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CHAPTER 1
MAX
Ionly feel alive when I’m on the ice. Life is a hazy dream, a succession of disconnected scenes I have to go through to get to moments like this.
As I stand before the door to the arena, my heart pounds at a mid-game rhythm. It can’t be explained by the minimal effort of suiting up for my first training session. A cocktail of excitement and nerves swirls in my gut, and I try shaking it off by stretching my neck and shoulders. Orientation at St. Cloud University was meh, but this moment—an hour before my first training session as a newly minted St. Cloud Thunder Bolt—feels like a big freaking deal.
“This is it,” I say to myself. The start of my whole future. No presh.
I push the door open and take the first steps into the corridor. The cold seeps through the air, and I breathe it in. Smells like home. And there’s nothing better than being the first in to the new digs. That’s why I’m here an hour before it will be teeming with guys—to get a feel for the space I’ll be living in for the next four years.
A sound stops me. Someone’s skating already.
Whatever. Let’s not attach some bad omen to this. Second on the ice isn’t bad. The other guy may value solitude as much as I do and leave me alone for a while. I stomp all the way down the corridor. The glare of the overhead lights makes me squint until I’m all the way out of the shadows.
My plans are derailed once more when the dude turns out to be skating up a storm. He dashes from one goal to the other like an arrow. Slush rains on the boards as he brakes to turn and skate behind the goal, then back out to the other side. He’s doing edge work as he goes, shifting backward and forward every time he crosses a line.
Going hard like this, on my own, was precisely what I wanted to do. And I still intend to do it. I push the door open with my knee and step onto the ice anyway. I may be used to being pushed aside in my private life, but not here.On the ice, I am king.
I glide over to center ice to warm up my ankles. The guy does some figure skating move that would get him a ten in the Olympics. If he plans to pull crap like that during a game, he’s going to get eaten alive by the opponent. And he’ll have it coming.
A cross between a snort and a laugh escapes from my chest. The echo across the quiet arena grinds him to a halt.
The way he squares up his shoulders screams hostility louder than words, but I don’t know who he’s trying to shake when he’s pocket-sized. If I were a D-man, I’d be pissed about having Tinker Bell here on the team. With guys my size and larger, he’ll be a liability no matter how fast he can skirt away.
I catch him approaching from the corner of my eye, but I keep stretching in silence. I make a point of whistling as innocently as possible.
“Was that a laugh?” Lil dude has a weird voice, too high pitched. Don’t tell me he’s a child.
Through the helmet’s visor, I catch a scowl so deep it scrunches up his nose and lifts up his lip. Which is surrounded by the smoothest face I’ve seen since middle school. I do a double take.
Uh, correction. Tinker Bell is a she.
“What the—You’re a girl?” The question spews out of my mouth before I can think better of how it sounds.
She tosses her stick and gloves onto the ice in one motion. “Yeah, you got a problem with that, you jerk?”
At most, she’s five-six to my six-three. Her fists ball up like an enforcer about to throw down, but they couldn’t hurt a fly. I have to bite my lips to keep from laughing again.
“You can’t possibly think you’ll fight me.”
“I don’t think—I will. Someone clearly needs to teach your smug face a lesson.” She pushes the sleeves of her jersey up. “And no one who makes fun of me lives to tell the tale.”
I lean on one foot, using the stick like a cane. This is considerably more amusing than if she’d turned out to be a guy who beat me to the punch.
“Oh yeah? Can you even reach my face?”
To her credit, she makes an attempt to swing at me. It has no chance of landing when she has to stretch far out of her range to even get close. The second fist I catch in my left glove.
“You may want to introduce yourself with your mouth and not your fist, Tinker Bell,” I say with a chuckle.
She splutters for a second. “Tinker—excuse me?”
At least the shock made her drop the bravado, and with that, her guard goes all the way down. And she’s frozen. The ice is finally mine.
I go from zero to a hundred in a second, taking up the whole span of the two hundred feet like she did earlier.Every cell of my body roars to life. This is what I wanted, to breathe in the icy air until it burns my lungs. To push my muscles until I break a sweat. That’s how you break the ice, pun intended.
“What did you call me?”
