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"We win, we're alive." Aiden doesn't look up from taping his stick, black over the toe, surgeon's focus, the C stitched over his heart and a fresh scar riding his eyebrow from a shot he blocked with his face a few nights ago.

"We lose, we're done, tonight. Win, and we're still breathing with a handful of games left to climb back into the playoffs. "

"See. Motivating."

"Nothing about elimination is motivating."

"Everything's motivating if you say it in the right voice, Cap."

Across the room Mason's got his lucky shirt on inside out, the gray one that should have been cremated two seasons back, light brown hair sticking straight up, blue eyes wide and haunted over a stick he's already taped twice.

"Nobody says the word tonight." Our goalie aims the tape roll around the room like he's reading us our rights. "Four-game skid. The universe is listening. We do not say the word, we do not say the other word, and Ryker, I swear on my grandmother, do not touch my water bottle."

"Which word."

"You know which word."

"I genuinely don't, you've got like nine forbidden words, throw me a…"

"Playoffs." It bursts out of Mason and he slaps a hand over his own mouth, gray with horror. "I said it. I said the word. We're cooked, boys, I cooked us."

Derek stalks in from the training room, six and a half feet of foul weather, dark green eyes, a fresh butterfly over the eyebrow that never fully heals, the tattoo sleeve catching the light as he drops onto the bench beside me.

He jerks his chin at the whiteboard in the corner, the one that's tracked every stupid thing about my season since October.

Somebody's wiped it clean. One line left, in Ryker's handwriting.

WHO KEEPS HUNTER'S SECRET: ALL OF US. HOUSE ODDS.

"Room voted." Derek says it to the floor, which for Derek is a filibuster. "Unanimous. Nobody breathes a word, in here or out there." He finally looks at me. "You'd do it for any of us." A grunt. "So. Go win a hockey game and quit blinking at your skates like a rookie."

And I sit in a room full of men who found out my most guarded secret and turned it into a line on a betting board that means we've got you, and I have to look hard at the tape on my stick for a moment.

Ryker, because Ryker cannot let a moment breathe, claps once. "Also the over-under on Hunter proposing is still live and I'm holding a lot of action on before summer, so if you could play like a man in love, purely for my portfolio."

"Ryker."

"What. It's strategy."

On the way up the tunnel I look towards the friends-and-family box, and there she is. In a green sweater. My favorite color. The same sweater she wore years ago when I first kissed her.

She buried it in a drawer ever since, but tonight she has it on for me. A united front.

Four losses on my back. A nine-figure deal on the wire. And a reporter about to expose Margot's plan.

Margot and I agreed to handle this together. This game I’ll play for us.

The puck drops and I quit thinking, which is the only way I've ever been any good. First shift I finish a check clean enough that the whole barn comes off its feet.

Ryker bangs the boards as I fly past the bench. "There he is. He's back, boys, the bad boy's back."

Second period he springs me on a two-on-one, saucer pass flat onto my tape, and I go bar down before their tendy can drop into the butterfly. I peel off toward the glass under the box and point my stick up at green, at my girl, and the barn loses it.

Third period, tied, two minutes on the clock and the whole season teetering on the edge of it. I read a lazy breakout pass and jump the lane, and then there's nothing but me, the goalie, and eighty feet of open sheet. Everyone's standing.

And somewhere under all that noise I hear Cade's voice from a driveway years ago, follow through, and I dangle, and I wait the tendy out until he commits, and I slide it five-hole through the wickets as he sprawls.

Bar down. Top cheese. Season still alive.