Chapter 69: CHAPTER 69

Julian’s POV

The fog didn't rise off the Red River that morning; it lay flat and greasy across the blacktop of the varsity parking lot, smelling of sulfur, wet iron, and the heavy diesel exhaust of three microwave-linked broadcasting vans parked idling on the grass.

Every time I turned my neck to check the side mirror of the Cutlass, a sharp, cold needle of pain went straight down from my left ear into the first layer of white zinc tape wrapped around my third rib. The steering wheel had three inches of loose play in the column before the gear caught, and every time the front tires hit one of the frozen gravel potholes along the rink road, my teeth clicked together with a dry, hollow sound that made my throat taste like copper coin.

I parked thirty yards out, right by the old coal bunker where the salt trucks dumped their gray slag.

Through the windshield, the glass of the main arena entrance looked dark and wet under the early mist. A group of four men in red nylon windbreakers, reporters from the Detroit papers and a local affiliate crew from Grand Rapids were standing on the concrete apron, their boots leaving dark, slushy tracks on the salt-whitened steps. One of them had a large black camera bag slung over his shoulder, the metal buckles clinking against his belt as he shifted his weight to keep his heels out of the standing water.

"Julian!"

The voice didn't have any name behind it; it was just a raw, wet shout that came through the fog before my heel had even cleared the rusty rocker panel of the passenger door.

I didn't run. I couldn't. If I took a stride longer than eighteen inches, the tape around my lower back pulled so hard against the skin that my left lung went entirely flat, leaving me standing in the slush with my mouth open, waiting for the air to clear the valve. I kept my chin down, my fingers buried deep in the pockets of my old gray wool coat, my travel bag dragging against the side of my shin with a heavy, rhythmic thud-thud.

"Julian Thorne! Over here! Just a second!"

A microphone, the gray foam wind-muff held on the end of a black aluminum stick, came over my shoulder, the metal rod brushing the collar of my coat with a short, dry scritch. The reporter was a tall man with a red nose and a wet synthetic hood that smelled of stale tobacco and cheap grease. His eyes were small, gray, and completely empty of anything but the five-minute wire deadline.

"The registry filed a secondary claim in the probate court at eight this morning, Julian," he said, his breath coming out in a fast, sour cloud of coffee steam. "Are you still claiming eligibility under the local waiver, or is the association preparing to pull the entry before the warmups? The Detroit board is calling you the 'Disgraced Prince' on the early wire. Do you have a statement for the alumni?"

I didn't look at his lens. I didn't look at the small, black-and-white print of the morning ledger he was holding against his chest, the headline Thorne Trust Fund Dissolved: Prince of the Ice Left Without a Name or a Sheet showing through the wet plastic cover like grease on grease paper.

"The roster is signed," I said. My voice was thin, dry, and flat—devoid of any of that clean, silver tone I used to use when I had three lawyers standing behind my shoulder at the registrar's desk. "We’re playing."

"But what about the Vance allegations?" another voice barked from the left. A woman in a blue utility coat stepped into my path, her hand holding a small digital recorder with a red light that blinked like a cold eye in the mist. "Marcus Vance's group says you signed the waivers after the margin was already closed. If the association finds the signatures were backdated to clear the Detroit draft minimum…"

"The roster is signed," I repeated.

I didn't look back to see if she was following. I shoved my right shoulder forward, the good one, the one that didn't have six inches of purplish-black skin hiding under the flannel shirt and let my weight clear the green-painted steel of the gatehouse door. The latch came down behind me with a heavy, metallic clank-shirr that cut the reporters' voices off in the middle of a syllable, leaving nothing but the familiar, damp chill of the arena corridor and the low, sixty-cycle hum of the water heaters in the basement.

The varsity locker room smelled of pine disinfectant, dry cedar, and seventy years of wet wool that had never quite dried out between the winters.

I sat down on the long oak bench by the corner locker, locker number twelve and let my travel bag slide to the floor. The canvas gave a soft, heavy thunk against the gray rubber matting, the metal zipper catching on a loose thread near the seam. The room was empty; the second and third lines were still upstairs in the administration wing signing their regional cards, and Jax hadn't come back from the equipment shed yet.

I took my coat off slowly, one sleeve at a time.

Every movement was an exercise in small, mechanical calculations. If I lifted my left elbow more than three inches away from my ribs, the entire left side of my chest let out a dry, sliding click, the floating ribs shifting against the white zinc adhesive like broken slate in a bag. I unbuttoned my gray flannel shirt, my fingers cold and clumsy against the horn buttons, before I turned around to face the small, rectangular mirror that had been screwed to the cedar paneling above the sink.

The glass was old, the silver backing starting to turn a dark, greasy brown around the screw holes, leaving my reflection looking like it was suspended in six inches of muddy river water.

I looked at my face.

I was pale, not that clean, aristocratic white I’d worn when I was sitting at the front of the classroom in Ann Arbor, but a dull, flat gray that made my skin look thin and translucent under the yellow glare of the bare bulbs. My eyes were small, dark, and rimmed with red, the skin beneath them bruised from forty-eight hours without sleep, looking like grease smudges from the Cutlass's steering column. The small, dark line of blood behind my left ear had been washed away, leaving nothing but a tiny, yellow-rimmed scar that looked like a birdshot mark against my hairline.

I reached down to my waist, my fingers catching the top edge of the white athletic tape.

The wrap went all the way from my sternum down to the hip bone, fifteen yards of stiff, thick cotton adhesive that had been pulled so tight my ribs looked like they had been cast in plaster. The skin above and below the tape was swollen, a soft, fluid-filled ridge of deep, purplish-black flesh that had begun to yellow around the margins. Every time my heart gave a heavy, flat thud against the bone, the tape pulled, the zinc oxide adhesive smelling of medicine and dry glue.

But as I looked at that pale, bruised chest in the dirty glass, the strange, cold weight that had been sitting in my throat since the stone gates unraveled.

The mask was gone.

The Thorne name, that clean, silver shield my father had spent thirty years building out of regional options and administrative favors was lying in the wet gravel outside with the news vans. The "Disgraced Prince" was a name for the wire; it wasn't a name that had any weight when my steel hit the gray sheet. I wasn't the captain of the academy line anymore, and I didn't have a trust fund held at the Merchant's Trust to clear the margin when my heels went over the blue line.

I was just a twenty-two-year-old boy with three broken ribs and a pair of old Graf skates that had been sharpened on a hand-cranked wheel in a coal shed.

And for the first time in my life, I wasn't afraid.

I reached out, my cold fingers touching the glass right where my reflection's forehead sat. The mirror was freezing, the condensation leaving a small, gray circle of fog around my fingertip that cleared almost instantly.

"Let them look," I whispered to the empty room.

"Julian."

The voice came from the locker room office doorway, not a shout, but that low, gravelly rasp that Coach Clain used when she was reading the penalty logs before a Tuesday scrimmage.

She was standing with her boots planted six inches apart on the rubber matting, her old black nylon splash trousers tucked into her grease-darkened winter boots. She had a paper cup of black coffee in her left hand, the cardboard wet and stained around the seam where her thumb had been riding the rim. Her short, gray hair was still damp from the mist outside, looking like wire wool under the yellow light.

She didn't look at my bare chest. She kept her small, dark eyes fixed on the roll of white tape lying on the pine bench next to my skates.

"Fin says you shouldn't be dressing," she said.

"I’m dressing, Coach," I said. I pulled my blue jersey over my shoulders, the tight navy polyester letting out a dry shhh-click as the gold stitching caught on the tape around my ribs.

Clain took a slow, rattling sip of her coffee. The paper cup let out a short, wet crinkle in her hand.

"The NHL draft board president is sitting in box four today," she said, her voice dropping into that flat, local baseline that didn't leave any room for academic decency. "He came down from Chicago on the nine-forty train. He isn't here to look at the State College defense, Julian. He's here to see if the Thorne name is still worth a sixty-thousand-dollar signing incentive after the probate filing."

She took two steps into the locker room, her heavy leather soles making a muted thunk-thunk on the cedar floorboards.

"But that's not the only thing you're running into," she continued, her eyes finding mine through the yellow light. "State College knows about the training room yesterday. Liam's cousin is their secondary goalie, and he’s been talking to the Detroit papers since midnight. They know about the three-line, Julian. They know the third and fourth ribs are floating."

She stopped, her hand coming down onto the top of locker number twelve, her short fingers leaving a small, gray smudge of grease on the clean cedar paneling.

"If you take the ice today, they aren't going to play the puck," she said, her voice dropping into a low, deadly whisper. "Their defense has two hundred and twenty pounds of regional beef on their first line, and they’ve been told to clear the crease. The first time you clear the blue line, the first time you drop your shoulder to gather a lead pass, they're going to drive you into the oak. They aren't trying to draw a minor, Julian. They're trying to collapse the lung.”

I didn't answer her right away. I reached down, my fingers catching the laces of my left skate, my weight shifting to my heels as I pulled the thin, waxed string through the brass eyelets. The tension in my ribs was a cold, constant pressure, but I didn't let my hands shake.

"The registry is signed, Coach," I said, my voice flat as the gray ice in the arena. "If I don't dress, the association pulls the waivers, and the team doesn't clear the gatehouse. We don't have the numbers to play without the first line."

Clain looked at me for five long seconds. Her face was completely still, her small, dark eyes tracking the line of my jaw as if she were looking for that old, silver Thorne shield I used to carry.

"Then stay in the neutral zone," she growled, her hand coming off the wood with a sharp clack. "If the gold wingers close the gap, you drop the puck and clear the lane. I don't care if the Detroit scouts think you're soft. I'd rather have a living boy sitting on the bench than a corpse lying in the Grand Rapids ward when the noon train leaves. Do you hear me, Julian?"

"I hear you, Coach," I said.

But as she turned to leave, the brass latch of her door letting out a dry click-shirr, I knew the lane wasn't going to be clear.

The hallway leading to the ice was four feet wide, a narrow, dark cinderblock tunnel that smelled of wet horsehair, old grease, and the sharp, freezing draft that came off the river through the gatehouse vents.

The roar of the crowd outside didn't sound like a hockey game; it was a loud, chaotic thrud-thrud-thrud that vibrated through the concrete floorboards and into the steel of my skates. It was three thousand people from the rail docks and the salt works, their voices rough and hostile, shouting about the "Disgraced Prince" and the Vance filings before the first line had even cleared the gate.

I stood in the shadow of the brick archway, my helmet held under my left arm, my fingers cold and numb against the blue plastic.

Every time the crowd let out a sudden, rising shout, the air in the tunnel seemed to go thin, making my chest tighten until the white zinc tape around my ribs felt like an iron band being pulled with a wrench. My tongue was dry, coated in that dark graphite taste of the diesel exhaust, my eyes blinking against the bright, blinding glare of the ice that showed through the narrow gap at the end of the passage.

Then a shoulder pad bumped mine.

It wasn't a soft touch; it was the heavy, violent clack-thud of two hundred and ten pounds of navy polyester and canvas driving into my good side, the force of the impact pushing my shoulder back against the cold cinderblocks of the wall.

Jax didn't look down at me. He stood right at my right elbow, his broad shoulders filling the narrow space of the tunnel until the yellow light from the hallway was completely blocked out behind him. His helmet was already on, the black plastic chin strap pulled tight across his scarred jaw, his dark eyes looking out through the wire cage like two cold coals. He had his Sherwood stick held flat across his hips, his massive, split-knuckled fingers closed over the ash shaft with a grip that had turned the wood white.

"You ready, Jules?" he growled.

His voice was so low it didn't even clear the noise of the crowd outside, just a deep, mechanical rumble that vibrated through the shoulder pads and into my collarbone.

"The ribs are tight, Jax," I whispered, my mouth close to his ear. "They know about the floaters. Clain says they're clearing the crease."

Jax didn't shift his weight. He didn't look at the bright glare of the ice, and he didn't look at the red windbreakers of the press crews standing by the gate. He just leaned his massive frame half an inch closer, his shoulder pad locking against mine with a solid, unyielding pressure that felt warmer than the bricks of the boiler house.

"Let them try," he whispered. His voice had no volume to it, just that raw, cold steel from the equipment bay. "Just stay behind me, Jules. I’m clearing the path today. If anyone drops a shoulder within three feet of your left side, they’ll have to carry him off the sheet in the same box they used for the options."

The silver whistle blew down by the gatehouse, a short, sharp pip that cut the air off in our throats before we could even take a breath.

Jax didn't wait for the second line to clear the gate. He drove his right skate into the wet concrete of the threshold, his steel runner letting out a loud, violent crunch-hiss as he took the first step into the blinding yellow light of the arena, and the ice was finally ours.

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See you in the next one!