Even Viktor leans in, towering and quiet, placing one massive hand on my shoulder with a gravity that sinks straight through bone.
I’m surrounded, completely engulfed by them, all of them, every single one, reaching out in their own broken way, but it doesn’t help, and I still can’t stop shaking. Because the fear inside me isn’t just a feeling anymore. It’s a creature now. Alive and hungry and tearing through every inch of me. Clawing at my ribs. Gnawing at my gut. Whispering every nightmare I’ve ever had straight into the hollow spaces behind my eyes.
What if Damian doesn’t make it. What if the last thing I said wasn’t enough. What if—Another sob rips free, violent and uncontrollable, like something inside my chest tore loose and doesn’t know how to fit back in.
Cole pulls me closer, presses my forehead to his neck, and rocks me hard enough to jolt air back into my lungs. “Don’t you dare,” he mutters fiercely into my hair. “Don’t you dare bury him before they tell us anything.”
I cling to him and cry until I can’t anymore.
Coach shows up like a thunderstorm. A door swinging open so violently it rattles the wall, and Coach McClellan storms down the hallway like he’s ready to sue god for touching one of his boys.
He sees us—sees me, curled in Cole’s lap, shaking and soaked in tears—and his whole face twists. Like he’s going to kill. He drops to one knee beside me, growls something low and furious, “Fucking hell, Mercer” and then plants a hand on my head, checking I’m still breathing.
I am. Barely. A flicker of something still upright, still pretending not to shatter.
I don’t know how long I stay there. Curled in on myself, pressed to Cole’s chest, arms locked around his ribs. I’m crying, but the tears don’t even feel real anymore, just warm streaks down frozen skin, leaking from a place too deep to touch. There’s nothing left to do but breathe and break and exist in this horrible, unbearable stillness.
Cole doesn’t speak, none of them do, and it feels like hours—the kind of time that bends and twists and loops back on itself—maybe it really is hours, maybe it’s longer, maybe it never ends.
I don’t even remember falling asleep. Just Cole’s fingers in my curls, murmuring absolute bullshit in my ear, “You’re prettier than every nurse in here,” and, “Bet he’s fighting the scalpel toget back to you faster,” and, “If you pass out on me, you better be dreaming about me in a tux, asshole.”
I remember the warmth.
Then—BANG. The surgery doors swing open.
I jerk up, slamming back into consciousness with a violent gasp. My legs tangle in Cole’s, I scramble to stand, but my knees don’t work—my body doesn’t work—and I faceplant straight onto the hospital floor.
It doesn’t even hurt. The numbness is absolute, wrapped around me. I barely register the movement when a man steps out through the sliding doors, scrubs wrinkled, mask pulled down around his neck. His face is pale, drawn tight with exhaustion. A doctor. One of the ones who’s been hiding behind silence for hours.
His voice is flat, stripped of comfort by too many conversations like this. “Damian Kade’s family?”
Everything in me snaps to attention. I’m on my feet before the sentence finishes. The blood drains from my face so fast it makes me sway. The hallway around us freezes like someone hit pause on the world. My team holds their breath. So do I.
The doctor swallows, his throat bobbing like he doesn’t want to be here either. “I’m sorry—”
No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no—
I don’t hear the rest. I won’t hear the rest. Because I’m sorry is what they always say first. It’s the prelude. The drumbeat before the execution. It comes before we did everything we could. It comes before he didn’t make it. It comes before I lose him.
And that’s the moment my lungs stutter and my ribs start to crack open.
“Unfortunately…” the doctor goes on, softer now, each word wrapped in something careful and quiet, like he knows he just shattered five lives with one sentence. “His hockey career is over.”
There’s a pause—a beat of silence so thick I could drown in it—before he says, “But he’s alive.”
The world tilts on its axis. The floor pitches beneath my feet, and my ears start ringing so loud I can’t tell if it’s from the relief or the fury or both. The scream I was about to unleash—something guttural and grief-stricken—dies in my throat, swallowed by shock. It curls tighter, until it burns.
And then it hits me. The rage. The sheer, blistering audacity of those words. He let me think Damian was dead. He let me spiral. He led withsorry.
I lunge.
Cole yells. Viktor shouts. Coach doesn’t move fast enough to stop me. I grab the doctor by the front of his scrubs, slam him into the wall so hard the crash echoes, and scream in his face—“WHO STARTS WITH ‘I’M SORRY’???” My voice shatters the hallway. “WHO DOES THAT? ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND?!”
I’m shaking. “HE’S ALIVE—YOU START WITH THAT!” I scream again, so raw it hurts. “YOU DON’T—” I choke, cough, rage turning into grief again. “You don’t do that. You don’t—”
Hands grab me, multiple sets, firm and fast and familiar, with Coach first, rough and commanding, barking orders without words as Viktor follows with brute strength and quiet restraint, arms like steel hauling me away from the target, and Cole anchoring behind me, wrapping around my middle with the kind of grip meant to stop hurricanes, all of them together dragging me back and grounding me before I can do something I won’t come back from.
But it doesn’t stop the fire.
