“Well, I’m glad you do. And that all of you came.” She looked around the table. “Dante hasn’t had friends over in a long time.”
“Ma,” I said again, mortified.
“What? It’s true. You work too hard, you don’t have fun. These boys are good for you.”
I risked a glance around the table. Taz was grinning. Keegan was trying not to laugh. Max had that expression he got when he was filing something away for later chirping purposes. And Ash was still watching Max in that way that made me think I wasn’t the only one having a complicated morning.
We stayed for another hour. My mom showed everyone embarrassing photos from my childhood—me at six with a missing front tooth and a hockey stick bigger than I was, me at twelve with terrible hair and worse acne, me at sixteen looking shell-shocked at my dad’s funeral in a suit that didn’t fit right.
The ride back to the hotel was quieter. Cole, Phoenix, and Cinder were in one car with Taz driving. I was in the other with Max, Ash, and Keegan. Max was driving, Ash in the passenger seat, and I was in the back with Keegan.
“Your mom’s great,” Keegan said.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
The city slid past the windows—Bridgeport giving way to the Loop, the skyline doing its thing against the gray March sky. I should have been thinking about the game tomorrow, about trying to persuade them I could play. About the series.
Instead, I was thinking about the way Kincaid’s hand had felt on my face this morning. The warmth of his palm. The careful pressure of his thumb checking the swelling. The fact that he’d stayed all night when he could have left after the second check, could have gone back to his own room and his own bed and maintained every professional boundary that existed between a coach and a player.
He’d stayed. And I still didn’t know what to do with that.
Chapter eight
Momentum Shift - A sudden change in control or energy during the game.
Dante
I stood in the tunnel watching early warm-ups through the gap in the boards, dressed in a suit that felt wrong in every possible way. Suits were for press conferences and funerals and days when you weren’t playing hockey. They weren’t for playoff games when your team was down 1-0 in the series and every shift mattered.
My ribs still ached. The bruise on my face had reached its full purple-black glory, and Cinder had made it extremely clear that getting hit again before the swelling went down could turn a mild concussion into something significantly less mild. So here I was. Watching. He’d even said it was unlikely I’d make game three, which I was trying not to think about.
Max found me an hour before puck drop, skating over with that purposeful quality that meant he’d already decided something.
“Your family here?” he asked through the glass.
“What?”
“Your family. Your mom. Your brothers. Are they here?”
I blinked at him. “No. I didn’t—I mean, I thought about it, but tickets are expensive and—”
He frowned. “You know you get free ones? How many?”
“We only get two, though.”
He scoffed. “How many family members?”
I did the math. “Five, six maybe? My mom, my two brothers. Marco’s married, has a kid.”
Max pulled out his phone, typed something with the efficiency of a man who’d done this before. “Done. VIP tickets. Suite level. They’re comp’d.”
“Max, I can’t—”
“You’re not. Team is. Families of players get taken care of.” He looked up from his phone. “Call them. Tell them to get here before puck drop. And tell your brothers they’re meeting the team after, locker room.”
“You can’t just—”
“I’m captain. I can do whatever I want.” He grinned, that quick flash of warmth that made it impossible to argue with him. “Call them, Russo. Your mom fed us. Least we can do.”
