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PROLOGUE
One Year Ago: Frozen Four
Toren
I can’t see.
My stomach cramps, eyes shutting as my head hits the brick behind me. Something wet hits my cheek—either the blood still dripping from my eyebrow or from my coach spitting in my face through his screaming. I don’t know. I can barely keep my own head up.
“—so goddamn stupid, huh? This is ridiculous. It’s an embarrassment. You’re lucky they didn’t arrest you for that—”
Where’s my dad? I can’t see anything.
The voice of the player I’d hit is stuck in my head, an echo I can’t drown out. I can’t get the picture of him to disappear either—Rhys Koteskiy hitting the ground face-first, sprawled on the ice. For a second, I thought he was dead.
My hands rise to my ears, feet slipping on the concrete, before Coach Anders, the head coach at Mt. Hart, grabs for my suit coat lapels and slams me back against the wall. My head snaps against it hard, and something about it feels like penance.
“Are you even listening to me?”
“I am.” I try to spit the words back, but they’re barely a wheezed breath. The bus is loaded by now. I was the first one on, trying to escape the line of cameras by sneaking out the back, thinking that might save both teams some of the issues. But Coach Anders nearly dragged me off by my hair, spitting mad, as he laid into me off the side of the back entrance to the arena.
It’s April, perfect weather in the Twin Cities with a crisp chill keeping my skin cool enough to help me fight the near constant urge to vomit.
“I don’t think you are, Kane,” he growls. His fingers tighten in my jacket again, shaking me, and I slam my hands over his, trying pathetically to break his hold.
“Get the fuck off me.” It’s more of a plea than anything aggressive.
My body feels almost numb with exhaustion, like even reaching my hands to wipe at the blood dripping into my eye again is too much effort. I can’t do it.
Anders looks at me like I’ve assaulted him with my pathetic begging words. He’s been down my damn throat for thirtysomething minutes now. I deserve it, I know that I do, but all I can see when I blink is Rhys Koteskiy sprawled on the ice, older memories threatening. And every ounce of my body is strained, fighting exhaustion and pain and the urge to do something. Maybe I should . . .
What? Show up at the hospital and check on the guy you might’ve killed? Turn yourself in to the police preemptively?
A flash of the moment hits again—a clean hit. Hard and fast, sure, but I didn’t hit him in the numbers. It was clean. I’m always careful.
Are you?
“It was a clean hit.” I cling to the words.
Was it? I shake my head. My hand ghosts down like I’m going to reach for my knees. I can still feel the ache where his cage rocked against my pads. Can still hear the sound of him hitting the ice.
It’s my fault. I hit him, playing distracted and angry, and alone as I always seem to be on this team. On the last one too. A bitter laugh etches from my throat, as I shake my head.
A buzz in my pocket brings it full circle.
The fucking texts. I shouldn’t have checked my phone, knowing it was never anything good. What did I think? It was a fucking Good Luck! text? From who? I don’t have family, no real friends who would be reaching out.
No, it was worse.
A ghost from my past with an offer that, knowing how the next few minutes will go, I can’t refuse. And the thought of being right back to square one, with only one pathway out offered by the hand that pushed me here in the first place, makes the sickness in my stomach, the swirling in my head, worse.
Bad enough, part of me thinks I might have a concussion.
I’d hit the ice hard enough to bust my lip open, but it didn’t matter. No one cared enough to pull anyone off me. If I’d cracked my skull, fine, I deserved it, right?
“They said it was a clean hit,” I repeat, lost. Terror’s claws sink steadily into my spine. I can’t even see my coach standing in front of me anymore. Everything is lost in the fog clouding over me.
“Didn’t look fucking clean to me when they had to stop the game to stretcher the kid off the ice. Or when they spent the next fifteen minutes cleaning up his blood and deciding whether to throw you out or not.”
