Page 190 of Game Misconduct
Not here.
Not like this.
Except he is.
A staff member in a Vipers jacket skates out and hands him something—a black foam core board. From up here, I can’t make out the image on it, but he holds it in both hands like it matters.
Like itmeanssomething.
When he turns to the crowd, the jumbotron catches his face.
His hair is damp with sweat, his jaw scraped from a hit, but his eyes?—
God.
They find mine and don’t let go.
“I don’t like talking,” he says into the mic, voice gritty, low, everything in him shaking with restraint. “Never been good at it. And I definitely don’t like attention.”
A ripple of soft laughter rolls through the stands.
“But there’s someone in this building tonight I owe more than a private apology. Someone I hurt… because I thought I was protecting her. Because I was trying to undo the wreckage I’d caused, even if it meant pretending I didn’t love her.”
A gasp breaks from my throat. Tessa’s hand clamps down on my arm.
He keeps going.
“I said some things in that boardroom I didn’t mean. I did it so she’d be safe. So no one could take what she built. I thought I was being noble. But I was being a coward.”
His voice cracks there, just a little.
“I told her she wasn’t a distraction. That she was the reason I still wanted to be better. And then I walked away anyway.”
He pauses. Lifts the board.
The jumbotron switches to an image—his drawing.
It’s a comic panel. Two figures, unmistakably him and me, rendered in simple black ink. I’m in a business suit, heels planted, expression fierce. He’s in full gear, shoulder bruised, mouth bloodied.
Behind us, the arena is in flames. The world is collapsing.
But we’re standing side by side, holding hands.
The caption:
Let it burn. I’ve got you.
A sob punches out of me.
“I made this on the road,” Maddox says. “Because I needed to remember what we looked like when we weren’t scared. When we were just…us.”
He looks straight up at the owner’s suite again.
“I don’t know how to fix everything. I can’t give you back control or undo the things we lost. But I can tell the truth.”
He drops the board. Tosses his gloves. Drops his stick.
And then he turns to face the owner’s suite—faceme—and sinks to one knee.
