Marco held his hands up in mock surrender, grin still in place but dimmed just enough to acknowledge the line. “What? I’m applauding the man.”
Cam’s gaze slid to me then, sharp and assessing. “You done making this about you?” he asked.
I lifted my head. Cam held my gaze for a beat longer than most people would’ve been comfortable with, then looked away first, already turning back to his stall like the conversation had served its purpose.
“You know,” Marco added, unable to help himself, “most people try to avoid being the story before a road game.”
“I’m not most people,” I huffed.
Marco’s grin flickered, satisfaction passing through it before he dipped his head in acknowledgment.
The room settled back into motion around us, but it didn’t return to normal. Not completely. Conversations restarted in pockets. Gear shifted. Someone tapped a stick twice against the floor, the sound echoing briefly before getting swallowed by everything else.
I finished lacing my skate and pulled it tight, locking it down with a firm tug that grounded through my forearms. The pressure felt right. Familiar. Something I could hold on. I stood, testing my weight, the blade biting slightly into the rubber mat beneath me. My hands flexed once inside my gloves, leather creaking faintly, the padding pressing against my knuckles.
Across the room, Zee said something too fast, too loud, trying to fill space that didn’t need filling. Buzz laughed. Someone else told him to shut up. It blurred together, background noise I didn’t need to track.
I exhaled slowly through my nose and grabbed my stick, the familiar grip settling into my hand. Tape rough, worn exactly where it needed to be. The balance of it sat clean through my palm, an extension of something that had always made more sense than anything off the ice ever had.
“Five,” Coach called from the doorway. “We’re moving.”
Benches creaked. Gear snapped into place. Conversations cut clean. The room shifted from loose to locked in seconds.
I stepped forward with the rest of them, blades clicking against the floor as we filed toward the tunnel, the noise compressing into something tighter, more focused with every step.
As I passed the threshold, the air cooled, the concrete beneath my skates less forgiving. The sounds changed—echoed sharper, voices bouncing off the walls in clipped bursts.
Ahead, the tunnel opened toward the ice, light spilling in cold and bright, the distant roar of the crowd already building, thick and alive.
I didn’t look back. Whatever was off—whatever had shifted—stayed buried where it belonged.
The arena noise came down on us all at once, a full-body impact—twenty thousand voices layered over each other until it stopped sounding like people and started sounding like pressure. It vibrated through the glass, skittered across the ice, straight into my chest as I pushing off to take my first stride, legs opening up into something that should have felt automatic.
I circled once, scanning without thinking, trackingmovement in patterns I’d read a thousand times before. Jerseys, spacing, angles, weight shifts. It was all there, all familiar, all predictable in the way high-level hockey always was.
And yet—something sat half a step out of place.
The Otters didn’t warm up like a team going through motions. They moved like a unit.
Pucks changed clean, no hesitation, no wasted touches. Lines rotated without needing direction. Communication happened without voices—shoulders shifting, heads turning, small adjustments that kept everything connected.
There were no gaps. No one trying to do too much. No one compensating for someone else.
I slowed near the boards, rolling my head slightly, grip tightening slightly on my stick as I watched them cycle through another drill without breaking rhythm.
“Enjoying the show?” Oliver muttered as he skated past, bumping my glove lightly with his.
“Always,” I snickered.
He huffed a quiet breath that might have been a laugh, might have been something else, and pushed off toward his line.
The horn cut through the ice a second later, sharp and final.
The first shift told me everything I needed to know.
They came out fast. Not frantic. Not reckless. Unwavering in the way that came from knowing exactly where everyone was supposed to be before the puck even dropped.
Face off snapped back clean to their defense. No bobble. One touch to the weak side, immediate pressure up the boards, and we were already reacting instead of initiating.