Page 117 of Her Player

"I know."

"The game⁠—"

"I know, Brynn." I drew in a long breath through my nose. I straightened my spine. I turned away from the ice and found Jett being separated from two Dynamites players by a pair of officials, still talking, still chirping, completely undeterred by the fact that he had blood on his lip. I found Coach at the bench, watching the medics, his face carved from stone.

His eyes found mine across the ice.

He nodded once.

I nodded back.

The official skated to center ice with his microphone. Forty thousand people waiting.

"Following a review of the play," the official said, his voice ringing out across the arena, "number forty-four Viktor Sokolov of the Canadian Dynamites is assessed a match penalty for charging and deliberate targeting of a vulnerable player. He is ejected from the game."

The Vipers side erupted.

The Dynamites side erupted differently.

I watched Sokolov skate off the ice with his head down and his coach red-faced behind the bench and I felt something cold and satisfied settle in my chest that had nothing to do with sportsmanship and everything to do with the fact that the man who put Rhett on the ice was no longer in this goddamn game.

The medics helped Rhett to a seated position. He was upright. He was talking. He waved off the stretcher with one hand in a gesture so characteristically him that Jett laughed out loud from across the ice.

He looked up into the stands.

He found me at the boards.

Even from here I could see the blood on his chin and the way he held his left shoulder and I wanted to cross that ice and check every single inch of him myself. But he looked at me with those ice blue eyes and he shook his head once, deliberately.

I'm fine.

I know you are, you stubborn son of a bitch.

I pressed my hand flat against the boards between us.

They walked him off the ice to a standing ovation from forty thousand people.

I turned back to Brynn. "Get to the tunnel. Stay with him until I get there."

She was already moving.

I turned back to the ice where Coach was rallying the team at the bench. Where Jett was vibrating with an energy that was going to be either magnificent or catastrophic depending on the next ten minutes. Where my team was lining up for the face-off a man down in spirit and up in fury, fifteen minutes left in the third period and everything still to play for.

I gripped the boards.

"Come on," I said quietly to nobody and everybody. "Come on."

The puck dropped.

What followed was the kind of hockey I would tell my grandchildren about.

Jett took the first face-off and won it cleanly, driving hard left before cutting back through two Dynamites defenders. He lost the puck at the blue line but Langley was there, scooping it up and feeding it back to Jett who put a shot on net that the goalie barely got a pad to. The rebound came out messy. Bodies crashed together in front of the net. The whistle blew and every person in the building exhaled at once.

The Dynamites were rattled. I could see it from the boards. They'd come into the third period with a structure and Jett had spent four minutes dismantling it piece by piece, not with force but with that chaotic, infuriating, impossible-to-anticipate style of his that drove opponents absolutely out of their goddamn minds.

Four to three. Then the penalty kill that made my stomach drop.

Four to four with two minutes left and I pressed my hand flat against the boards and I thought about fourteen years. About a Tuesday in April and willow trees and a man who loved this team before I did.