I dropped my gloves. The right glove hit the ice first, the catching glove, the tool I'd spent seventeen years training, worthmore to my career than any other piece of equipment. Then the blocker. My bare hands found Thompson's jersey, the rough weave of the away sweater, the ridge of his shoulder pads beneath, and I pulled him toward me.
His surprise became understanding. His training kicked in. He dropped his own gloves and threw a punch that caught my helmet and snapped my head sideways, the force of it ringing through the cage and into my skull. Stars. Brief, bright, irrelevant. I didn't feel them. I didn't feel anything except the focused, burning certainty that this man had hurt Nico and I was going to make him regret it with every cell in my body.
My fist connected with his jaw. The impact was nothing like a save, not clean, not controlled, not the precise geometry of a puck meeting leather. This was raw. Knuckle against bone. The shock traveled up my forearm and into my shoulder. Thompson's head snapped back. Blood appeared at the corner of his mouth.
He hit me in the ribs, a hook that drove through my chest protector and found the soft tissue beneath. I grunted, absorbed it, and held on. I hit him again. His nose this time, or his cheek—it was hard to tell through the adrenaline and the blood and the roar of the crowd that had risen to its feet around us like a tide.
"You don't touch him!" The words tore out of me, raw and furious. "You don't fucking touch him!"
Thompson threw another punch. I took it on the shoulder and drove my fist into his sternum. He doubled forward. Linesmen were there now, arms wrapping around my chest, around my shoulders, hauling me backward. More arms around Thompson, pulling us apart. The ice between us was spotted with blood, drops of red on the white surface.
Game misconduct. Ejection. The words from the referee's mouth were distant and bureaucratic. Irrelevant. The penaltythat would cost us our starting goalie for the rest of a playoff-clinching game.
At the boards, I looked back.
Nico was on his feet. The trainer was beside him, a hand on his shoulder, but Nico wasn't looking at the trainer. He was looking at me.
His hand was on his shoulder where Thompson had hit him. His face was a wreck—not from injury but from emotion. The mask was completely gone, every defense shattered. His eyes were bright, his lips were parted.
The look lasted half a second. Maybe less. A fraction of a heartbeat in a game that moved at thirty miles an hour.
But it contained everything. Every 3 AM conversation, every shared silence, every night on the floor and in the bed, and in the space between hiding and being seen. It said,You just did that for me.It said,Everyone saw.It said,I love you too.
I let the officials guide me into the tunnel. The door closed behind me. The arena noise became a muffled roar.
I sat on the bench in the tunnel corridor, my bare hands bloody, my ribs aching from Thompson's hook, my heart hammering.
Abbott stepped into the tunnel, already adjusting his mask. Backup goalie. My replacement.
"Nice fight," he said mildly, pulling on his glove. "Should I assume this means you're not filing that monitoring report?"
I almost laughed. "Win the game, Abbott."
He nodded and walked toward the ice. At the door, he paused. "For what it's worth, nobody on the bench was surprised."
He disappeared onto the ice.
The Storm won 3-2. Without their starting goalie.
20
NICO
The locker room after a playoff-clinching win was a specific kind of chaos, primal and joyful, the release of months of pressure condensed into a single room. Music was blasting from someone's speaker. Volkov was dousing Eriksson with water. Theo was bear-hugging everyone within reach, his dimples threatening to split his face in half.
I sat in my stall and pressed an ice pack to my lower back where Thompson's cross-check had left a bruise the shape and color of a storm cloud.
Bishop dropped onto the bench beside me.
He was still in his equipment, shoulder pads, elbow pads, the full armor of a man who had just played twenty-six minutes of hard hockey. He sat with his elbows on his knees and looked at me with an expression I'd never seen from him before. Not hostility. Not cold assessment. It almost looked, improbably, like respect.
"Walsh doesn't do that for just anyone," he said.
I looked at him. The enforcer who'd shoulder-checked me at a line change during my third game. The man who'd told methat's my spot, Minnesotaduring special teams. The immovable wall of judgment who had tested me, deliberately and systematically, for weeks.
"No," I said. "He doesn't."
"You know the whole arena saw that. Every camera. The broadcast team. Twenty thousand people and a national TV audience just watched our starting goalie leave his crease and throw punches for you."
