Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
TOLREK
Iarrived at the rink early.
New team. New city where I knew four street names and none of them well.
Early meant I could learn the layout without anyone watching me figure out where the bathrooms were or which entrance led to the locker room instead of equipment storage.
Small things that mattered when you were trying not to look like you’d just been traded away from the only organization you’d ever known.
The parking lot was empty except for a handful of cars that probably belonged to the coaching staff who also arrived before anyone else to set up the day.
The building itself was newer than my last rink, cleaner, with that particular smell new construction kept for the first few years before sweat worked its way into the walls.
I stood outside the main entrance and studied what I could see on the back of the building.
Multiple stories, sprawling. Two separate entrances, one marked for players and staff, the other for public access.
Loading dock around the side. The ice would be regulation, but every surface had its own personality.
Soft spots. Places where the cold didn’t hold as well.
I’d learn it the way I learned everything else.
Last night had gone differently than planned. That was all I let myself think about it.
The sound of footsteps on pavement pulled my attention left. Haley came around the corner from the far lot loaded down with enough gear that she should’ve made two trips.
She had an equipment bag over her left shoulder.
A laptop bag on the right. Coffee in one hand and a paper bakery bag in the other.
She managed it all the way a person did when they’d done it a hundred times and stopped noticing the weight.
Her head was down, her attention on not spilling her coffee, and she walked straight into me as if she didn’t see me at all.
The bakery bag slipped.
I caught it. Reflex, the same way I’d position myself between a forward and the net. The bag was light, barely anything, and I was holding it before she’d even registered what happened.
Looking up, she had to tilt her head back to see my face. I was suddenly aware of how small she was. Human-sized. Breakable in ways that had nothing to do with hockey and everything to do with the fact that I could palm her shoulder and my fingers would wrap most of the way around.
She stared at me.
I handed the bag back and she took it.
My hand was steady. Hers wasn’t.
“Good reflexes,” she said.
I said nothing.
My anger was clean. She’d known who she was and let me talk anyway.
She let me say things I didn’t say to people, the kind of conversation I didn’t have because conversations like that required someone to see past the surface.
And she’d stood there and watched me do it without telling me the one piece of information that mattered.
Coach’s daughter. Off-limits in every way that counted.
The fact that I didn’t entirely blame her was its own separate problem, and I wasn’t ready to look at that yet.
She held up the bag.
“I brought two,” she said. The words came out fast. “Pastries, that is. I wasn’t sure if you’d be here this early, but I thought… They’re raspberry. From this bakery near my apartment. There’s an orc who runs it, and she makes the best—” She stopped. Took a breath. “Do you want one?”
The bag had a simple line drawing of an oven with script underneath it I couldn’t read from this angle. She’d bought two on purpose, then brought them here on the chance she’d run into me.
I was aware saying nothing was petty, but I did it anyway.
Silence stretched between us, and I watched her realize I wasn’t going to answer.
“Tolrek—”
Footsteps interrupted her, accompanied by the rustle of someone carrying their own gear.
Brashe Kedish, the team’s starting goalie, came up the walk with the loose, easy stride of someone who knew exactly where he was going.
He was big even for an orc, though that was the norm for this sport.
Green-skinned like me, with his dark hair tied back and his bag slung over one shoulder.
The coffee he carried could’ve doubled as a bucket.
He took in the scene with more attention than I liked. I’d played against Brashe enough times to know he could read everything but pretended not to, because it was useful when people underestimated how much he noticed.
“Haley,” he said, and the warmth in his voice irked me. They knew each other, though I couldn’t tell if there was more to this than friendship.
And that irked me too.
“Tell me you went to the Pillage and Pastry. Tell me those are the ones with the berries that taste absolutely amazing.”
“They are.” She smiled at him. Not me. “I got two, though I already ate one.”
“You’re my favorite person today. I love those things.”
My growl ripped out.
Brashe went still.
Then he grinned, all tusks. “Tolrek. Good to see you. Settling in alright?”
“Fine.”
His grin was the worst part. He’d looked between us and come up with a theory and decided he liked it.
“Right.” He adjusted his bag and started toward the entrance. “I’ll leave you two alone. Seems like you’ve got things to discuss.”
The door swung shut behind him.
The silence after was worse than anything he could’ve said.
Haley shifted her weight from one foot to the other, glancing at me before looking away.
The door was three steps away. I strode toward it and held it open, gesturing for her to go ahead.
She blinked at me.
“Go,” I said.
She did as I asked.
I was angry with her, but I wasn’t going to snap. The instinct to make space for her was apparently nonnegotiable, regardless of how I felt about what she’d done, which irritated me more than my growl had.
She stopped inside and turned back, holding out the pastry bag.
“It’s raspberry,” she said. “The filling. My favorite. I don’t know what you like, however, but I took a chance this could be it.
There’s a big unruly glob of jam right in the center, and the dough on the outside shatters when you bite into it.
Megha, who runs the place, has three orclings who look exactly like her, and they all help on weekends. They’re…”
I didn’t say anything, though I did take the bag from her.
She looked at me like she wanted to explain and didn’t know how. I was angry about what she’d done and angrier that the explanation might actually matter.
“I should’ve told you who I was,” she finally said.
“Yes.”
“I didn’t because—” She shook her head, making her long brown hair shift across her shoulders. “You were talking to me like I was a regular person and I liked that. No one ever does.”
I understood. I might’ve done the same thing. But irritation still churned through me.
“I have practice.” Turning toward the locker room, I left her standing in the entryway.
I didn’t look back, though I did hold the pastry bag close to my chest to keep it from being crushed.
The locker room smelled different, though not bad.
Unfamiliar. Every building had its own scent, a combination of cleaning products and old gear and whatever the ventilation system did or didn’t manage.
This one was new, with an undercurrent of something I couldn’t place yet.
Hope, maybe, though that didn’t have a smell.
The other players moved around like they’d been here all their lives.
They knew which stalls had the best airflow, which showers ran hot longest, where to sit if you wanted to be part of the conversation, and where to sit if you didn’t.
I moved with the ease of someone who’d learned not to claim things prematurely.
A couple of players nodded at me.
I nodded back. This part I knew how to do.
My stall was third from the left, my name already printed on a placard above it. Someone in equipment had hung my jersey, number 4, same as always, and set out the rest of my gear in the configuration I’d requested. Small courtesies that mattered.
The Purple Punishers.
I sat, facing away from everyone, the pastry bag in my hand, staring down at it. I opened it carefully, as if it might bite, before pulling out the treat. Damn, it smelled amazing. I ate some before gobbling the rest down fast.
Then I carefully folded the empty bag and placed it inside my locker.
After gearing up in my padding, I tucked the bag inside the waistband of my compression pants. I was stupid to carry it around. I knew this. But I couldn’t hold back.
I pulled my new team jersey over my head, the weight of it settling on my shoulders. It felt different from my old one in ways that were purely physical. Also in ways that weren’t.
Fourteen minutes later, I was suited up and thinking about last night again despite every effort not to. I shoved the thoughts aside.
The first skate on new ice was always methodical. I stepped out of the tunnel and onto the new surface, doing my own circuits before drills began. Read the surface the way I’d read a play developing.
This I could control.
The rest of the team filtered out in clusters. Forwards grouped together while defensemen paired off. I stayed in my lane and focused on the ice and didn’t let myself look at the box yet.
I lasted about four minutes.
Haley sat there, in the second row, with her laptop open, already working. I didn’t look directly, but I was aware of where she was in the same way I was aware of where the net was. Peripheral vision and spatial sense. The kind of thing you couldn’t turn off even when you wanted to.
She was watching the entire rink, not specifically me, and I told myself that was fine.
Drills started. All teams did them at the start of camp to see who’d kept up their conditioning and who’d spent the summer pretending they would. I fell into the rhythm of it easily enough. My body knew what to do even when my head was somewhere else.
But our first full-contact drill made my problem impossible to ignore, because the hesitation was still there.
I felt it from the inside for the first time, and that was different.
Worse, actually. She’d seen it on tape before she’d met me and pointed it out like it was an observable fact, which it was.
But having it confirmed from the inside made it real in a way I hadn’t wanted to face.
A half a second before contact, I protected my left side. I retreated from hits I used to welcome.
She was right, and I was angrier about that than I was about her holding information back.
I played through it anyway, forcing myself into contact I’d been avoiding. It wasn’t elegant, but my defensive reads were still good. That part hadn’t left. I placed myself where I needed to be, cut off passing lanes, and made the plays I was supposed to make.
There was some comfort in that.
And then I was annoyed that I needed the comfort.
The coaches set things up, and we started playing seriously. I did well. Assisted two goals. Stopped three before they reached my side’s goalie. After missing the second half of last season, I was playing like myself again—the version of myself my last team had decided wasn’t worth waiting for.
Crim Lundrig hit the ice like he owned it.
Maybe he did. Star center, first line, and the team captain. The kind of player an organization built itself around, and he knew it. He had true talent, and he was accustomed to being the axis everything else rotated around. I’d played against him before.
He wasn’t dirty, but he was hard, especially with new acquisitions. Establishing hierarchy was part of the job, and Crim took his job seriously.
The scrimmage started, and I tracked him the way I did all centers, taking in the way he moved through space. He was good. No, better than good. He punished any mistake.
I was three strides into a gap close when my attention pulled toward the box.
That was all Crim needed.
The hit was hard, legal, and perfectly timed.
He caught me square across the chest and followed through with the kind of nudge that came from years of professional hockey.
I held my position. I didn’t go down. But the impact registered, rattling through my ribs and into my spine, and for a split second, I was just absorbing it.
I looked up at the box, giving in to the same involuntary pull.
Haley was watching, her expression neutral. But something moved underneath it. She’d seen exactly what had happened. She’d seen it in sequence.
Lapse first. Hit second.
I looked away and got back to the play.
I’d given Crim the opening. He was good enough that he didn’t need help, but I’d handed it to him anyway. This was sloppy on my part, the kind of thing that should get punished at this level.
I was already thinking about how Haley would log it. Whether she’d mark it as a positioning breakdown or read the sequence correctly. Part of me didn’t want her to read it correctly. That part wanted her to think I’d made a mistake instead of seeing the actual problem.
The other part of me knew she’d see it exactly right.
I didn’t want to care either way, but I did.
On my team, Crim was an asset, a player whose gravity pulled everything toward him. Including, presumably, the attention of the analyst in the box.
The coaches called a break.
Players milled around the bench, catching their breath. One of the assistant coaches gave me a tactical note about gap timing that I half-listened to while tracking the rest of the team.
Haley spoke to Mikael. He grinned up at her and said something I couldn’t hear. She laughed, the same one I’d heard last night. Mikael looked pleased with himself.
I told myself it didn’t matter if she laughed with someone else. I had no claim on her, though acknowledging it didn’t help. She hadn’t seemed impressed with him last night. She’d stood in the corner and been completely unaffected.
After we’d rested, they put me back on the ice for the scrimmage. I took to the ice and did my job. My control was better in the second half than the first. I was warming up to the new ice and my teammates, starting to know where they’d be. The way I’d told her I would.
The whistle blew, and the coach waved a few of us off. Time for a rotation.
I went back to the bench and sat, grabbing a towel and draping it over my head. I let the noise fade into the background. When I surfaced, she still sat above me, reviewing something on her screen.
I tugged the pastry bag from my waistband and laid it on the seat beside her.
“I love raspberry filling too,” I said, the words coming out gruff.