Page 103 of Heartless As Puck

Butterflies fluttered in my stomach, and I distracted myself before I melted into a puddle of goo by looking around the audience and weighing the ratio of Detroit supporters to Chicago supporters. It was heavily in Detroit’s favor, with a wall of red along two thirds of the seating and small clusters of blue around us and interspersed between.

“Do you think they’ll make it?” Hazel asked.

This was the last game before play-offs, and it was the Chaos’s last chance to get through. They’d already done better than anyone had expected and they were in the best shape the team had been in for years.

“They’ve got it in them,” I said, not wanting to jinx them with any other response.

“Excuse me?”

I turned. Maribel was seated behind me, and she’d leaned down close to my ear so I could hear her.

She looked unimpressed. “They are taking us all the way, and I won’t hear anything other than complete certainty that they’re making this happen.”

Grinning, I replied, “Sorry, Mari.”

“You should be.” She cupped her hands over her youngest’s ears. “Little ears are listening and they need to believe in their daddy one hundred percent.”

I smiled at her daughter. “Your daddy is going to be a machine out there.”

Maribel nodded. “That’s more like it.”

She returned her focus to her kids and Hazel leaned closer.

“She’s intense sometimes,” Hazel whispered.

“She isn’t wrong, though,” I said, checking to make sure Maribel hadn’t overheard us. “Positive thinking, all the way.”

On the ice, Mitch Davenport made his way to the goal and started warming up. Everyone seemed to know what they were doing, and the team was almost unrecognizable from that first preseason game.

After a while, the players were called in and then sent back out for the game to begin. The Chaos’s starting lineup included Austin, Jesse, Nick, Matt, Gauthier, and Mitch. Jesse won the puck drop and they were off.

Unfortunately, Detroit smashed right through the forward line, seizing control of the puck and racing with it toward Mitch and the goal.

To my absolute horror, the Detroit center shot the puck right past Mitch and into the corner of the net.

I gasped. This was bad. Conceding a goal so early in the period would put a dent in the Chaos’s confidence, and despite how well they’d been playing, their confidence was still shaky to begin with.

Applause from the Detroit supporters thundered through the stadium, so hard it made the seats rattle.

“Don’t worry,” I heard Maribel say behind me. “Your daddy has got this.”

I wished I had the same faith that she did.

Fortunately, rather than fall apart as I’d feared they might, the Chaos banded together to ensure there were no gaps in the defense for Detroit to slip through again. The first period ended one-nil.

In the second period, both teams went out hard and fast, as if their entire seasons depended on it, because really… they did.

There were several shots on goal at both ends of the ice, but the goalies were in form, blocking everything that came at them.

Near the end of the second period, Drew used a bit of the brute force he was known for to take the puck from an opposition wing and passed it across to Elliott, who sent it up to Nick.

Detroit had, to their detriment, left Nick relatively unguarded. He bolted up the side of the rink, weaving around the defenseman who tried to intercept him, and headed directly toward the goalie.

I stood, my heart in my throat, waiting to see if he’d managed to get past him. Nick didn’t slow or stop, though. He just kept on going, pulling up at the very last minute to flick the puck to Austin, who slid it over the line.

I screamed, jumping up and down and waving my arms above my head. “Go, Austin, go! Yes!”

Jesse and Nick crowded him, slinging their arms around him from either side before separating to resume their positions. The goal seemed to give the Chaos new life, and they held out for the rest of the game without allowing any more goals through. Unfortunately, they didn’t score again either, so when the regular game time ended, the score was one-all.