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"Did you touch her, Jax?" His voice splits clean down the middle. His helmet bangs into mine. "Look at me and tell me you didn't touch my sister."

The linesmen hit us like a wave. Arms lock across my chest and haul me backward, blades scraping.

The crowd one solid wall of sound on their feet wanting to see blood.

Cade is dragged the other way with his eyes still glued to mine, still waiting on an answer I cannot give him.

On my way to the penalty box I look up into the stands.

Margot is on her feet. White as a sheet. She saw every second of it.

And she has no idea I just held the pin of the grenade between my teeth and detonated my life.

Chapter 14: Jax

The horn blast and the scoreboard says it all. Boston 4, us 2.

I ride out the last of it from the box, watching the worst night of my season end the way it started, badly, and when the final buzzer sounds I climb over the boards for the part I've dreaded more than any goal against.

The handshake line.

We file down the ice and shake the hands of the men who just took our building from us, glove by glove, name by name, with our fans going home unhappy behind us.

I move down the black and gold until I'm standing in front of Cade.

My best friend. My brother in every way that isn't blood.

He takes my hand and holds, and his eyes do the thing they've done since we were kids and one of us broke something. He’s hunting for the truth and comes up empty.

His mouth barely moves. "Did you touch her?" Not a threat this time but a plea.

I don't answer. I can't tell him. I squeeze his hand, and I let go, and I skate off my own ice a loser twice over.

He’ll hate me. I’ll lose him if he knew.

Our room after a loss is a party nobody wants to be at.

Gear peeled off in silence, ice bags, the drip of the showers, the scoreboard still lit behind every set of eyes.

On a normal night the guys would have something for me. A chirp, a shove, a reason to laugh it into the ground.

Tonight nobody says a word about the fight. That's the mercy of it.

They watched me and Cade go at each other like we’re strangers, and every man in here knows why, and not one of them will bring it up.

Ryker sets a fresh water bottle by my stall on his way past and doesn't crack a single joke, which from Ryker is basically a eulogy. Noah squeezes the back of my neck and moves on.

Aiden stops behind me on his way to the shower, drops a hand on my shoulder, captainly and brief. "We lost a game tonight, Hunter. That's all we lost. The rest of it, you still get a say in."

I sit in my base layer long after the room empties, elbows on my knees, staring at the photo taped inside my locker door. Cade, me, and Margot, mid-laugh, feels like a hundred summers ago. The secret that isn't a secret anymore. My team knows and Cade knows.

Derek moves towards me. Six and a half feet of him and he lowers onto the bench beside me, fresh stitches over his eyebrow, and for a while he just sits, because Derek's whole idea of comfort is being a large silent wall next to a man who's drowning.

Then, to the floor, not to me he says. "Secrets don't get lighter."

I say nothing.

"Secrets get heavier, and it gets expensive, it chips away at you and one day it costs you the exact thing you were shielding."