"Yeah." Elise took a pull from her water bottle and squeezed it until the plastic crackled. Wiped her chin guard with the back of her glove. Stared at the ice. Waited for her name to be called.
When her next shift came, she threw herself into it. She won three consecutive board battles in the offensive zone, using her body to shield the puck and her stick to direct the play, and whenshe came off the ice Lou caught her eye and gave her a nod. Not as visible as the one Mara had given Lex, but from Lou Calder, it was practically a standing ovation.
The first period ended scoreless. Both teams retreated to their locker rooms, and Elise sat in her stall and stared at the floor and tried to loosen the tension that had taken up residence between her shoulder blades. Across the room, Lex was laughing with Camille, helmet off, dark hair damp with sweat. The easy confidence of someone who didn't have to worry about where she stood.
Elise pulled her water bottle from the shelf and drank half of it without tasting anything.
The game tightened as the periods wore on. Toronto had brought a physical system, heavy and grinding, and they weren't shy about using it. Their forwards drove into the corners with shoulders first. Their defencemen finished every check. And their centre, a tall woman named Kowalski with a broken nose and dead-eyed focus, was camping in the Valkyries' zone like she planned to file a lease.
Kowalski had been targeting Elise since the opening whistle. Not Lex, not Camille, not any of the players who scored the goals and grabbed the headlines. Elise. Because Elise was the one who won the faceoffs and controlled the pace and disrupted the cycles, and Kowalski was smart enough to know that if you broke the engine, the machine stopped.
Stick taps on her shins during stoppages. Shoulder bumps after the play was blown dead. A glove shoved into the back of Elise's helmet during a scrum along the boards. The persistent, low-grade harassment that referees ignored and opponents felt in their bones. Every time Elise set up in the faceoff circle, Kowalski was there, leaning in, breath hot and sour behind her cage.
"Scared to take a hit, Moreno?"
Elise said nothing. She won the faceoff, clean and sharp, and sent the puck back to Lou without giving Kowalski the satisfaction of eye contact.
But Kowalski kept coming. On the next shift, she drove Elise into the boards after the puck was gone, a late hit that sent Elise's helmet rattling against the glass. The crowd booed, a sharp burst of collective anger that rose and fell like a wave. The ref's arm stayed down.
Elise peeled herself off the boards. Her back ached where the crosscheck had landed and the glass had left a cold stripe along her cheek. She kept playing.
She wasn't the type to retaliate. Never had been. Growing up, she'd watched her father absorb one frustration after another without complaint. Late payments from clients. A herniated disc he couldn't afford to treat. Her sister Sophie's orthodontics bill. He'd just kept going, kept working, kept doing the next thing that needed doing. Elise had inherited that. The quiet endurance. The refusal to let anyone see her break.
Lou always said Elise was the team's anchor, the player everyone counted on to keep things steady when the game got ugly. And Elise took the compliment at face value, because it was true. But sometimes being an anchor just meant staying in one place while everyone else moved.
The second period ground on. Toronto scored first on a deflection that bounced off Dani's pad and trickled over the line, a garbage goal that felt like a gut punch. The crowd went quiet. On the bench, Mara's jaw tightened. Elise stared at the scoreboard and the 0-1 and the anger in her chest burned hotter.
But the Valkyries responded. Camille buried a power play goal off a gorgeous pass from Rowan Pike, the puck rocketing past the Toronto goalie's glove into the top corner. The arena exploded. Camille slid to her knees, arms spread, blonde hair flying, and the rest of the team piled onto her against the boards.Even Mara pumped her fist behind the bench. The score levelled at 1-1.
The arena was loud and tense, an atmosphere that made the ice feel smaller and the stakes feel larger. Elise's legs were heavy with the deep muscular fatigue that came from playing a physical game at full intensity. Her lower back ached from Kowalski's earlier crosscheck. Her mouth tasted of the rubber guard she'd been biting down on since the first period. But she kept pushing. Kept grinding through shifts. Kept winning board battles with positioning and timing because that was what she did and it was all she knew how to do.
Kowalski caught her again in the neutral zone. A crosscheck to the lower back that the ref missed. Pain shot up Elise's spine, bright and sharp, and she gritted her teeth and kept skating. The frustration was building behind her sternum, a hot pressure she normally kept buried. This game mattered. Every game mattered. Every shift was an audition now, whether Mara admitted it or not.
She was not going to let a cheap-shot artist from Toronto take her off her game.
Dani Petrovic made two enormous saves in the final minutes of the second period, her tall frame sprawling across the crease, and the crowd chanted her name as the buzzer sounded. Elise skated past her and tapped her pads. Dani held her ground in the crease, unshakeable.
In the intermission, Mara stood at the whiteboard in the locker room and talked through adjustments. More pressure on the forecheck. Tighter gaps in the neutral zone. She looked at Elise. "Moreno, I need you winning draws in the offensive zone. You're at sixty-two percent on faceoffs tonight. Keep that up."
Elise nodded. Sixty-two percent. Better than Lex. At least there was that.
The third period started, and Elise won another faceoff. She directed the puck to Lou, who fired it up the boards, and Elise chased the play, cutting between two Toronto defenders. The lane opened up. Clear ice in front of her. She reached for the puck, weight shifting forward, shoulder exposed.
Kowalski came from the blind side.
The check was late. It was high. It was illegal. And Kowalski had been building toward it all night, each dirty hit a little harder than the last, escalating toward a hit that wouldn't stop at a warning.
Elise didn't see it coming. She was reaching forward, weight on her front foot, stick extended, every line of her body committed to the play. Kowalski drove into her from behind with a full-body hit that caught her high on the left side, all shoulder and hip, and sent her airborne. The arena spun. She was airborne and the lights blurred into streaks of white and the crowd noise went distant and strange, as if someone had plunged her head underwater. The rafters, the banners, the Jumbotron cycling through an ad for a car dealership, all of it rotating above her. Then she hit the ice on her left side, her full weight landing on her outstretched arm, and her shoulder buckled underneath her with a wet, grinding pop that she heard before she felt.
Then she felt it.
White-hot. The pain radiated from her shoulder down through her arm and up into her neck and there was nothing else, no game, no score, no crowd, nothing except the ice against her cheek and the agony pulsing through her in waves. She couldn't breathe. The air had been knocked out of her lungs and all she could do was lie there, curled on her side, her left arm pinned beneath her at an angle that was wrong.
The arena went quiet. Not silent, but the roar dropped to a held breath, twenty thousand people recognising at once thatsomething was wrong. Elise lay on the ice and the cold crept through her jersey into her ribs and she could smell the ice itself, that clean mineral nothing, and taste copper at the back of her throat. The overhead lights were too bright. The scoreboard was a blur of numbers she couldn't read.
The ref's whistle, sharp and final. The scrape of skates rushing toward her, and somewhere behind all of it the low murmur of a crowd waiting to exhale. Frankie was swearing somewhere. Dani Petrovic was shouting from the net. Then Lou's face appeared above her, dark eyes tight with concern, short dark hair sticking to her forehead with sweat.
"Elise. Don't move."