Pucking Around with Fate
They were supposed to be on the same team.
Santos Khyle arrived in Seattle as the Soul Reapers' most anticipated rookie in years, a natural-born scorer with something to prove and a chip on his shoulder the size of a regulation puck. Gunner Jäger had been tearing up the ice as the team's feared enforcer for two seasons, and he had zero interest in sharing his spotlight with some orange-haired twenty-one year old who looked at him like he was a problem to be managed.
From the moment they met, it was war.
On the ice, they were a disaster. Off it, they were worse. Screaming matches in corridors. Fists through locker room walls. A live on-air brawl that made every highlight reel in North America and earned them both a suspension, a lecture from their furious coach, and the undivided attention of the entire hockey world.
Nobody could stand to watch them together.
Nobody could look away either.
Because underneath the fury and the bruises and the months of spectacular mutual destruction, something else was building. Something neither of them had language for yet. Something that felt uncomfortably like the only fight either of them was actually afraid to lose.
The Soul Reapers are one playoff run away from everything. Gunner and Khyle are one honest conversation away from falling apart completely.
Or maybe, just maybe, from finally figuring out what they are to each other.
Pucking Up the Ice is a slow burn MM romance set in the brutal and beautiful world of professional hockey. It contains explicit language, on-ice violence, emotional gut punches, two men who are absolutely terrible at feelings, and a love story that had to break everything before it could build something worth keeping.
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Chapter: Love TapPOV: KhyleThe first run through went cleanly enough.Khyle's side had control from the drop, and they moved the puck through the sequence the coach wanted with the mechanical efficiency of men who had run the same plays enough times that their bodies knew the pattern without being told. The opposing group pressed hard, won the puck back in the neutral zone, and put it in the net two minutes later. Clean, functional, unremarkable.Khyle barely noticed any of it.He was tracking Gunner.Not deliberately. Not as a tactical decision. His eyes just kept finding him the way your tongue finds a sore tooth, involuntary and persistent and deeply annoying. Gunner was playing his position with the same focused patience Khyle had observed on the bench during games, not chasing the play, not overextending, just maintaining his presence in a way that made the ice around him feel slightly more dangerous than the ice everywhere else.He hadn't come near Khyle yet.That was the part that had his nerv
Last Updated: 2026-03-27
Chapter: PenancePOV: KhyleThree hours and change into practice, and Khyle was fairly certain the coach was trying to kill them.Not metaphorically. Not in the way coaches always pushed their teams and players complained about it and everyone secretly understood it was for their own good. Khyle meant this in the literal, actual, someone-should-probably-check-his-credentials sense. The man had been running them through skating drills since seven in the morning with the cheerful relentlessness of someone who had never once in his life experienced muscle fatigue and had no working theory about what it felt like.The extra conditioning sets had started somewhere in the second hour. By the third hour, three of the hardiest players on the roster were openly scowling, and Logan had said several things to the ice that Khyle was glad he hadn't been close enough to hear clearly.The coach called it whipping them into shape.It felt a lot more like penance. Khyle wasn't sure what they were all being punished fo
Last Updated: 2026-03-27
Chapter: StrikePOV: GunnerThe ice was good this morning.Gunner could tell within the first two strides. There was a quality to fresh ice that you either learned to read or you didn't, and after twenty years on skates he could feel it through his blades before he'd consciously registered anything else. The overnight resurface had left it clean and fast, with just enough give in the top layer to hold an edge without fighting you for it. Good practice ice. The kind that made everything feel possible before the work started and reminded you why you came back every morning.He pushed into his warmup laps and let his body find its rhythm, the familiar sequence of muscle groups waking up and loosening in order, calves and quads first, then the hip flexors, then the long pull of his back as he leaned into the corners and let momentum do the work. Around him the rest of the team was spreading out across the ice in the loose, unhurried way of men who had done this so many times that the routine had become s
Last Updated: 2026-03-27
Chapter: DownpourPOV: GunnerSome sort of spiritual assessment. That's what it felt like.Like whatever force ran the universe had looked at Gunner Jäger, taken stock of his general track record, and decided that before it let him anywhere near the afterlife it was going to put him through one final test to see if he had the basic moral and psychological infrastructure to handle eternity without causing a incident.And the test was Santos Khyle.Every conversation they had detonated. Every interaction on the ice turned into a war of wills that neither of them could walk away from without having left something burning. Gunner had stopped looking for resolution weeks ago. There was no resolution to be found. You couldn't resolve something that kept generating new fuel every time you got within twenty feet of it. All you could do was manage the damage and try not to let it take out anything structural.The problem was that Khyle was genuinely, specifically, infuriatingly difficult to ignore.Not just his
Last Updated: 2026-03-27
Chapter: Guy Was a JerkPOV: KhyleThe parking lot doors were heavy and cold to the touch, and the air that hit Khyle when Shane pushed through them was sharp enough to make him blink. Seattle in the fall had a particular quality to it, clean and dark and faintly hostile, like the city was reminding you it had a winter coming and you should probably be making arrangements.He let Shane and Logan carry the conversation for the first thirty seconds, which was not difficult because Logan was already deep into his theory about the Shoten's superior selection of draft beer and Shane was agreeing with the enthusiasm of someone who would have agreed with almost anything right now just to keep the atmosphere moving in a productive direction. They were good at that, both of them. The particular skill of filling space with noise when noise was what the situation needed.Khyle walked between them and said nothing and let it wash over him.His mind was still in the corridor."Khyle." Logan's voice shifted registers, dro
Last Updated: 2026-03-26
Chapter: My TeamPOV: KhyleThe corridor outside the locker room was the kind of quiet that only existed in arenas after the crowd had gone home. Not true silence, because buildings like this never went completely silent, there was always the hum of ventilation and the distant clatter of staff doing their jobs and the residual energy of nineteen thousand people that seemed to linger in the walls long after they'd emptied out. But it was quiet enough that footsteps echoed, and quiet enough that Khyle heard Gunner coming before he saw him.He'd been the last one out. Or close to it. The bulk of the team had already moved through, running home to wives or hot dates or just the relief of their own couches, and Khyle had taken his time in the shower, letting the hot water do what it could for the particular combination of physical and psychological damage the evening had produced. They'd won. A lone goal, late in the third, and it had been his. He should have felt better about that than he did.He was pull
Last Updated: 2026-03-26
Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession
He proposed the morning of graduation. She called him a nobody and walked away.
By midnight, the whole world knew his name.
Chase Sterling is the heir to an empire she never knew existed, and Vivian Ashford is the actress who rejected him before the fortune ever came. Now she is building her career under the bright lights of Hollywood, and he is dismantling everything in his path from a New York boardroom. They should be strangers. They should be over.
But something is pulling them back together, and it is darker than desire.
Chase is not the man Vivian fell for in college. He is colder now, crueler, and every time he gets close to her, something inside him turns. He does not understand why he needs to hurt what he loves. She does not understand why she keeps coming back. Neither of them knows about the curse written into the Sterling bloodline, or that the stronger their love grows, the more violently he will be driven to destroy her.
His mother is watching from the shadows. Her best friend is seeing visions drenched in blood. And the man offering Vivian the career of her dreams has his own reasons for keeping her close.
Some curses cannot be broken. Some loves refuse to die. And some obsessions were never meant to end.
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Chapter: The Rhodes Affair Part OnePOV: Chase SterlingThe Whitmore Foundation Gala is the kind of event that exists primarily to be photographed, which means the venue has been selected for its bones rather than its comfort, and the lighting is designed to make everyone look like the best version of themselves, and the champagne is very good because bad champagne at a charity gala is the one thing that will actually generate negative press coverage.I have been here for forty minutes and I have already closed two deals, deflected one journalist, and had a conversation with the deputy mayor that will be useful in approximately six weeks when Sterling Industries needs a permit expedited. This is what these evenings are for. I understand that now in a way I didn't before the will reading, the way you understand a language once you've lived in the country, not just studied it in a classroom.Dominic is not here. He is somewhere in the Hamptons doing whatever Dominic does when he isn't actively making my life more complica
Last Updated: 2026-03-27
Chapter: First BloodPOV: Vivian AshfordThe role is called Margot.She is a twenty-three-year-old woman who grew up with nothing and clawed her way into a world that wasn't built for her, and she is brilliant and ruthless and quietly devastating, and the script is the best thing I have read since I got to LA, and I want it the way I have wanted very few things in my life with the particular clarity of knowing this is exactly the right thing at exactly the right moment.I've read it four times. I've made notes in three colors. I know every scene Margot has and I have thought about each one from the inside out, the way my acting coach at Columbia taught me, the way that separates the people who perform a role from the people who become it.I am going to become Margot.I have been awake since five practicing the sides in front of the bathroom mirror, which is a thing I would be embarrassed about if anyone could see me, but no one can, and this is the advantage of living alone in a city that doesn't know you
Last Updated: 2026-03-27
Chapter: New BeginningsPOV: Vivian AshfordLos Angeles is exactly what I needed it to be, which is to say it is enormous and loud and full of people who are too busy becoming something to spend much time asking you what you left behind.My apartment is in Silver Lake, third floor, west-facing windows that catch the late afternoon light in a way that makes everything look more golden than it actually is. I have a bed, a secondhand couch, three boxes of clothes I haven't fully unpacked yet, and a view of the hills that I stand in front of every morning with my coffee and remind myself counts as a win. It is smaller than my dorm room was. I don't care. It is mine, and no one I grew up with knows the address, and that feels, for now, like exactly the right amount of freedom.I have been here eleven days.I have a meeting in two hours with Marcus Webb.Marcus Webb's production company occupies the top two floors of a building in West Hollywood that someone spent a great deal of money making look like it cost eve
Last Updated: 2026-03-27
Chapter: InheritancePOV: Chase SterlingThe Sterling family attorney is a man named Gerald Foss, who has been handling this family's affairs for thirty-one years and has the carefully neutral expression of someone who has witnessed enough Sterling drama to have developed a professional immunity to all of it. He sits at the head of the conference table in the forty-second floor offices of Sterling Industries with a leather portfolio open in front of him and his hands folded on top of it, and he does not look at me when I walk in, which tells me he already knows exactly what this morning contains and has decided in advance not to be the one who makes eye contact when it happens.Dominic is already seated.He doesn't look up either, which is vintage Dominic, which means we are all going to sit in this room together and pretend that the last seventy-two hours didn't happen, which is also vintage Dominic, which is maybe the most Sterling thing I've ever witnessed in my life.I take the chair across from him.
Last Updated: 2026-03-26
Chapter: The RevealPOV: Vivian AshfordI find out the same way everyone else does, which is the part that makes it unbearable.It's forty-eight hours after graduation and I'm sitting at Mara's kitchen table with a coffee I haven't touched, still running on the particular kind of adrenaline that comes from having your perfect moment publicly detonated, and Mara sets her phone face-up on the table between us without saying a word.The headline takes about three seconds to load.STERLING HEIR SURFACES: Chase Sterling, 22, Confirmed as Sole Heir to Sterling Group Fortune. Net Worth Estimated at $2.3 Billion.There is a photograph. It's Chase, but not the Chase I know, not the Chase who showed up at my door at nine in the morning with a tie he'd knotted wrong and a ring box in his jacket pocket. This Chase is standing outside a glass building in a suit that costs more than my entire wardrobe, next to a man I recognize from financial news as Aldous Sterling, silver-haired and severe, with the same jaw and the
Last Updated: 2026-03-26
Chapter: Graduation Day (Part 2)POV: Chase SterlingThe ceremony is already in full swing by the time I find my seat, and the applause is the kind that fills a space so completely you stop hearing it as individual sound and it becomes something more like weather. I sit down between two people I've known for three years and will probably never see again, and I stare straight ahead, and I keep my hand flat against my thigh so I stop reaching for the ring box in my pocket.She's up there.Of course she is. Vivian Ashford is always exactly where the light is brightest. She's standing at the edge of the stage with the other honor students, perfectly composed, her dark hair pinned back, her gown pressed like she ironed it herself at six this morning, which she absolutely did. She's looking out over the audience with that expression she has, the one that reads as serene confidence to everyone in this auditorium and reads to me, after three years, as the very specific kind of calm that means she's already won and she knows
Last Updated: 2026-03-26
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