Chapter 80 CHAPTER 80

Chapter 80 CHAPTER 80
Jax’s Pov

The ice didn't look like ice anymore.

The three-minute scrape between regulation and sudden death hadn't smoothed out the surface,it had just laid down a thin, wet glaze over twenty deep, jagged trenches that ran from blue line to blue line. The sheet was gray, chewed up, and soft around the crease, smelling of stale refrigeration ammonia, wet leather, and cold, iron rust.

There was no noise in the National Stadium.

Twenty thousand people who had spent two hours screaming, whistling, and stomping their boots against the concrete risers were sitting in dead, unnatural silence. The upper and lower bowls were frozen in time,twenty thousand faces leaning over the brass handrails, holding their breath, waiting for the single mistake that would end a season. The only sound in the entire six-story vault was the loud, mechanical hum of the scoreboard clock ticking down from twenty minutes, and the dry, ragged panting of ten boys standing on thirty yards of frozen water.

My legs didn't feel like legs anymore.

From my hips down to the tops of my leather skates, my body was a numb, heavy block of lead. Every stride I took required an explicit, deliberate command from my brain,a mechanical effort that made the muscles in my thighs throb with a dull, sickening ache. My chest protector was soaked through with sweat that had gone cold against my skin, the salt drying in white, stiff crusts around my collarbone.

I set my blades into the gray slush at the right defense point, my right glove locked around the raw, splintered ash shaft of my Sherwood stick.

I wasn't thinking about the draft wire, and I wasn't thinking about the sixty-thousand-dollar contract sitting in Arthur Thorne’s black folder upstairs. I wasn't even thinking about the national championship trophy sitting on its wooden pedestal behind the scorer's bench.

I was skating on pure, unadulterated instinct,the same raw, animal survival that had kept me alive through twelve-hour shifts at the Flint plant and cold winter nights on the dirt roads of the county.

I looked down the ice at Julian.

He was crouched at the center dot, his blue helmet tilted low, his face completely pale under the blinding halogen floods except for the jagged, dark red line of dry blood running from his cheekbone down to his chin. The surgical glue was holding the cut, but the skin around his left eye had swollen shut into a dark, purple bruise. Beneath his torn jersey, his chest was rising and falling in short, desperate hitches against the yellowed zinc tape.

He looked broken, bloody, and entirely indestructible.

The referee stepped into the red circle, holding the vulcanized rubber disc between two gloved fingers. He looked at Vance, then he looked at Julian.

"Clean drop," the referee muttered, his voice thin and tight in the quiet arena. "No hands."

He opened his fingers. The puck fell.

The play didn't start with a clean win at the dot.

Vance’s stick blade met Julian’s with a loud, wooden CLACK, the force of the impact sending a spray of gray slush four feet into the air. The black rubber disc squirted sideways, ricocheting off the linesman’s boot and tumbling into our defensive zone toward the left circle.

Central State’s lead defenseman,a six-foot-two senior with a yellow visor who had spent the third period flinching away from our hits,saw the loose puck and lunged forward. He abandoned his blue line position, committing all his weight to a desperate, sweeping stick-flick to force the puck back into our crease.

It was a fatal mistake.

Julian saw the opening before the defenseman’s blade even touched the ice.

Ignoring the screaming, white-hot agony in his floating ribs, Julian planted his right skate blade deep into the frozen surface, twisted his hips, and threw his frame straight into the lane. His stick blade swept across the gray slush in a tight, razor-sharp arc, catching the puck a split-second before the defenseman’s stick arrived.

WHACK!

The black rubber cleared the defender's stick by two inches, sliding cleanly out past the blue line into the wide-open neutral zone.

"JULES!" I roared, my heavy boots instantly exploding into motion behind him.

Julian didn't look back. He dug his edges into the ice, taking three long, desperate, and agonizing strides that propelled him past Central State’s sprawling defenseman into open ice.

He had split their defense.

Forty feet of untouched, blinding white ice stretched out between his boots and Central State's goalie.

The crowd in the stadium stood up in a single, massive, collective gasp that sounded like a windstorm blowing through dry timber.

Behind Julian, Central State’s two remaining players turned in a frantic, terrifying panic, their white skates cutting deep, frantic gashes into the ice as they chased him down the center lane. They were faster,Julian was running on broken ribs, a half-blind left eye, and three hours of physical exhaustion,and they were closing the gap by two feet with every stride, their stick blades raised to chop at his hands the moment he entered the high slot.

Up in box four, the thirty NHL draft board scouts pressed their faces against the double-paned glass. This was the moment the wire had been waiting for: Julian Thorne,the disgraced prince, the unlisted prospect,taking the game into his own hands for personal glory, shooting for the national title to force his name back onto the league registry.

Julian reached the high slot, fifteen feet out from the red crease.

Central State’s goalie dropped into a low, frantic butterfly stance, his wide leather pads covering the bottom corners, his glove cocked high to block the shot. The two defenders were on Julian’s heels now, their sticks coming down in a violent, desperate attempt to slash his hands before he could pull the trigger.

Julian lifted his stick blade. He cocked his wrists back, opening his hips as if preparing to unleash a top-shelf wrist shot over the goalie’s left shoulder.

The goalie committed, sliding two inches to his right to block the angle. Both defenders threw themselves flat onto the ice, sliding on their stomachs to block the shot path with their bodies.

Julian didn't shoot.

He didn't care about the draft wire. He didn't care about thirty scouts taking notes in calfskin folders, and he didn't care about proving his worth to the men in charcoal coats sitting behind the glass.

He didn't even turn his head to look.

Through three months of cold morning practices, forty miles of back-country dirt roads, and a twenty\-four\-dollar motel room in the county, Julian didn't need eyes to know where I was. He felt my presence trailing seven feet behind his left hip like a second pulse,an indestructible, unyielding force that had carried him through every inch of the dirt.

With a smooth, impossibly delicate turn of his forearms, Julian executed a blind, back-hand saucer pass.

FLIP-SLIDE.

The black rubber disc lifted two inches off the ice, floating cleanly over the sprawling bodies of two sliding defensemen, spinning through the narrow three-inch gap between their skate blades, and landing flat on the tape of my stick at the left circle.

The entire arena froze.

The goalie was completely out of position, stuck on his right pad, his eyes wide with absolute horror as he realized he had covered a shot that was never coming. The entire net was sitting wide open,four feet of red pipe and black nylon mesh completely exposed.

The puck hit my stick tape like a gift from God.

I didn't hesitate. I didn't stick-handle, and I didn't try to make it pretty.

I drove my broad, grease-stained shoulders forward, caught the black rubber disc on my forehand, and slammed every single ounce of my two\-hundred\-and\-ten\-pound frame into a crushing, final wrist shot.

BOOOM-CLACK!

The puck didn't just slide,it exploded off my blade, cutting through the ozone-heavy air of the stadium, and slammed directly into the top right corner of the net, hitting the iron back-strut with a deafening, metallic PING-RATTLE.

The green light behind the net flashed brilliant, blinding red.

BUZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!

The massive, iron arena horn let out a deafening, continuous scream that rattled the floorboards, echoing off six stories of concrete and steel.

NORTHWOOD: 4 | CENTRAL STATE: 3

NATIONAL CHAMPIONS.

The world didn't slow down; it completely exploded.

I didn't look at the scoreboard, and I didn't look at the crowd. I threw my gloves into the high, bright halogen lights, dropped my Sherwood stick onto the sheet, and charged straight for Julian.

He was still on his knees in the high slot, his bare face lifted up toward the rafters, his chest heaving, tears cutting two clear paths through the dry blood on his cheek.

I slammed into him at full speed, sliding flat on my knees across the wet ice, catching him around his waist and pulling him hard against my chest.

"WE DID IT!" I screamed into his ear, my gravelly voice cracking with a raw, ugly, and glorious sob as my arms locked around his shoulder pads. "WE TOOK THEIR SHEET, JULES! WE TOOK THE WHOLE GODDAMN SHEET!"

Julian’s arms came around my neck, his cold, bloody cheek pressing hard against the side of my face, his fingers clutching the fabric of my jersey like a dying man catching an iron rail.

"Jax..." he choked out, laughing and crying all at once, his breath hot against my skin. "Jaxom... we won..."

And then the rest of our team arrived.

Liam, Harrington, Ross, and Miller jumped over the wooden boards, fifteen blue jerseys flying across the red line like a tidal wave of leather, steel, and screaming voices. They threw themselves flat onto the ice over the top of us, piling twenty bodies deep into a wild, barbaric mass of blue and gold.

Up in the front row of the lower bowl, sitting behind the glass partition in his dark charcoal overcoat, Arthur Thorne sat completely alone.

The silver-framed glasses reflected the flashing red light of the scoreboard above him. His white, long-fingered hands were resting flat on his knees, his face pale, hollow, and completely defeated as he watched his son,bleeding, unlisted, and radiant,holding the mechanic from Flint in the center of the national ice.

The system was dead. The ledger was clear. We owned the sheet.

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