“His neighbor called emergency services around eight-thirty. Paramedics pronounced him at the scene. The police are treating it as an apparent suicide, pending toxicology and a full investigation.”
“An investigation of what?” I asked, my brain struggling to navigate through the slush of emotions and words.
Ignatius sighed. I could hear it. “I’m sorry, but Gavin is dead.”
Chapter twenty-one
Game Misconduct - A serious penalty that results in a player being ejected from the game.
Taz
The road trip started in Vegas, but it was almost like I didn’t care.
Not the crowd—though they were loud enough, hostile in the way only a building full of fans who'd watched you celebrate on their ice ten days ago could be. Not the cold—my cold, the one that usually sharpened everything into crystal clarity the moment I settled into my crease. Not the rhythm of the game, the pulse and flow I'd been reading since I was sixteen years old and first realized the ice spoke to me in a language no one else could hear.
All I could feel was the absence of him.
Ok. Get some sleep yourself.The empty apartment.
I tried not to listen to the announcers, but it was hard.
“Well, with their last win, the Colorado Dragons are in a position to secure a wild card spot for the cup playoffs.”
I should have been ecstatic, but at that point, I didn’t care.
“And that’s huge for this team after the last few seasons they’ve had, Brian. But the job’s not finished. There are still a lot of games left on the schedule."
I sighed and tuned them out. Tapped my posts and settled.
The first shot beat me clean. A wrister from the top of the circle, nothing fancy, the kind of shot I stopped in my sleep. Except I wasn't sleeping. I wasn't even present. I was standing in a bar hallway listening to a man with a forgettable face explain, with the patient courtesy of someone dismantling a bomb, exactly how much it would cost me to love someone.
Walk away from Cinder Adair.
The puck hit the back of the net and the horn blared, and I didn't even flinch. I tapped my posts. Reset. Tried to find the cold place inside me where the goaltender lived—that clean, empty chamber of pure reaction where nothing existed except trajectory and timing.
It was gone. Filled with something hot and wretched that my dragon kept trying to freeze and couldn't.
"Everything okay, Rees?" Ash murmured as he skated past. I pretended not to hear him.
The second goal came four minutes later. A redirect off a screen that I should have tracked through traffic but didn't because my eyes kept drifting to the bench, to the medical staff area where Patel was sitting in the seat Cinder should have occupied, and the wrongness of that image was so visceral it made my chest physically ache.
Two-nothing. First period wasn't even half over.
Cole glanced at me during the TV timeout, and the look on his face—not anger, not frustration, just quiet, searching concern—made me want to crawl out of my own skin. He knew something was wrong. Of course he did. Cole read people the way I read shots, and I was broadcasting distress on every frequency.
I pulled my water bottle, squirted it over my face, and stared at the jumbotron without seeing it. The cold pressed against my ribs, restless and agitated, my dragon pacing in tight circles like a caged animal. It wanted Cinder. It wanted the steady warmth that anchored it, the heartbeat that matched its rhythm, the hands that touched without flinching. And I'd sent him away. Told him to sleep in his own apartment. Watched him offer me the exit and taken it like a coward because a man in a hallway had shown me a phone screen and saidforty-eight hours,and I'd believed—
No. I hadn't believed him. I'd calculated.
That was worse. Believing was passive. Calculating was a choice. I'd listened while he'd explained exactly what would happen. And the only variable I could control was distance.
So I'd created distance in the short space of a day. Inch by inch, text by text, silence by silence. Not because I'd stopped loving him—God, the opposite, the feeling was so enormous it was crushing me from the inside—but because loving him and keeping him close meant risking everything for everyone else.
I felt like I was dying.
The third goal was my fault in a way that was almost poetic. A two-on-one rush that I committed to too early, sliding across the crease when I should have held my ground, leaving the far post gaping like an open wound. The shooter didn't even have to pick his spot. He just put it where I wasn't, and the lamp lit up behind me for the third time, and the Seattle crowd roared with theparticular delight of an arena watching a goaltender come apart in real time.
Three-nothing. Halfway through the second period.