Page 48 of Wild Card 13

A few guys laughed.

I ignored it. Or at least I tried to.

I focused on my gym bag and started pulling things out. Water bottle. Practice gloves. Extra tape.

Normal routine.

Normal morning.

Then Marco looked up from across the room. "The new girl?"

"The owner's daughter," Zee clarified.

"I bet her mom is a smoke show," Marco chuckled with a devilish leer. "Ezra's got game."

More laughter.

I rolled my shoulders. Focused on literally anything else. I unlaced one skate. Then relaced it for absolutely no reason. Took a drink of coffee that had already gone lukewarm. Dug through my bag looking for tape I already knew was there.

"Pretty sure that's how people get fired," Jonah muttered.

"She's technically forbidden fruit," Victor Petrov added.

Someone threw a roll of tape.

Petrov looked entirely too pleased with himself.

Forbidden fruit.For some reason that was the one that got me.

My jaw locked. Because suddenly I wasn't hearing teammates chirping before morning skate. I was hearing strangers talk about Lucy like she was some random woman they'd passed in a bar.

I looked down at the stick in my hands and realized I'd been retaping the same section for nearly a minute.

Across the room, Marco kept talking. "All I'm saying is if ownership keeps pulling out these new, young hires, I am changing my stance on nepotism."

A few guys laughed. A few groaned.

I stared at my stall. Counted to ten. Because for reasons I couldn't explain, I wanted every single one of them to shut the fuck up. Not because they were saying anything particularly awful. This was hockey. This was locker room nonsense. The kind of conversation I would've participated in any other year.

But every word felt wrong. And I couldn't exactly explain why. Couldn't tell them they'd spent the last fifteen minutes talking about the girl I'd once loved. Couldn't tell them she'd been mine long before she became Ezra Thomas's daughter or Hockey Ops or the woman sitting behind a desk upstairs pretending not to know me. Couldn't tell them any of that.

Across the room, I caught Alois looking at me once. A brief glance over the rim of his coffee cup. The same look he gave rookies right before they made a bad decision.

Then another voice cut through the room. "Watch your mouth, De Luca."

The entire locker room went quiet for half a second.

Alois didn't even look up again from where he was sitting. Just kept drinking his coffee.

Marco shrugged. "Only having some fun, Müller. No harm done."

"You know what you are fucking doing," Alois replied.

Several guys barked out laughs.

Marco pressed a hand dramatically to his chest. "That was rude."

"You deserve rude."