Too Many Men - A penalty for having more than the allowed number of players on the ice.
Taz
I woke to the sound of rain.
Not the aggressive, hammering kind that rattled windows and sent people scrambling for umbrellas—this was the slow, steady kind that turned Denver into something softer. Gray light filtered through the curtains, and for a disoriented moment, I couldn't figure out why the bed felt different. Why the sheets smelled like eucalyptus instead of nothing.
Then the weight against my chest shifted, and everything came back.
Cinder was still asleep. He was sprawled across me like a human blanket, one arm flung over my ribs, his cheek pressed to the hollow beneath my collarbone. His breathing was slow and even, his body radiating the kind of warmth that made my dragon curl up and refuse to move.
I lay perfectly still, afraid that even breathing too deeply would wake him.
This was new. Not the physical proximity—we'd shared a bed before, in hotels and in the aftermath of crises—but the quality of it. The ease. Last night something had shifted between us, some final barrier dissolving, and the space it left behind felt vast and terrifying and exactly right.
I watched the rain trace patterns down the window and let myself feel it.
The word I couldn't say. The one that sat behind my teeth every time he looked at me, every time his warm hands found my cold skin and didn't flinch. It wasn't the human word—notmate, though that was there too, humming constantly now like a frequency I couldn't turn off. This was the dragon word. The one that should have been easier to say but somehow wasn't, because I'd never said it to anyone, and the thought of saying it to him and watching his face change—
The memory came without warning.
Not of battle. Not of the rink. Not of blood or frost.
Of a kitchen table.
Of hands far older and softer than my own wrapping around a chipped ceramic mug.
Emile had told me the story on a night when I was barely fifteen and already too controlled for a boy my age.
“You think you don’t feel things,” Emile had said, watching me with those patient brown eyes. “But you do. You just bury them in ice.”
I hadn’t answered. We talked hockey. We talked everyday life. We never talked dragons.
“That’s the trouble with your kind,” Emile continued gently. “You mistake endurance for solitude.” We’d been quiet for a while.
“There’s an old Icelandic word,” Emile had said. “Ástmaki.” He’d pronounced it carefully. “AUST-mah-kee.”
I’d frowned. “What does it mean?”
“Love-mate,” Emile replied. “But not in the way humans use it. Not temporary. Not convenient.” He’d leaned back in his chair, smiling faintly. “The old stories say an ice dragon’s heart is wrapped in living frost. Untouchable. Until the Ástmaki comes.”
In typical but rare-for-me teenage fashion, I’d rolled my eyes at that. “I don’t need someone to thaw me.”
Emile had laughed softly. “It isn’t about thawing, Taranis. It’s about balance. The one heartbeat that steadies yours when the storm inside you rises.”
I remembered staring into the fire, irritated by the idea.
Weakness.
Dependence.
Danger.
“What happens,” I’d asked finally, “if the dragon never finds one?”
Emile’s answer had been quiet. “Then he survives. But he does not live.”
Ástmaki.