They shove me toward the bench, toward the locker room, toward whatever the fuck comes next. But the only thing that settles into my chest, cold, certain, and heavier than the entire arena, is the vow that locks into place like iron chains.
I am going to kill every single person who touched her.
I am going to burn the city to the ground if I have to.
And then I am going to bring my wife home.
No matter what’s left of me when I get there.
two
Jackson
I’ve seen Elijah angry before.
I’ve seen him drop men twice his size without blinking, seen the way he moves when something crosses a line, the way his control tightens instead of slipping, like violence is something he knows how to hold, not lose, something he channels instead of being consumed by, something that always feels deliberate even at its most brutal.
What I just saw wasn’t that.
It stays behind my eyes as I skate, not as one clean memory but as a series of flashes I can’t stop replaying, his fist connecting, Vargas’s body twisting under him, blood on the ice, blood on Elijah’s hands, the way it took half the team to drag him off and even then it didn’t feel like enough, because nothing about him looked interrupted. It looked unfinished. It looked like if they hadn’t physically hauled him away, he would have kept going until there was nothing left of the man underneath him.
That’s the part that won’t leave me. Not the violence itself, not even the brutality of it.
It’s the fact that there was nothing in Elijah’s face except the need to kill.
No hesitation. No awareness. No line left in him that mattered more than what he wanted to do.
A cold sliver of something settles low in my chest as I push forward into the play, my body moving automatically while my head stays caught on that moment, still trying to make sense of the fact that I have never seen him like that, not once, not in all the time I’ve known him, or watched his career, not through fights, not through pressure, not through anything. Elijah has always been the kind of man who is more dangerous because he is controlled, because he chooses exactly how far to go and knows exactly what he is doing when he gets there.
Tonight he didn’t look like a man choosing anything.
He looked like something in him had been cut loose.
And if that’s where he is already, if this is what Lia being taken has dragged out of him before we even know where she is, then there is no version of this where it gets better on its own.
There is only worse.
Only darker.
Only a version of Elijah that doesn’t stop next time.
The thought settles hard in my stomach as the puck moves past me and I react a fraction too late, my stick missing the clean connection it should have made, the play slipping out of reach before I can recover it.
“Fuck,” I mutter, turning hard and forcing myself back into position.
I need to focus.
I know I need to focus.
But every time I drag my attention back to the ice, it slips again almost immediately, pulled under by the same sick, relentless awareness that has been sitting in my chest since Evelyn called.
Lia is gone.
The game keeps moving anyway.
It doesn’t care that something just broke open in the middle of it. It doesn’t pause because one of our players nearly beat a man to death in front of a packed arena. It doesn’t stop because the woman who has somehow become the center of all of us is out there somewhere with no idea if she’s hurt, no idea who has her, no idea what they’re doing to her while we skate under bright lights like any of this still matters.
The whole energy on the ice has changed. Every hit comes in harder than it needs to. Every pass carries a fraction too much aggression behind it. Every collision lingers just a little too long, like both teams can feel that something has shifted and neither side knows how to settle it back down again.
