CHAPTER 22

JARRETT

The board gave us exactly seventy-two hours.

The commissioner announced a temporary stay on my suspension pending a full financial audit, granting me permission to play in just one game for the sake of public relations.

It was a single game pitting Brent’s team against mine, scheduled for prime time on a national broadcast.

The network executives called it a rivalry showcase, but I knew it was nothing more than a dangerous trap.

Helena and I walked into the arena together. We were not holding hands just yet, but we moved side by side with a quiet purpose.

Brent was already out on the ice, smiling for the lenses and doing his best impression of a wounded husband who just wanted to play hockey.

Vanessa was sitting in the front row wearing a team jersey with his name plastered across the back, and the sight of her made my wolf see absolute red.

When the first period started, Brent came directly for me instead of going for the puck.

He caught me with an elbow to the jaw during an early faceoff and hissed to ask if I missed him.

Later on the boards, he drove his shoulder hard into my ribs and whispered awful things about how Helena was barren and broken, claiming her own body knew I was not worth it.

I refused to swing back at him because the referee was watching our every move.

One single act of retaliation would land me straight in the penalty box, and if I ended up in the box, Helena would look guilty by association under the league's excuse of species-related instability.

So I just took the abuse, enduring a skate blade to my ankle and a heavy stick slashed across the back of my neck.

Every single hit he delivered was carefully designed to make me snap, and the crowd booed me because they thought I was showing weakness.

My wolf was screaming inside my head to kill him, tear his throat out, and make him bleed, but I forced myself to breathe through the anger, counted to ten, and skated away.

Helena was standing behind the bench wearing a team jacket instead of a suit, holding a clipboard in her hand.

She did not look at me at all, keeping her eyes entirely on Brent as she studied his feet, his hands, and all of his physical tells.

Brent managed to score in the second period to put them up one to zero, and he skated right past our bench to tap his chest over his heart before pointing directly at Helena.

She did not react to the provocation, but I saw her jaw set into that specific look she always gets right before everything burns.

By the third period, we were down by one goal with eight minutes left on the clock. Helena leaned in to say something to Coach D, and the coach nodded before looking over at me.

He tapped two fingers against the glass to signal the switch play.

We had only run this specific play in practice a single time and never in an actual game, because it was entirely Helena’s design.

She knew Brent always overcommitted to his left side whenever he grew tired, and he always dropped his stick about half an inch right before he attempted a check.

Helena saw the flaw perfectly, so I lined up across from him for the crucial faceoff.

Brent mocked me by asking if I was getting tired, sneering that my woman could not even keep me company in bed and questioning why I thought she could coach a team.

I kept my eyes locked on the puck instead of looking at him, and the moment it dropped, I won the draw clean and sent it back to the defense.

Then we executed the movement. It did not feel like hockey anymore, playing out more like chess at thirty miles per hour as the wing cut left and the center dragged right.

I looped completely behind the net, right into the space where Brent expected me to be. He bit hard on the bait and came in for a massive hit, but I was already gone.

The puck was already sitting on my stick on the opposite side, executing Helena’s blindside play perfectly.

I found an open lane, and Brent realized what was happening far too late as he turned to deliver a desperate, missing slash.

I was already moving too fast, and in a matter of three seconds, I deked the goalie backhand and sent the puck straight into the top shelf.

The goal tied the game at one apiece, and the arena absolutely exploded around us.

I did not celebrate with the rest of the team, choosing instead to skate straight toward the glass where Helena was standing.

I tapped my chest once and pointed directly at her as a quiet thank you rather than a salute. Her mouth twitched into something that looked almost like a smile, while Brent slammed his stick against the boards in pure frustration as we headed into overtime.

Overtime turned into four minutes of absolute hell because Brent was playing completely wild now.

He stopped the whispers entirely and focused strictly on heavy hits, eventually catching me in the corner and driving me hard into the glass.

He spat in my ear to ask how it felt to know she would never give me children because she was damaged goods, and something inside of me finally snapped.

It was not my wolf that broke, but me as a man. I spun around, caught his wrist, and delivered a clean, perfectly legal check that sent him crashing down to the ice.

The puck popped loose, so I grabbed it and began to skate down the ice with absolutely no one standing between me and the net.

Brent was left on his knees far behind me, and I could hear Helena’s voice carrying clearly from the bench, not yelling but simply telling me to finish it.

I unleashed a powerful slap shot that found the back of the net to win the game two to one.

The horn blared through the building, but I did not look at the crowd or the cameras. I skated right past Brent while he remained on the ice refusing to look up, and I brought myself to a stop right by the bench.

Helena was already waiting there, and for a short moment, we just stared at each other while breathing heavily. Then she did something she had never done in public before by placing her hand gently on my arm, right over the dark bruise Brent had left behind.

"Good game," she said in a quiet voice.

"Good call," I replied.