Then it slips out.
I don’t mean to say it. I don’t even think it first. The words simply rise, tangled in my throat with the moans and breathless, broken laughter, spilling free before I can stop them. “Fuck, I love you.”
I gasp it—like a confession I didn’t know I was carrying, like a secret my body had been holding hostage until this exact moment.
And Rafe snaps.
His whole body jolts as though the words struck him harder than any hit he’s ever taken on the ice or in a fight. His grip tightens—bruising now—his mouth tearing away from mine so he can stare at me, wide-eyed and utterly wrecked. I swear to God, he looks more destroyed by that single sentence than he did the day I flatlined in his arms, foam at my lips and his screams echoing through the compound.
He groans—low, full-body, a sound that vibrates deep in his chest like it physically hurts him—and I feel it inside me, furious and raw.
Then he grabs my throat enough to pin me there, to force my eyes to meet his. And I see it—something unraveling behind the storm-grey of his gaze, something vast and unguarded and terrifyingly real.
“Say it again,” he growls, voice cracked open, shattering him from the inside out.
I blink, bite my lip and whisper, “I love you, Rafe.”
His hips snap forward—hard, punishing, perfect.
My back slams into the bark again, fresh splinters biting skin, and I think he might actually fuck me into legend: into myth, into something no video, no ghost, no past could ever touch.
The second I say it again—softer this time, not a gasp or a curse but a truth, something that means something—Rafe fucking loses it. Not like before. Not just rough or frantic or desperate. This time, he goes still. Still in that terrifying way he does when something in him fractures. One hand tightens on my waist. The other stays curled around my throat. His forehead drops to mine, and he breathes me in like he’s trying to inhale the moment and lock it behind his ribs forever. And for a second—just a second—I think he might say it back. That one broken phrase again. That jagged, violent, sacred thing. But he doesn’t. He acts.
His hips thrust deeper—slower now, brutal in their intent. It’s not about pace. It’s about possession. About burying himself so deep inside me that the whole fucking world disappears. I feel it in my chest, my spine, the burn between my thighs where he’s stretching me open like a goddamn fault line. He pushes harder, like he’s trying to fuse us. Like if he fucks me hard enough, deep enough, he’ll never have to say it again—because this, this, is what he means when he says he loves me. A worship that tastes like violence. A promise carved in bark and bruises and bone.
My thighs tighten around his waist. My nails dig into his shoulders. I pant his name over and over like a mantra, trying to hold on, trying not to fall apart too soon, because I want to feel it when he gives in. When he stops holding back.
Rafe snaps his hips forward, growling low into my throat as he fucks into me so deep and hard that the scream rips out of me before I can catch it. He doesn’t let up, doesn’t stop—his rhythm relentless, punishing, reverent. One hand clutches the nape of my neck like he’s anchoring me to the earth, the other fists my hip like a lifeline he refuses to release. His whole body bows over mine, curved and taut, as though he’s praying through every thrust, and then I feel it: the sudden heat, the brutal pressure, the full-body jolt of him coming inside me with a violence that borders on religious ecstasy. He holds me pinned there—cock pulsing deep, face buried in the crook of my neck like he’s trying to hide the raw vulnerability of what he just gave me.
But I know.
He gave me everything.
And I fucking take it.
I arch into him, grind back against him, ride out every shuddering wave of his orgasm like my body was carved specifically for this—for him, for the way he unravels inside me. When he finally stills—still buried to the hilt, still breathing ragged and uneven like a man who just handed over his soul—I smile, slow and wrecked and utterlysatisfied.
My voice comes out raw, scraped thin from screaming and gasping and everything in between. My body is a ruin of sweat and bark-scratches and bruising fingerprints. But I still say it again, quiet and certain, like a vow pressed into skin. “I love you, Rafe.”
This time, he doesn’t groan. He doesn’t snap or growl or break. He simply whispers it back—right against my mouth, lips brushing mine like a secret too sacred to speak any louder. “I love you.”
EPILOGUE
RAFE
The ice is still white—not clean, not pure, just new and untouched, a blank page begging to be written on in blood and broken teeth. It won’t stay that way for long; it never does with this team, this family. The boards still shine under the lights, the plexi holds firm without a single crack—yet—and the goalposts stand unbent, pristine for now. But they will be soon enough. Because this isn’t just a rink anymore. It’s ours.
We took it, won it, burned the past to ash so we could build something filthier on the ruins. The new compound—once NHL regulation, once a church of capitalism—is now a cathedral to chaos: syndicate-funded, renovated with blood money, erected on bones no one dares count. I sit on the bench half in shadow, elbow propped on my knee, watching it all unfold like a war I already won.
Beside me, Kai has his med kit open across one thigh and a thermos balanced on the other—black coffee, probably spiked with something that would get us all arrested if anyone cared enough to check. He’s stitching his own palm with the calm focus of someone who treats self-surgery like a hobby, the result of smashing through a glass door because Bishop thought lassoing a Zamboni was a good idea. Again.
Out on the ice, my boys are feral in the best way. Luca skates backward in nothing but a jockstrap, chirping Finn so loud the sound carries clear through the boards: “COME GET DADDY, YOU LIMPING WHORE!” Finn screams something incoherent, swings his stick wildly, misses entirely, and crashes ass-first to the ice. Bishop is trying—and failing—to ride Misha like a human sled, both of them laughing like lunatics. Vlad sitscross-legged near the boards, sharpening a skate blade with an actual hunting knife, the metallic rasp cutting through the chaos like a promise. And Julian?
Julian stands at center ice—captain, king, chaos given human shape.
He isn’t skating. He’s commanding. Stick loose in one hand, whistle dangling from the other, he wears a jersey with no name stitched on the back—just black tape covering where it should be. He hasn’t replaced it. He won’t. He likes what the blank space means now: unnamed, untouchable, a void that dares anyone to try filling it.
“Tell me again why we’re not dead,” Kai mutters beside me, not looking up from the neat line of stitches he’s pulling through his own skin.
