I had stood there and told her I couldn’t forgive her, then watched her walk out.
That was what kept catching in my throat. Not the fight. Not the blood. Not the fact that Maddox still had his teeth because Aura told me to stop.
It was the door closing softly behind her.
The quiet click.
The way her leaving had sounded considerate, even after I gutted her.
Ryan skated up beside me and bumped his shoulder against mine. Not hard. Just enough to bring me back. “You’re somewhere else.”
I looked down the ice. Cade was collecting pucks near the boards. Rider traced a slow line near the circle. Briggs had pushed his mask onto the top of his head and was drinking from his bottle with his gaze fixed on me, no humor left in it.
“I’m here.”
Ryan gave me a flat look. “Physically.”
“Dangerous concept,” Briggs called. “A man can be on the ice and still be emotionally lost in a swamp.”
Cade sent a puck sliding toward us with the blade of his stick. “Do not encourage him to use metaphors.”
“Swamp was restrained,” Briggs argued. “I had a whole haunted-marsh option.”
I skated a slow circle, letting my blades carve a clean curve into the ice. My ribs pulled on the turn, deep and ugly, and I swallowed the wince before any of them could make it a project.
Ryan saw anyway because Ryan always saw too much.
That was becoming inconvenient.
“You should’ve taken another day,” he said.
“I don’t need another day.”
“You need a week and a therapist.”
Briggs lifted his glove. “And possibly a priest, but only for the beating you put on Maddox.”
“Not funny,” Cade said.
“Wasn’t trying to be.” Briggs’s expression sobered. “I hope every time that guy chews for the next month, he remembers why his jaw hurts.”
The air shifted, and none of us spoke for a few seconds. I could hear the rink settling around us—the hum of the lights, a distant clank from somewhere near the equipment room, the faint hiss of ice beneath Cade’s slow glide.
I stared at the faceoff circle until the red line blurred.
“Maddox was easy,” I said.
Ryan’s head turned.
I rubbed the taped heel of my stick across the ice. “That’s the fucked-up part. He opened his mouth, and I knew what to do with that. I knew where to put it. Rage has a place to go when there’s a face in front of you.”
Cade skated closer, quiet now. Briggs pushed out of the crease, his pads whispering against the ice.
“And when there isn’t?” Briggs asked.
I swallowed because that was the question.
When there wasn’t a Maddox. When there was only my apartment and Aura crying in a wrinkled Sin Bin uniform beside my crooked coffee table. When there was no door to slam anyone into, no jaw to split, no man on the pavement to make smaller than the damage he had bragged about.
