Page 102 of The Players We Hate
“Always,” she said. “Besides, someone’s gotta remind you how strong you are when you forget.”
My throat ached at that. I swiped at a tear before it could fall.
“I just want to be done with the game,” I whispered. “I want to live in a world where I don’t have to keep proving I’m more than his daughter.”
Alisa shook her head, firm. “You don’t have to prove it. Not to me. Not to anyone.”
And maybe, just maybe, she was right.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Talon
The second the puck dropped, it wasn’t hockey anymore. It was a fight against the pressure chewing us up from the inside.
It sat heavy in my chest, every shift harder to breathe. The arena spun in black, purple, and aqua, lights flashing off the glass. The crowd was deafening, but it all blurred into static. What cut through were the dead spots—the groan after a blown pass, the hollow thud when a shot smacked the post and died.
We weren’t playing. We were hanging on by a thread.
Every whistle chipped at us. Our systems were shot, breakouts sluggish. I saw it in Kade’s hesitation on a rotation. In the twitch of Rowdy’s glove after a save. In the way Owen’s shoulders locked as he crouched over the circle. Even I couldn’t shut it out—choking my stick until my hands ached, trying to squeeze the noise out of my head.
By the second period, we were down one. Then two.
It wasn’t because they were better. It was because we were broken.
The bench felt dead, energy bottled up with nowhere to go. Coach Dawson barked until his voice cracked, but nothing caught. The weight of everything off the ice had bled into this one—scandals, headlines, whispers we couldn’t skate away from. It was in our lungs, our legs, our bones.
The sound of the buzzer lingered, not as closure, but as judgment.
I skated for the tunnel, staring straight ahead, blocking out the other bench’s roar. My lungs burned, not from effort, but from the hollow ache of knowing it wasn’t just a loss on the scoreboard. We’d lost the last chance to control the story.
Inside the locker room, no one spoke.
You’d expect a blow-up—helmets thrown, sticks cracked. But nothing. Just the hiss of showers in the back, the rip of velcro as pads peeled away.
Rowdy sagged onto the bench, chest heaving, gear sliding off him like it was too heavy to wear. Kade leaned back in his stall, eyes shut, jaw tight. Owen dropped to the floor, forearms braced on his knees, sweat dripping steady as he stared at the tile.
And me? I sat there with my jersey bunched in my hands, twisting the number until the fabric knotted.
My head wouldn’t stop spinning. My mom. Wren. Everything we’d fought through to get here. And it still wasn’t enough.
The air in the room pressed down, thick and suffocating.
Finally, Owen’s voice cut through, low and rough. “This whole year,” he muttered, eyes still on the floor, “we were fighting ghosts. Chasing something that was already lost.”
Kade didn’t lift his head, but his words cut through the quiet. “Ghosts don’t hack game tape or funnel money through fake charities.”
“No,” I said, slower this time. “People do.”
Rowdy let out a laugh that didn’t sound like him. Bitter, sharp around the edges. “Guess we were never playing on even ground, huh?”
No one answered. The silence that followed was heavier than anything the scoreboard could throw at us.
For the first time, I didn’t feel like a captain. I felt like a kid again, beaten down by a loss I couldn’t fix with harder hits or one more desperate power play.
The silence that followed wasn’t the usual kind. Not the hush after a bad play or the low grumble of fans heading for the exits. This one stuck, pressing down in my chest and refusing to move.
Coach cleared his throat once, like he had a speech lined up—the kind he usually gave after a loss. But nothing came. Just a tight jaw, a single nod, and then he walked out without a word.
