"The Colorado Dragons win three-two in Nashville, and their playoff hopes are ALIVE!"
I was somewhere at the bottom of the pile, helmet knocked sideways, gloves gone, my teammates' weight pressing me into the ice in a way that should have been uncomfortable but felt instead like being held. Like being claimed. Like belonging to something bigger than the cold and the fear and the four days I'd spent trying to convince myself that distance was the same thing as safety.
When they finally let me up, I stood on shaking legs and looked across the ice toward the bench.
Cinder was on his feet. His tablet was on the floor. His hands were pressed over his mouth, and even from this distance, I could see that his eyes were bright and his shoulders were trembling.
He wasn't smiling. He was trying not to fall apart.
That made two of us.
I raised my hand. Just once. A small gesture that could have been for the crowd, for the team, for anyone watching. But it wasn't. It was for him. Only for him.
And when his hands came down from his face and he pressed one palm flat against his chest, right over his heart, I felt the cold inside me crack open and bloom into something that wasn't cold at all.
Chapter twenty-four
Hat Trick - When a player scores three goals in a single game.
Cinder
The tunnel was chaos.
Equipment staff dodging around each other with armfuls of tape and towels. A camera crew backing up against the wall to let players through. The particular post-victory electricity that turned concrete corridors into something almost alive, voices bouncing off every surface, sticks clattering, someone's music already blaring from the locker room.
I walked straight into it.
Not the measured, careful walk of a medical professional maintaining composure. Not the tentative approach of a manwho'd spent four days convincing himself he wasn't wanted. I walked like someone who'd just watched the person they loved score a goal from two hundred feet away and realized, with the force of revelation, that distance was not a treatment plan. It was a disease. And I was done being sick with it.
The locker room door was propped open. The noise hit me like a wall. Eighteen guys in various states of undress, shouting over each other, replaying the goal from every conceivable angle, Ember doing what appeared to be a reenactment using a water bottle as the puck and his shoe as the stick. Max was filming it on his phone. Cole was leaning against his stall with his arms crossed, grinning in that quiet, private way he had when he was genuinely happy and didn't want to make a spectacle of it.
Taz was in the far corner.
He'd gotten his helmet off but nothing else. Still in full pads, chest protector, the works. His dark hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat, his beard damp, his eyes that impossible gray-blue that shifted depending on the light and his mood. Right now, they were somewhere between storm and silver, and they found me the instant I crossed the threshold.
The room didn't go quiet. That would have been too neat, too cinematic. Ember kept talking. Max kept filming. The music kept pounding from someone's speaker. The world didn't pause for us.
But Taz went still. The particular stillness I'd learned to read over months of mapping his body, the one that meant his dragon had locked onto something and the rest of him was catching up. His gloves were off. His hands hung at his sides, bare and pale, and I could see the faint shimmer of frost still clinging to his knuckles.
I didn't stop walking.
I crossed the room. Past Ember's reenactment. Past Ash, who glanced up and then very deliberately looked away. Past Cole,who straightened slightly and then smiled, small and knowing, and shifted to give me a clear path.
Taz watched me come. He didn't move. Didn't reach for me. Didn't do any of the things I'd spent four days wishing he would do and hating myself for wanting. He just stood there, chest still heaving from the game, and let me close the distance he'd created.
I stopped in front of him. Close enough to feel the cold radiating off his skin. Close enough to see the red rims of his eyes and the way his jaw was clenched so tight a muscle jumped in his cheek. Close enough to catalogue every sign of exhaustion and pain and something raw and desperate underneath it all that he was trying, even now, to hold behind the goaltender's mask.
"You scored a goal," I said.
His voice came out rough, scraped bare. "I did."
"From your own crease."
"Apparently."
"That's not a normal thing goalies do."
"No." Something cracked in his expression. A fissure, thin and bright, running through the composure like light through ice. "Cinder—"