The groan is collective, loud, broken. Helmets drop forward, sticks clatter against thighs, curses spill like blood.
I don’t repeat myself. I don’t need to.
Blue line. Red line. Far blue. End boards. Back again. Over and over until legs give out. Until lungs rip. Until every rookie remembers whose ice this is.
The vets pace themselves—controlled, steady, efficient. Cole still chirps every time he hits the boards—“Mats, slow down, I’m fragile!”—but his stride is clean. Viktor is a machine, expressionless, skating like he’s pulling the whole rink behind him. Mats keeps his shoulders loose, his lungs even. Shane’s twitching but he moves, like curses really will hold his legs together.
The rookies? They drown.
Tyler collapses on his third set, sprawling face-first across the circles. He claws back up, gasping like a landed fish, and I blow the whistle. He stumbles, but he keeps going. Good.
Elias doesn’t fall.
Not once.
He pushes like fire itself is eating his heels. Curls plastered to his forehead under the helmet, mouthguard clenched between his teeth, chest heaving so hard I can see the ribs under his pads. His strides are sloppy, his stops sudden enough to spray snow halfway across the rink, but he doesn’t stop.
Every time his knees threaten to buckle, he digs in harder. Every time his lungs hitch, he snaps his head up, grins like a devil, and pushes again. He’s breaking. I can see it—his legs trembling, sweat dripping, throat raw. He’s breaking and he doesn’t care.
Good.
Break for me.
The whistle keeps cutting. Blue line. Red. Blue. Boards. Again. Again. Again.
Tyler pukes first. Collapses against the glass, helmet tilted, heaving until he’s spitting yellow bile onto the ice. The vets don’t even look. They’ve all done it. Hazing doesn’t come from pranks—it comes from skating until you’re sick and still dragging your body back onto the line.
I don’t stop blowing the whistle.
Elias’s legs are gone by the fifteenth set. I see it when his stride falters, when his stick drags. But he doesn’t fall. He doesn’t puke. He doesn’t even slow down.
I watch him crawl through it, eyes wild through the cage of his helmet. He hits the boards, pushes off, legs trembling like they’re bone on bone. Every stride a miracle. Every gasp a fight. And still—he goes.
The team sees it. They’re slowing, panting, breaking down into steady collapse. Elias isn’t steady. He’s chaos, reckless, half-dead. But he won’t quit.
And that—
That makes me smile.
It’s cruel, quick. The kind of smile that freezes the whole bench. Cole sees it first, his mocking dying mid-sentence. Shane shuts up. Mats raises his brows like he knows exactly what it means. Even Viktor flicks his gaze toward me, grunts low under his breath.
Because they all know what it means when I smile.
It means someone’s been claimed.
The whistle cuts one last time. The sound echoes final. Everyone collapses where they stand—helmets hitting knees, gloves dropping to ice, curses spilling ragged. And Elias—
He’s bent double at the red line, lungs shredded. His hands shake where they clutch his knees. His whole body trembles like it’s one twitch from falling.
But he’s still grinning.
Green eyes bright. Wild. Locked straight on me.
He doesn’t say it. He doesn’t need to.
Was that good enough, sir?
I let the silence hang. Let the sound of them fill the rafters, let the weight of my smile sink into every one of them.
