Chapter 80: The Game Without Him

CASSIAN’S POV

The first shift told me everything I needed to know.

I was off.

Not physically, not enough for anyone else to notice. But something in me had shifted the second I stepped onto the ice and saw the bench without Torin on it in the place it had occupied for every important game we had played since the first round.

Game four.

It was the first game I had played without him in years, or at least it felt that way by the time I got to center ice and realized how wrong the night already felt.

The crowd was loud, the building was full. The Finals were still alive, still brutal, still one mistake away from getting away from us. None of that mattered as much as the empty space where Torin should have been on the ice with me.

I knew he was there.

I just did not want to look too early.

The puck dropped and I went after it hard enough to make myself forget the shape of the room around me. Their winger got there first, chipped it out, and we were scrambling before I had even settled into the game.

We spent the first two minutes chasing the play.

Then I looked at the bench.

Torin was there.

He had crutches beside him, with one hand braced on the top rail. His face was set in that calm, tight way he wore when he was trying not to let pain or frustration show in public. He had his chin lifted, his eyes already on me.

The second he caught me looking, something in his face changed.

He gave me a look that said, you are not alone.

That did something to me immediately.

I pushed harder into the next shift.

The first time I got the puck, I went into the corner and got hit late enough to make the crowd react. I stayed up, kept my feet and tossed it back to the point and watched the shot go through traffic. No goal, but the pressure was building. The other team was coming hard. They knew we were missing something, they wanted to test it.

They should not have tested me.

I looked at the bench again on the next change.

Torin was still watching.

He had not moved much. Just the crutch shifted a little against the floor and his fingers tightened on the rail. He looked tired and annoyed at being stuck there. He also looked like he would have stood up and come onto the ice himself if his leg had not made that impossible.

I skated back out with a shot of anger in my chest that had nowhere useful to go.

So I put it into the game.

The first period stayed ugly; their defense was clogging lanes and leaning into every entry we tried to make. I lost one puck battle I should have won, but I got it back two shifts later.

By the second period, the game had turned into one long grind. Our line was forcing the pace, but everything still felt just a little out of sync. A pass slipped behind me on one rush and I turned too late to recover. On the next shift, I took the puck low and drove the net myself, got the shot off clean, and nearly tied it.

The crowd roared anyway.

I looked at the bench again and found Torin already staring at me.

He did not smile.

He did not need to.

The look in his eyes was enough.

I knew exactly what he was thinking because I was thinking it too. We had spent so much of this playoff run playing like one unit that being without him felt like a broken habit. Every shift ended a beat early in my head, every lane felt wrong. Every time I turned up ice, I expected him to be there on the back side of the play.

He was not on the ice.

But he was there.

That was the problem and the answer.

Near the middle of the second, I finally got my chance.

A bad bounce along the boards, a puck pinching loose. One of their defenders stepping up too early. I picked it up at speed, cut across the blue line, and took the lane before anyone could force me outside. Their goalie bit on the first angle, I slid the shot low on the far side.

Goal.

The building detonated.

I did not even finish my turn before I looked up at the bench.

Torin was standing as much as he could with the crutches.

I pointed at him before I could think better of it.

He shook his head once like he could not believe I had done that in front of everybody.

I was already grinning when I got back to the bench. “You saw that?”

“Hard to miss,” he said.

“Because it was good?”

“Because you stared at me after scoring like a lunatic.”

I laughed once. “That was not what I was doing.”

“No?”

“No.”

He looked at me for a beat too long, and the space around us got a little quieter in my head even though the arena was still roaring.

Then he said, low enough that only I could hear, “You are playing angry.”

I leaned in. “You are on the bench and I still have to hear this?”

His mouth twitched. “Answer the question.”

I stared at him. “Yes.”

The look he gave me after that was too direct to be called anything but dangerous.

It was hard not to want to kiss him right there.

The third period got ugly.

Their defense started taking runs at our top line. There was late contact and heavy finishes. Every time one of our guys touched the puck in the wrong area, somebody finished with an extra shove. The refs were letting it go too long. Danton kept barking from the bench, Raffi was already at the point of wanting to fight the entire opposite bench.

I did not care about any of it.

I cared that Torin was on the bench with crutches beside him and his eyes fixed on me like he was willing the whole thing forward by sheer force.

He looked angry and proud and frustrated all at once, which was not a combination I wanted to examine too closely while I was trying to win a championship game.

I got my second goal late in the third.

We had been cycling in their zone for nearly a minute. The puck moved low to high and back down again, and then suddenly the lane opened. I got a pass at the top of the circle and let it go before the goalie could set.

It hit net.

The building erupted again, louder this time because the score had finally started to bend in our favor.

I screamed once without meaning to and turned straight towards the bench.

Torin was already looking at me.

His face had changed.

The look on his face said he was feeling every part of this with me even from the bench, even with one leg out of commission, even while the rest of the game kept moving.

I hit the glass with my glove on the way back and kept my focus locked to that one corner of the room where he stood.

We finished it out after that.

Every shift was tighter and every clear mattered. The last couple of minutes dragged and then flew at the same time. Their goalie came out for the extra attacker; we cleared once, then gain. I nearly had a third empty-net chance and missed by a hair.

The horn sounded with us ahead.

The crowd went feral.

I did not remember skating off the ice. Only the noise, the heat and the push of bodies around me.

Torin was already in the tunnel when I came off.

Or maybe he had been waiting there.

I saw him before I fully processed the rest of the room.

The second he saw me, he moved.

Fast enough to make my breath catch.

I barely had time to stop before he reached me. His hand came up to my jersey and caught me by the front, hard enough to stop my momentum, and then he pulled me in with a force that made everything else vanish.

He kissed me right there in the tunnel.

No hesitation.

No concern for the cameras, the staff, the guys behind us, the noise from the ice still roaring through the open doors. He kissed me like he had been waiting the whole game to do it and no longer cared who saw.

I kissed him back immediately.

His hand tightened in my jersey. My hand went to his waist on instinct, careful of the injured leg, and the whole tunnel seemed to narrow around us in one bright, dangerous second of heat and relief and the kind of need that only showed up when one of us had been forced to spend a game apart.

The kiss did not last long.

It did not need to.

When he pulled back, his breath was rough, his eyes too bright, his mouth still close enough to mine that I could feel every exhale.

That was when I finally got the words out.

“That was for you.”

His expression changed first, then softened in a way that nearly undid me. He looked at me with a kind of private satisfaction that was somehow hotter than anything else he could have done in front of everyone.

He kissed the corner of my mouth once, quick and sure.

Then he answered, voice low and raw and entirely Torin.

“That was all you.”

That hit harder than the goals had.

I stared at him for a second, still holding him by the waist, still standing in the tunnel with the game noise fading behind us and the team celebrating somewhere a few steps away.

He looked wrecked and proud and completely sure of what he meant.

I smiled before I could stop myself.

He saw it and his own mouth curved in response, tired and real and a little dangerous in the way it always was when he knew exactly what he had done to me.

The tunnel was still full of noise.

But, none of that mattered as much as the fact that he had waited for me here and kissed me like he did not care who saw.

We were not done.

Not even close.

But for that one second in the tunnel, with Torin holding my jersey and looking at me like I had just brought him the game, I felt like we had already won something bigger than the scoreboard.