Beside me, Marco had gone very still.
“Better turn tonight around, Savard,” Boucher added,pushing off his stall. “Hard to trade a guy who’s actually producing. But a first-liner who plays like a fourth-liner?” He shrugged. “That’s just dead weight.”
He turned his back on me, leaving his words hanging in the suddenly quiet locker room.
I grabbed my phone from my bag with shaking hands. Pulled up social media. And there it was, posted six hours ago:
Hearing Colorado Glaciers taking calls on RW Étienne Savard.
The tweet had two thousand retweets. Five hundred comments. Everyone had seen this. Everyone except me.
“Étienne.” Marco appeared beside me, his voice quiet.
I couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t look at anyone. Just stared at my phone, at the words that might be a death sentence for my time in Colorado.
“Forget about it,” Kinnunen said from across the room. “Just noise. Play your game tonight.”
It wasn’t noise, though. If Bob Macaulay was reporting it, it was real. I swallowed the lump in my throat and tossed my phone into my duffel.
“Ready?” I asked.
“Let’s go.”
But I wasn’t ready. The trade rumors sat in my chest like a stone, and no amount of adrenaline could shake them loose.
I played terribly—two turnovers, no shots on goal, minus-one. The electricity I’d hoped for never came, and Marco’s disappointed glare stabbed me in the gut when Morrison scored off a pass just as I’d been warned. By the third period, Coach had cut my ice time.
In the locker room after we lost, no one said anything. They didn’t have to.
The post wasn’t just a rumor anymore. It was a prophecy.
CHAPTER THREE
Marco
My phone lit up on the nightstand at 11:52 p.m., the vibration loud in the dark silence of my bedroom.
I grabbed it automatically, my heart kicking up the way it did with late-night calls. Nothing good ever happened after eleven. Late-night calls meant injuries, family emergencies, or?—
“Étienne?” I sat up, fully awake now. “What’s wrong?”
“Hey, man, I’m fine, everything’s fine…” His voice was tight, strained in a way that meant everything was definitely not fine. “Well, not fine exactly, but I’m okay. I just—there was a fire.”
My stomach dropped. “What?”
“Electrical fire in the apartment next to mine. Building’s evacuated. Fire department’s still here, they’re—” He broke off, and I heard sirens in the background, the crackle of radio chatter. “They’re saying my place has smoke damage throughout. Can’t go back in yet.”
I was already out of bed, pacing my bedroom floor. My chest felt tight and my mind raced through every terriblepossibility. Fire. Étienne’s apartment building. If the fire had spread differently, if he’d been fast asleep, if?—
“Are you hurt?” My voice came out sharper than I meant it to.
“No, I’m good. I smelled smoke and heard the smoke detectors. Got out of there fast.”
Thank God.
He let out a shaky laugh. “Scared the shit out of me, not gonna lie.”
I pressed my palm against my chest and tried to slow my speeding heart. The relief was so intense it almost hurt. He was okay. He was safe. Everything else could be dealt with.
