Her hand curled around the railing, her chin lifted, and her mouth remained unsmiling. She wasn’t performing, flirting, or pretending the night was easy. She was simply there, watching me with eyes too honest for a woman who had built an entire life from sharp edges and controlled exits.
I looked away first because if my mom could read me from behind the glass, Aura had always been worse. She saw the cracks and made me hate myself for wanting her near them.
Cade drifted beside me as the horn sounded to end warmups. “She came.”
“She has friends here.”
“She came for the team.”
I adjusted my glove. “Great. The team thanks her.”
“East.”
I looked at him. “Fuck, enough, Cade.”
“I was going to say don’t let her in your head.”
“She isn’t. Get the fuck out of my ass about it.”
Cade’s eyes held mine through his cage. “Then stop playing like every shot is aimed at her.”
The horn blasted again before I could answer, but Cade had already pissed me off, and playing angry had never steered me wrong.
We lined up beneath lights fractured into streaks of pink and yellow while the crowd thundered around us. My family stood behind the bench, my team waited for my lead, and scouts sat somewhere in the building writing down whatever version of me they thought they saw.
Aura watched from the section I had told myself she had no right to stand in, wearing nothing of mine and still feeling like a claim I had never figured out how to break.
I set my edge against the ice and forced everything soft inside me quiet.
The puck dropped, and Cade won it clean.
The pass came back to me as The Furnace rose around us and the season began, but for one brutal second, all I could hear was Aura’s voice from the night before.
You don’t get to take what I survived—when you don’t know what I survived—and twist it into a personality flaw.
I caught the puck, lifted my head, and hit the ice like pressure had finally found somewhere to go.
6
Aura
Hockey House was packed wall to wall with post-game chaos, but the air felt wrong before we made it ten feet inside.
The Fury had won their first game of the season. Easton had played like he wanted every scout in the building to regret breathing near a clipboard, Cade had looked impossible to kill, and Briggs had taken one dramatic lap around the living room telling anyone who would listen that his third-period save had restored faith to the American people.
The house should have felt loose, loud, and stupid in the usual Hockey House way, with music vibrating through the floorboards, cheap beer sweating on counters, and neon pink and yellow lights glowing around the windows.
Instead, it felt like the whole place had been waiting for me to walk in and find the knife.
Easton was in the kitchen, and so was Brinley.
She stood tucked beneath his arm like she had been built for the exact purpose of being seen there, her glossy blonde hair falling over one shoulder, her cropped KFU top cut high enough to show the smooth strip of stomach beneath it, and her black skirt short enough to make subtlety a lost cause. One hand rested against Easton’s hoodie, directly over his heart, while the other held a red cup as she laughed up at him like he had said something worth the giggle.
He wasn’t smiling.
Easton looked bored, cold, and detached in that brutal way he had perfected, letting her lean into him while his gaze stayed somewhere beyond the room, the party, and anything she could offer. He didn’t have to touch her back for it to work or want her for it to count.
He only had to let me see it.
