Beside me, Alois didn’t move.
Didn’t exhale.
Didn’t react at all.
If I hadn’t been watching him—if I hadn’t been paying attention the way I had been for weeks now—I might have believed it hadn’t touched him.
But I saw it.
The smallest drop in his shoulders. The slight release in his jaw. The way his hand flexed once against his knee before going still again.
Relief.
My chest tightened. Because it didn’t feel like relief.
Not really.
The court cleared him.
Clean. Clinical. Final.
And yet—I could already feel it.
The way the narrative would twist. The way the headlines would reshape themselves around something easier. Something louder. Something that didn’t require context or nuance or understanding.
The way this wouldn’t be over.
I turned my head slightly, just enough to look at Alois. He stared straight ahead, expression unchanged, posture as stiff as it had been the moment we walked in.
A man who had just been cleared of criminal charges and looked like it had cost him nothing at all.
And for the first time since this started, I understood something that settled deep and uneasy beneath my ribs.
The court had decided what Alois Müller wasn’t. He was not dangerous. A criminal. Nor Guilty.
But it hadn’t answered the part that mattered. The part I felt every time he stepped too close or not close enough, every time he looked at me like he saw something I hadn’t meant to show him, every time he did something that didn’t fit the version of him the world had already decided on.
I didn’t understand him.
Not even a little.
And sitting there, in a courtroom that had just cleared his name—I realized that might be the most dangerous part of all.
CHAPTER 17
ALOIS
By the middle of the second period, the building had stopped waiting for us to screw it up.
You could feel the difference. It lived in the sound first.
Not louder—not exactly. Talon Arena was always loud when the crowd had enough beer in them and something to believe in. But this was different. The kind of noise that came when people leaned forward instead of sitting back. When they finally stopped bracing for disappointment.
Every rush got bigger. Every clean breakout pulled more of them to their feet. Every time we forced a turnover through the neutral zone, the air inside the building tightened and lifted, anticipation rolling through the lower bowl in waves that made the glass hum.
My skates bit hard into the ice as I angled back into our zone, tracking the puck carrier through the right circle while the other team tried to force a lane that wasn’t there. He dropped a shoulder and looked middle, telegraphing the pass before he ever moved his stick.
I stepped into the lane and cut him off clean, shoulder tochest, the hit solid enough to jar through my own frame. Not open ice. Not highlight-reel violence. Just enough. A hard stop. A reminder. His breath left him in a rough grunt as the puck kicked loose along the boards.