I pull my jersey on.
Go to work.
Practice is sharp.
Everything clicking the way it clicks when a team has been through enough together that thinking drops out of it. I know where Aiden is before he gets there. Liam’s shot patterns are in my bones at this point — I’ve faced them ten thousand times inpractice and I know the hesitation before the release, know the micro-shift in his shoulder that tells me high or low before he’s decided. Even Brody, who operates on pure chaos energy and has never once done the expected thing in three seasons — I know Brody now. I know what he’s going to do before he knows.
That’s what three years builds.
You can’t buy that. You can’t show up to a team that already has it and step into it like it was always yours. It has to get built in the specific way this got built — badly, slowly, through losing seasons and roster changes and one bad loss in the playoffs two years ago that we sat with all summer and came back from.
I stop everything they throw at me.
Nova is at the glass.
She’s got the Nikon up. Working. I know where she is the same way I know where Aiden is — in the bone, before I look. I don’t look. I face the net and do my job and she does hers and that’s how this works and it works because we both understand it.
My phone buzzes in my bag during the break.
I almost don’t look.
Almost.
The Enforcers.
Not a call — a message. Short. Measured.
Jax — when you have a moment. We’d like to talk. No rush.
No rush means there is absolutely a rush.
I put the phone back in my bag.
Zip it.
Go back to the ice.
The message comes with me.
Every drill. Every shot. Every clean glove save and blocker deflection and rebound kicked exactly where I want it. It stays there, behind everything, like a puck I lost sight of for half a second and can’t stop tracking after the whistle.
The Enforcers.
No rush.
There is always a rush when someone says that.
I don’t tell anyone.
Not Aiden warming up beside me. Not Liam, who would say exactly the right five words and skate away. Not Brody, who would offer to solve a career decision with violence and a group text.
I don’t say it out loud because out loud makes it real. Out loud turns a message into a choice.
And I’m not there yet.
So I do the thing I know how to do.
I stop everything they throw at me.
