Chapter 21
Silas
I sat in the stands watching the final game. I was on the edge of my seat the entire game, but now that we were in the final few minutes, I was on my feet.
My whole life was out there on that ice. Elliot, playing center for the team that he loved. He was carrying my child. Living his dream.
The official crew was doing well. So far they kept everything fair, and they knew their stuff.
“You miss it?” Colin asked.
I shook my head. “Not even a little bit.” I was surprised when Colin reached out to see if he could come to the final game with me. According to him, he just wanted to watch for fun, but based on the way his gaze followed his ex-stepbrother Charles, I knew it was more than that.
“They’re going to win,” he said.
I grimaced. “Don’t jinx it. We’ve both seen teams get annihilated with higher leads than this.”
Colin laughed, but he went quiet again fast. We both did.
Two minutes and fourteen seconds on the clock. The Badgers were up by one. One mistake and we could end up tied or worse.
The Badgers were in their own zone, killing the last seconds of a penalty that had my stomach in my throat when it happened.
Elliot took a hit. It was clean, but it was hard enough to rattle his bones, and my stomach was in my throat.
I gripped the seat in front of me so tight the guy sitting in it turned around to glare.
I didn’t care. Elliot had skated it off without so much as a wince.
Of course he had, because he was the most stubborn omega ever, and I loved him so much it was stupid.
I watched him now, stick on the ice, body low, reading the play the way he always did.
Like the game was whispering to him and he was the only one listening.
That was the thing about Elliot that the cameras never quite caught.
It wasn’t just skill. It was patience. He waited while other centers forced. He saw three moves out.
“He’s good,” Colin said. He sounded almost reluctant about it.
“Yeah,” I said. “He is.”
The penalty expired. Elliot won the faceoff clean, snapped it back to the defenseman, and the Badgers exhaled as a unit, resetting, running out the clock. Sixty seconds. Fifty. The other team pulled their goalie, six skaters flooding the ice, and the crowd behind me surged to their feet.
My heart was a fist slamming against my ribs.
“Here we go,” Colin muttered.
It happened fast, the way things always did when they went wrong.
Charles was on the boards, battling for position against a defender that matched him in size but not skill.
The hit came late. Too late. The kind of hit that made the crowd wince in unison before they even fully registered what they’d seen.
Charles went down hard into the boards, and then he didn’t get up.
Beside me, Colin went completely still. He gripped my arm.
The play stopped. Refs blew the whistle. Both benches were on their feet, and the trainers were already on the ice, kneeling over Charles in that tight, urgent way that meant it wasn’t nothing.
“He’s fine,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say. We’d both seen players skate away like it was nothing from worse hits than that. We’d also seen players have their career ended by hits not unlike the one we just witnessed.
Colin didn’t answer. His eyes were locked on the ice, jaw set, arms crossed tight over his chest like he was holding himself together by sheer stubbornness. I recognized that. I’d felt it myself, the first time I watched Elliot take a bad hit in a game I couldn’t control.
Charles moved. Slowly he pushed himself up to one arm, then accepted the trainers’ help the rest of the way. The arena exhaled. Charles kept his weight off his left leg as they helped him to the bench, but he was upright. He lifted a glove to acknowledge the crowd, and the place cheered.
Colin exhaled through his nose. A long, quiet breath that he’d clearly been holding since the hit.
“Told you,” I said. “Fine.”
“I wasn’t worried,” Colin said.
I let that one go.
The penalty against the other team gave the Badgers the power play, the clock started moving again, and I let myself refocus.
But I caught Colin’s gaze tracking to the bench where Charles sat, trainers still working on his leg, and I filed that away for later.
In most cases the player would be taken off the ice and back to the locker room area, but I doubted Charles wanted to miss the end of the game.
The puck came loose off the boards in a scramble, and for one horrible second, I lost it in the bodies.
Then I found Elliot, I always found Elliot, breaking out of the chaos with the puck on his stick, nothing between him and an empty net at the other end of the ice except two hundred feet and a defenseman closing fast.
I stopped breathing.
He didn’t rush it. That was the thing that killed me, that was the thing I would probably never stop loving about him.
He didn’t rush it. Even now, even with the defenseman’s stick reaching, even with the clock bleeding out, Elliot was composed.
He angled his body, drew the defender to one side, and put the puck in the net like he’d done it ten thousand times, because he had, because this was Elliot, and this was what he was built for.
The horn sounded.
The arena came apart.
I was screaming. I didn’t realize I was screaming until Colin grabbed my arm and I saw his mouth moving and couldn’t hear a word of it over the noise.
I didn’t care about that either. I was pointing at the ice like Elliot could somehow see me through the glass and the chaos and the pile of teammates landing on top of him.
“That’s my omega!” I shouted, at nobody, at everybody. “That’s my—”
Colin clapped me on the back hard enough to stagger me forward. “I know,” he said, loud enough to cut through. He was grinning. “The whole section knows.”
I didn’t care about that either.
I watched them celebrate. Watched Elliot climb out from under the pile, visor fogged, hair sweat-dark against his forehead, laughing at something his linemate said.
He looked young like that. He looked so happy it made something in my chest ache.
I thought about the night he’d come to me and we finally figured out how to make this work.
I thought about how far we’d come from that moment to this one, him holding a championship in his hands and my kid tucked safe beneath his heart.
He found me in the stands.
I didn’t know how. The place was a madhouse, twenty thousand people on their feet, light and noise and confetti drifting down from somewhere above us.
But his eyes cut through all of it and landed on me, and he pointed, just one quick finger, and I pressed my hand flat against my chest like an idiot because that was apparently all I was capable of.
Colin made a noise beside me. “God, you two are disgusting.”
“Extremely,” I agreed.
I glanced over at him. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the bench, where Charles had pushed himself upright and was watching his teammates celebrate from the other side of the glass, still favoring his good leg, expression unreadable from here.
“You should go check on him,” I said.
Colin opened his mouth. Closed it. “He’s got trainers.”
He didn’t say anything more, and he didn’t look away. When the crowd started moving toward the exits twenty minutes later and I turned to ask if he wanted to grab a drink, he was already gone.
I turned back to the ice, where Elliot was still celebrating, stick raised, and smiled.
I could wait.