minded.
As I stepped over the boards, Rawlings was there at the far end of the bench near the tunnel entrance, suit perfect, expression sour.
He said nothing while I sat, only watched the ice with his arms folded and his mouth set hard enough to crack teeth. The overhead lights caught in the silver at his temples. Everything about him looked expensive and irritated.
I reached for my water bottle, tipped it back, and let the cold hit my tongue. Plastic. Electrolytes. A faint taste of old rubber from my mouthguard.
On the scoreboard above center, the replay rolled again—Ty’s zone entry, Liam’s finish, the crowd losing its mind. Then the camera cut, because of course it did, to me.
Not live action. Not this period.
Footage from two weeks ago.
A frozen frame of me outside the courthouse in a dark coat with cameras in my face and my jaw locked like I was trying not to put my fist through a wall.
The arena reaction came in pieces.
A few boos out of habit. More cheers than there would have been before. A weird split sound, divided and uncertain, before the feed shifted away again fast enough to suggest someone upstairs had realized it was a stupid idea.
My grip tightened around the bottle.
Rawlings didn’t look at me. “Enjoying your welcome-back tour?”
I put the cap back on and set the bottle down between my skates. “Wasn’t aware I’d gone anywhere.”
His mouth flattened further. “Cute.”
The play had already restarted. Cam was out there now, settling things down from the back end with that sharp, stripped-down efficiency of his.
No wasted movement. No drama. Just command.
He took the puck behind our net, absorbed forecheck pressure, and moved it up clean to Erik, who sent it off glass and out.
Textbook.
The building roared for that too.
That was how starved they’d been.
Rawlings glanced toward the ice and then finally down at me, gaze cool and cutting. “One ruling doesn’t erase the problem.”
I said nothing.
He seemed to like that less. “Don’t mistake a good night for safety, Müller.”
There it was. Not even subtle.
I leaned forward with my forearms on my thighs, gloves hanging loose between my knees, eyes still on the ice. “You always this inspiring during games, or am I getting special treatment?”
“Special treatment seems to be your thing lately.”
Around us, the bench stayed loud in the usual ways—guys calling changes, sticks knocking the boards, coaches barking adjustments—but that sentence sat apart from all of it. A knife slid in under cover of normalcy.
I turned my head slowly and looked at him.
He held my stare. He had never liked me. Tolerated me, at best, when I was useful. Resented me when I was expensive. Now he looked at me the way men looked at structural damage in a building they were already thinking about replacing—annoyed by the cost, convinced collapse was inevitable.
“If it were my call,” he growled quietly, “I’d have solved this already.”
Before I could respond, the crowd surged again, a sudden sharp rise of sound pulling every eye back to the ice. Boris had stripped their winger at the line and fed Shawn down low, and the chance developed so fast the whole bench stood at once in reaction.
The shot rang iron.
A collective groan ripped through the arena.