Sound boomed from all sides at once, massive and physical, a wall of it crashing down from the rafters and rolling across the ice in a way that made everything inside me lock tighter instead of loosening. Gloves slapped against helmets. Sticks hammered the boards. Ty threw his head back and screamed something lost completely in the noise while Liam got mobbed near the circle by half our bench spilling over the boards.
I coasted backward toward the blue line, scanning the ice automatically while the celebration unfolded in front of me.
Three-one.
Halfway through the second.
And for the first time in a long time, it didn’t feel fragile.
I turned toward the bench on the change, lungs pulling in cold air so sharp it burned all the way down. Sweat had collected under my pads, along my spine, behind my knees, trapped heat meeting arena chill until my body felt split in two—freezing and overheated at once. The shift had been long enough to leave my thighs humming, that deep, familiar ache settling into muscle and tendon, but it was clean pain. Honest pain. The kind I never minded.
As I stepped over the boards, Rawlings was there at the far end of the bench near the tunnel entrance, suit perfect, expression sour.
He said nothing while I sat, only watched the ice with his arms folded and his mouth set hard enough to crack teeth. The overhead lights caught in the silver at his temples. Everything about him looked expensive and irritated.
I reached for my water bottle, tipped it back, and let the cold hit my tongue. Plastic. Electrolytes. A faint taste of old rubber from my mouthguard.
On the scoreboard above center, the replay rolled again—Ty’s zone entry, Liam’s finish, the crowd losing its mind. Then the camera cut, because of course it did, to me.
Not live action. Not this period.
Footage from two weeks ago.
A frozen frame of me outside the courthouse in a dark coat with cameras in my face and my jaw locked like I was trying not to put my fist through a wall.
The arena reaction came in pieces.
A few boos out of habit. More cheers than there would have been before. A weird split sound, divided and uncertain,before the feed shifted away again fast enough to suggest someone upstairs had realized it was a stupid idea.
My grip tightened around the bottle.
Rawlings didn’t look at me. “Enjoying your welcome-back tour?”
I put the cap back on and set the bottle down between my skates. “Wasn’t aware I’d gone anywhere.”
His mouth flattened further. “Cute.”
The play had already restarted. Cam was out there now, settling things down from the back end with that sharp, stripped-down efficiency of his. No wasted movement. No drama. Just command. He took the puck behind our net, absorbed forecheck pressure, and moved it up clean to Erik, who sent it off glass and out.
Textbook.
The building roared for that too.
That was how starved they’d been.
Rawlings glanced toward the ice and then finally down at me, gaze cool and cutting. “One ruling doesn’t erase the problem.”
I said nothing.
He seemed to like that less. “Don’t mistake a good night for safety, Müller.”
There it was. Not even subtle.
I leaned forward with my forearms on my thighs, gloves hanging loose between my knees, eyes still on the ice. “You always this inspiring during games, or am I getting special treatment?”
“Special treatment seems to be your thing lately.”
Around us, the bench stayed loud in the usual ways—guys calling changes, sticks knocking the boards, coaches barking adjustments—but that sentence sat apart from all of it. A knife slid in under cover of normalcy.