We weren’t just a team. We were a fucking storm.
And I was about to tear the ice apart to make her proud.
The tension in the locker room buzzed like a live wire, coiled tight and ready to snap. Every breath felt electric. Skate blades scraped against rubber flooring. Sticks tapped in ritual. And underneath it all, that shared pulse between us—twenty men bracing for war.
Grayson leaned back against a row of lockers, arms folded and wearing that smug, shit-eating grin of his. “So,” he said loud enough for half the room to hear, “our fearless captain’s got his little brown-haired bunny up in the stands tonight, huh?”
I didn’t rise to it. Just tugged my jersey down over my pads, calm and collected—until I met his eyes and let the smirk spread. “She’s not so little when she’s riding me.”
Groans exploded from every direction.
“Jesus Christ, Maddox,” Drew muttered, shaking his head without looking up from taping his stick. “Save the visuals for your own nightmares.”
Grayson cackled and slammed his fist against the locker like he’d scored the winning goal right there. Rhys, predictably, was all cold steel and control, arms folded tight, scowl carved deep. “I don’t care who you’re fucking,” he said flatly. “You better win tonight.”
"I'm not just fucking her," I growled. "She's my fucking wife."
The laughter faded. That last word hit the room like a shot.
Win.
That was what this was about. Not Kennedy, not the jokes, not even pride. This was a reckoning.
I stood and let the silence wrap around me. The weight of the “C” on my chest felt heavier tonight. Felt earned.
“This isn’t just another game,” I said, voice low, measured. “The Scourge came to make us look weak. They want to humiliate us in our own rink. They want to take what’s ours.”
Every eye turned to me. Every body stilled.
“You gonna let that happen?” I asked.
A murmur of no’s, low and rough, stirred the air.
“Didn’t think so,” I said. I stepped forward, locking eyes with Axyl, then Drew, then Wyatt, one by one like I was loading a chamber. “So here’s what we do. We skate faster. Hit harder. Play meaner. We don’t just win.”
“We end them,” Luke said, voice sharp, posture tight like a bowstring.
Axyl whooped as he grabbed his stick. “Let’s crush ‘em! And somebody keep Castellan from committing arson this time.”
“I make no promises,” Dominic muttered, rolling his neck with a quiet crack. “Besides, they started it.”
Laughter rippled through the tension like a match sparking dry kindling, but the fire in the room didn’t die down. If anything, it sharpened.
This wasn’t just a team. This was a pack.
And I was the one leading them into the kill.
The arena pulsed around me like a living thing—blinding lights, bodies shouting, the boards trembling with every stomp. But none of it touched me. Not really.
Not once my eyes found her.
Kennedy sat high in the VIP box, legs crossed beneath the massive jersey swallowing her frame—my jersey. Number seventeen bold across her chest. The sleeves drowned her hands, and somehow, she still looked like the most dangerous thing in this building. Like she’d walked in wearing my name and hadn’t even realized the power of it.
My heart kicked against my ribs.
She smiled, leaning forward as the announcer’s voice boomed overhead, and everything inside me tightened. I didn’t hear the crowd. Didn’t care about the flash of cameras or the echo of my name on a hundred signs. It was her—only her—that had me gripping my stick harder, breath turning sharp behind my mouthguard.
She had no idea what she did to me. No idea what kind of beast she’d called to the surface just by being here.
