Chapter 7 Liam
LIAM
It fucking sucks.
There’s nothing worse than being healthy enough to move but not cleared to play.
I’m stuck in joggers and a warm-up jersey, pretending I don’t care while my team gears up without me.
Every slap of tape, every clang of a skate blade sounds like mockery.
I should be out there. Not sitting here like a damn mascot.
“Quit moping, Callaghan,” Connor Murphy calls from two stalls down, smacking his stick on the bench for emphasis. “You’re the one who let yourself get your ass kicked. If you’d been less of a puss, maybe you’d have won that fight and been able to play today.”
I don’t bother responding. Connor’s like a gremlin — feed him attention, and he multiplies.
Mickey, our rookie forward, snickers. “Damn, Murph, you ever think about maybe being supportive?”
Connor grins. “I’m supportive as hell. I’m supporting him by reminding him not to suck next time.”
“Yeah, real uplifting,” Max chimes in from across the room, rolling a strip of tape around his stick handle. “You should get that printed on a Hallmark card.”
Connor flips him off. “Jealous you didn’t think of it first, Frenchie?”
“I’m not French, you illiterate fuck,” Max fires back, his British accent thick enough to make the insult sound classy.
The room erupts with laughter. Someone yells, “Kiss. Kiss!” and Connor winks exaggeratedly at Max. “He couldn’t handle me.”
“Handle you?” Mickey says. “Dude, your stamina’s shot after one beer and a chicken wing.”
“Watch it, rookie,” Connor warns, pointing his stick like a weapon. “You don’t get to chirp until you’ve scored more than once this month.”
“Once,” Mickey repeats, holding up a finger. “And it was beautiful once.”
Even I can’t help the slight smirk tugging at my mouth.
The banter fades a little as the topic shifts back to me, unfortunately.
“Still bullshit, though,” Max says, “Someone jumps you in our own parking garage? What kind of crap security are we paying for?”
“Yeah,” Mickey adds. “I mean, what if someone messed with my car?”
Connor laughs. “Relax, rookie. Nobody’s gonna risk jail time to jack your old Toyota. It’s worth less than your stick.”
“Hey! That car’s got character.”
I finally speak up. “It was an isolated incident. Nobody’s ever messed with anything in there before.”
“Still bullshit,” Max mutters. “We’re supposed to be the Chicago Reapers, not the Chicago sitting-ducks.”
Connor grins. “I like that. Someone gets marketing on the phone.”
The guys laugh again, the noise bouncing off metal lockers, but I just sit back and stretch my ribs, feeling the dull ache underneath the laughter.
Nikolai Ivanov and Dominic Belkin, our two wingmen, hang out by their own lockers, not really participating in the conversation.
They seem to be engaged in some other, private discussion, just talking low, in that clipped Russian cadence that sounds like secrets even when it isn’t.
Nik is our team captain, and Dom is his right-hand man. At one point, they both turn and look at me with curiosity.
They’re not my friends, per se.
I’m not particularly close to anyone on the team, although I get along with them all just fine.
Still, it’s not that surprising when the other guys finally file out into the tunnel, Nik hangs back.
“You okay?” he asks, nodding at me, or maybe at the whole wreck of me. My face is still bruised, but other than that, it’s the only outward evidence of the beating.
“I’ll live,” I say with a shrug. “Just sucks I can’t be out there with you guys.”
“It’s only six weeks,” Nik says, swatting away the thought like an annoying insect. “We all have injuries sometimes.”
“Well, just hockey injuries,” I say.
That makes him pause. His expression doesn’t change.
Finally, he says, “Not the same thing. Is it?” He tilts his head, studying me like he’s trying to see past my skin. “It was strange. The way it happened?”
“What?”
“Two random guys hanging out in a mostly empty parking lot, in the middle of the night on a weeknight? Just randomly waiting for a person to show up so they can beat them senseless but not rob them?”
I don’t meet his eyes. My throat bobs as I swallow. “Yeah, weird. I was just unlucky, I guess.”
“Hmm. Very unlucky,” he agrees. He lays a hand on my shoulder and looks me straight in the eye. “When you feel like talking about it, find me. I think you’ll find I’m… an understanding ear.”
He skates off, stick in hand, like he’s just told me to grab a drink and shake it off, but there’s weight in his tone, a warning buried under the casual words. Something that says he knows more than he’s letting on.
And it’s not like I’m na?ve. I’ve heard the rumors about the Chicago Reapers. That the team is mafia-owned, that several of my teammates have connections.
And, shit, both Nik and Dom are Russian, and both have come in to practice with inexplicable injuries.
And both are, to be honest, shady as fuck.
I know he’s not a Browning. He’s too slick and controlled for that. And yeah, he’s not Irish, which automatically puts him in a different league.
The Brownings are clowns in leather jackets; Nik Ivanov is something else entirely.
There’s a darkness to him, a quiet kind of power that fills a room without him having to say a damn thing.
Still, even if he is connected, what could he really do?
Out-mafia the Irish mob on my behalf?
No, not gonna happen.
He can’t just snap his fingers and make millions of dollars’ worth of debt go away.
Yeah, I think I’m on my own with this one.
However, the thought of these Irish and Russian mafia groups trying to overpower each other over me is almost funny.
I find it oddly amusing, and so I take that rare feeling of amusement with me as I wander down the hallway and find my place on the bench.
After all the pre-game hoodoo, our starting lineup takes the ice.
Minus me.
The horn sounds, the puck drops, and we win the faceoff clean.
The Reapers charge forward fast, skates cutting into the ice, the whole arena buzzing with energy.
The noise is deafening—sticks hitting, blades scraping, the crowd roaring louder with every pass.
Three minutes in, Dom snags a rebound off the boards, spins, and fires. It’s a monster of a slapshot, launched from a brutal angle no sane man would attempt.
The puck whistles through the air, slicing past a diving goalie and snapping into the top right corner of the net.
The red light flares. The horn screams.
The place erupts.
Fans are on their feet, fists pounding the glass. Dom throws up his arms, and the guys mob him, gloves slapping helmets, sticks banging against the boards.
The sound is pure adrenaline.
I sit on the bench, jaw tight, pretending it doesn’t bother me to watch instead of play.
My replacement, Penn Markham, skates past me on his next shift, grinning like he owns the place.
He’s big and fast, the kind of guy who makes defenders think twice before getting in his way. Bright too, an Ivy League brain in a fighter’s body.
But Penn’s got a short fuse temper. He loves to fight more than he loves to score, and that kind of hunger can wreck a game if he’s not careful.
Either way, he’s been solid tonight, really good, and Connor wastes no time reminding me of it the second he plops down beside me after serving a two-minute high-sticking penalty.
“You’d better haul your ass to the therapy room, Lee Lee,” Connor calls out, grinning like an idiot. “Markham’s coming for your spot. Guy’s a damn brick wall out there tonight.”
I shoot him the finger without looking his way.
“Put that away before the cameras catch you, you fuckin’ idiot,” Coach barks from down the bench.
Properly shamed, I mumble an apology and turn my focus back to the ice.
The game’s a war zone—back and forth, hit for hit. Washington ties it up in the second period, and the energy in the arena spikes.
After the break, the Reapers stormed out, fired up, and nailed a clean, beautiful goal early in the third.
The bench erupts.
The crowd loses its mind.
For a second, it feels like momentum is finally on our side.
But it doesn’t last.
A scuffle breaks out in front of the net, gloves hit the ice, and before I know it, one of our guys is sent to the box while Washington gets a power play.
They capitalize fast, slipping one past our goalie and evening the score again, and we’re right back to a tie game with only about seven minutes left on the clock.
Now, seven minutes is forever in a game like this. Anything can happen in that amount of time. This is the time when players lock in, when time seems to slow, and crazy shit starts to happen.
I’ve seen it. I’ve experienced it.
But something feels off tonight. The ref’s calls have been garbage all game, and it’s not the first time I’ve noticed it. When he misses a clear tripping call on one of theirs, then dares to whistle it on us.
I’m on my feet before I even realize it, shouting across the ice for blood.
“Open your eyes, ref!” I yell. “What kind of backwoods bullshit is this!”
Again, Coach is yelling for me to calm my ass down, but I’m not the only one losing it.
Our guys are going crazy, screaming in the ref’s face, yelling at the Washington players.
Gloves are coming off, then helmets, then there’s another full-blown fight. It takes a long time to get everyone separated, for the officials to review footage, and for the right call to come.
And after all of that, we end up two penalties a piece, and the game gets reset.
Five minutes left, and the faceoff goes Washington’s way, but Markham swoops in and takes the puck right off of their second-string forward. He wings it to the midline, where our center, Max Knight, grabs it, takes off, faking a pass to Nik and looping around the goalie’s back for a score.
The place erupts again, so loud it makes my ears ring, but we’re up by one goal, and there are only three minutes left on the clock.
Our players engage in full-scale defensive maneuvers, just trying to hold off a determined Washington offense that’s throwing everything they’ve got at us.
When the final buzzer sounds, the arena is electric, buzzing with that raw, wild energy that only comes from a hard-fought win.
The guys are shouting, sticks slamming against the boards, gloves in the air.
I’m so fucking pissed that I wasn’t part of this win. This is what it feels like to be part of a winning team, one that might actually be good enough to get to the playoffs.
I turn back to Coach, who does not look happy about the win, despite the confetti raining from the sky.
My suspicions about thrown games are confirmed in his expression, a mix of nausea and fear.
We were supposed to lose tonight.
He and Nik share a long, weighted look as Nik leads the team around the arena for their victory lap. He looks like he’s led a coup, not just a winning game during the regular season.
Back in the locker room, it’s absolute mayhem.
Music’s blasting, bass rattling the metal benches.
“Boys!” Connor shouts the second I step inside. “We fucked them up baaddd with that win!”
Someone slams a stick against a locker — Bang!
Another voice yells, “Champagne’s open! Grab a cup or open your mouth!”
“Who the hell brought confetti?” Mickey cackles, shaking pieces out of his hair.
“I did,” one of the rookies shouts back. “Playoff energy, baby!”
“Man, sit down,” Max laughs. “We’re not even halfway through the damn season.”
“But it felt good!” the confetti guy protests.
The place erupts in laughter.
Connor points at me through a cloud of champagne mist. “Look at Callaghan pretending he doesn’t love this shit. Look at him! This man is fucking glowing.”
I just shake my head, giving Conner a finger.
Nik and Dom engage in a quiet conversation near their lockers, the two of them always in on some inside scoop running a playbook the rest of us don’t get to see.
I wait.
I wait while the guys shower and dress, while the adrenaline fades and the room starts to clear out.
I keep replaying that look between Nik and Coach, the one that said this win means more than hockey.
And I think about his offer. When you’re ready to talk, find me.
So when Nik heads toward the media room for post-game interviews, I follow. I hang back in the hallway as he stands under the bright lights, talking to the press about determination, teamwork, grit—every buzzword they eat up.
When he finishes, he steps out in the hallway, and there is a determined glee in his eyes that goes beyond simply winning a hard-won game.
He meets my gaze, arching an eyebrow in question.
I square my shoulders and meet his gaze.
“All right,” I say. “Let’s talk.”