Chapter 6
"I remember what I promised," August said softly.
"August..."
"Go inside, Fallon. It's too cold out here for your hands."
He put his glove back on, pushed off the dasher with a single, powerful stride, and rejoined the defensive rotation, his stick blade clicking rhythmically against the ice as he gathered the puck for the next drill.
Fallon stood frozen by the gate, her fingers rising to touch the zipper he had just adjusted.
His touch had been tender. It had been protective, bordering on reverent.
So why did she feel a sudden, sick knot tightening in the pit of her stomach?
She looked toward the Edmonton tunnel, where their equipment staff was hanging up the opposing team's jerseys for the evening match.
Number 44. Vance.
And next to it, the jersey of their third-line enforcer, a veteran defenseman who had transferred from Minnesota four seasons ago: Marcus Grier.
Fallon turned on her heel and headed toward the dressing room, the titanium pin in her scarred palm aching with a sudden, violent throb that had nothing to do with the Canadian cold.
The national broadcast red lights blared above the glass like warning sirens.
Rogers Place was vibrating with twenty thousand Edmonton fans roaring for blood, their voices coalescing into a deafening, cavernous drone. On the television monitors mounted along the bench runway, the TSN graphics flashed in sharp yellow: *SPECIAL REPORT: TARGETED HIT IN THE THIRD PERIOD.*
Fallon stood at the dasher, her fingers clamped so hard around the composite ledge that the titanium pin in her right metacarpal burned with a shrill, white-hot ache.
"No," she whispered. Her voice was instantly swallowed by the scream of the siren and the shrill, frantic blast of three referees blowing their whistles simultaneously. "No, August, don't."
It had happened in a blur of six violent seconds.
For fifty-two minutes of clean, suffocating hockey, August had played like a surgeon. He had kept his checks along the perimeter, angled Edmonton’s wingers into the neutral zone, and refused to bite on two separate face-wash attempts by their enforcers. Fallon had dared to exhale. She had stood by the bench gate with her clipboard tucked against her ribs, feeling a stupid, swell of pride. *He's doing it. He's listening.*
Then Edmonton’s third line had rolled over the boards.
Marcus Grier had stepped onto the ice.
The shift in August hadn't been explosive; it had been glacial, terrifyingly quiet. The moment Grier swung around the Edmonton net to retrieve a dump-in, August hadn't looked at the puck. He hadn't checked his defensive partner. He had simply dropped his shoulder, dug his steel runners into the fresh ice, and accelerated across ninety feet of open sheet with the horrifying momentum of a missile seeking its coordinate.
There was no defensive logic to it. No hockey rationale.
Grier had barely gathered the puck along the half-wall when August arrived. The impact had sounded like an automotive pileup—a wet, metallic crunch that echoed over the crowd's roar. August’s shoulder had caught Grier square beneath the breastbone, driving the veteran through the curved acrylic partition near the bench opening. The glass had fractured in a cobweb of tempered shards.
Grier had folded backward, his helmet flying off, his skates kicking out beneath him as he crashed into the open gate.
But August hadn’t braced. He hadn't rolled off the contact. He had carried his own momentum directly through the collision, his head whipping violently into the exposed steel stanchion of the partition before his torso slammed flush against the unyielding iron frame of the door latch.
The sound of his ribs cracking had been audible from the bench.
Now, the ice was a war zone.
Edmonton players were piling over the boards, gloves littering the sheet like discarded armor. Sticks swung, helmets tumbled, and referees threw themselves into the churning knot of jerseys. In the center of the carnage, Grier lay motionless on the ice, his eyes rolled back, a trail of dark red pooling beneath his temple.
And three feet away, August was on his knees.
His helmet was gone, sheared off by the stanchion. Blood was pouring from a jagged split across his forehead, cascading down his left eyelid and dripping off his square chin onto the ice in thick, rhythmic splatters. His chest was hitching in ragged, agonizing spasms—the shallow, rapid panting of a man whose rib cage had just collapsed inward against his lungs.
"Doc! Get out there!" Coach Miller’s voice was a jagged scream behind her. "Get out there now!"
Fallon shoved the gate open. The rubber soles of her medical boots slipped on the bloody shavings near the crease, but she didn't care. Her hands were shaking so violently she could barely grip her trauma kit.
"Out of the way!" she yelled, shoving past an Edmonton linesman who was wrestling one of their defensemen away from the pile. "Move!"
She dropped to her knees beside August. The ice bit through her dark athletic trousers, freezing and wet.
"August!"
He didn't look up. His eyes were unfocused, the charcoal irises shuddering with the rapid, jerky rhythm of a grade-three concussion. He was clutching his left side with one shredded glove, his breath whistling through his teeth in wet, shallow gasps. Every intake of air sounded like grinding glass.
"August, look at me," she pleaded, seizing his face between her gloved palms. The blood from his temple smeared warm and slick across her fingers. "Look at me! Don't move your neck. Do not move!"
His gaze slowly tracked to hers. The fog in his eyes was terrifying—a murky, concussed daze that stripped away his usual sharp edge. But beneath the neurological shock, beneath the agonizing trauma of fractured bone, there was no panic.
There was only a terrible, exhausted finality.
"Fallon," he rasped. A thin line of pink, frothy sputum bubbled at the corner of his split lip—a sure sign of thoracic trauma, of rib fragments threatening pleura.
"Shut up. Don't speak," she said, her voice cracking as tears burned hot and furious behind her eyes. Her fingers worked furiously, checking his cervical spine, stabilizing his neck while the arena medical crew sprinted across the ice with the spine board and cervical collar. "Why did you do it? You promised me! You promised me you wouldn't take a run at anyone!"
August didn't flinch as she pressed her fingers against his neck. His right hand—the one she had carefully wrapped and tended in Chicago, the hand whose torn skin she had stitched back together with her own scarred fingers—came up trembling from the ice.
He reached for her wrist. His bloody, ice-caked fingers brushed the cuff of her jacket, seeking the pulse point he had held in the hotel room.
"Grier," he whispered, his chest hitching on a terrible, hollow spasm that arched his back off the ice. "Grier is... done."
"I don't care about Grier!" she screamed, the fury and the heartbreak tearing through her chest in a ragged sob. She snapped the hard plastic cervical collar around his neck, securing the velcro with brutal efficiency. "Look at what you did to yourself! You broke your ribs! You're bleeding into your lungs, you idiot! Is this what you wanted? You threw away your entire career for a grudge match!"
