The door closed behind him. My mother dissolved into fresh sobs.
I found the bathroom and closed the door behind me.
The mirror was smudged, water-spotted, the kind of cheap glass that distorted everything slightly. I looked at myself in it and waited to see my mother's chaos staring back. The wildness and the lack of control, the thing I'd always been afraid lived inside me, waiting to get out.
Instead, I saw my father.
Calm. Composed. Not a hair out of place despite what I'd just done, my breathing even, my hands steady. The only sign that anything had happened was a faint redness across my knuckles that would fade by morning.
I ran the water and washed my hands. The cut on my forearm needed attention. Kevin's knife had caught me before I'd gotten it away from him, a shallow slice that had bled through my sleeve. I found a first aid kit under the sink, cleaned the wound, bandaged it neatly, and pulled my sleeve down to cover the evidence.
In the other room, my mother had stopped crying. She was moving around now, probably pouring herself a drink, probablyalready rewriting the story in her head so that none of this was her fault.
I checked my phone. Three missed calls from Natalia, probably wondering why I wasn't on the plane. A text from my father that I deleted without reading. And the time: 9:47 PM.
The game had started almost three hours ago. It was probably over by now, or close to it. Red had played without me in the stands, had done whatever impossible thing he'd done tonight, and I'd missed all of it because my mother had called and I'd answered.
I always answered.
My phone buzzed in my hand. Natalia again.
I picked up. "Hey. Sorry, I got—"
"Joel." Her voice was wrong, tight in a way I'd never heard before. "Something bad happened. There was a scramble in front of the net. Red went down." She paused, and the pause was worse than the words. "Joel, there was blood. A lot of blood. They stopped the game."
"Where is he?"
"Sunrise Hospital. I think."
I was already moving out of the bathroom, past my mother on the couch, out the door without saying goodbye.
"His hand," Natalia said. "I think it was his hand. Joel, slow down. You can't help him if you wrap your car around a pole."
She was right. My chest was too tight, and my hands were shaking on the wheel, and the cut on my forearm had started bleeding again. I forced myself to ease off the gas, to take a breath, to think.
Natalia gave me the address. I followed the blue line through streets I didn't recognize, past casinos and strip clubs, and twenty-four-hour wedding chapels. Vegas at night was a fever dream, all that desperate glitter, and somewhere in the middle of it Red was bleeding.
I'd been fifteen minutes away.
The hospital parking lot was chaos. News vans had already gathered near the emergency entrance, cameras and reporters hoping for footage of hockey players arriving to check on their teammate. I parked in the back of the lot and sat there for a moment, trying to figure out my next move.
I couldn't walk through the front. Someone might recognize me, might wonder why Joel Coffey was at a Vegas hospital the same night an Aces player got injured. The connection would be thin, but thin connections were how secrets unraveled.
I pulled my hood up and found a side entrance. The hallways were bright and antiseptic, full of that particular hospital smell of cleaning solution and something underneath it that no amount of cleaning could touch. I followed signs toward the emergency department and tried to look like I belonged there.
The waiting room was half full. Families clustered in plastic chairs, some crying, some staring at phones, all of them waiting for news about people they loved.
I walked up to the desk.
"I'm here for Robert Piper," I said. "He was brought in from the arena."
The woman behind the counter didn't look up from her screen. "Are you family?"
The word caught in my throat. What was I? What could I claim?
"I'm a friend."
"Only family can go back right now. You're welcome to wait."
