Chapter 5: Eight Years of Ice

Jaxon’s POV

"Take the pills, Jaxson. You’re gray. You look like you’re already dead."

I didn't look at my trainer. I didn't even acknowledge he was in the room. I just stared at the two white tablets sitting in the palm of my scarred, calloused hand. They were small, innocent-looking things, but they were the only reason I could still stand upright. They were the only reason my spine didn't feel like it was being fed through a woodchipper every time I took a stride on the ice.

"I’m fine," I rasped. My voice sounded like it had been dragged through a graveyard.

"You're not fine. You’re a ghost," he said, shaking his head as he walked out of the training room. "You’ve been a ghost for eight years."

I swallowed the pills dry. He was wrong. I wasn't a ghost. A ghost has a soul that lingers. I was just a machine that refused to stop running. Eight years. Two thousand, nine hundred, and twenty-two days since the hospital bed went cold. Since the blood-stained 'C' became the only thing I had left of a boy who had once been my entire world. I wondered where Lukas disappeared to.

I have used up all I owned and possessed to look for him, but all to no avail.

It's been a whole 8 years of pure torture. All I forced myself to keep doing was not to stop playing.

I stood up, my vertebrae clicking in a rough rhythm. I grabbed my jersey the Rangers’ blue, now faded and heavy with the weight of a decade of failure. I wasn't the "Devil" anymore. I was just a relic. A cautionary tale. The man who let the Golden Boy become the shadow of the impossible.

I walked toward the ice for the morning skate, but the GM was standing by the tunnel, looking like he’d seen a vision of the apocalypse.

"Vane. Change of plans," he said, his voice high and tight. "You’re not hitting the ice. You’ve been summoned."

I stopped, my hand tightening on my stick. "Summoned? By who? The league finally decided to put me out of my misery?"

"The new owner," he whispered, wiping sweat from his brow. "The acquisition went through an hour ago. Moretti International bought the team. Along with your contract. And your personal debt. Looks like you have being fired."

The name hit me like a physical blow. Moretti. My heart, which had been a frozen stone in my chest for eight years, gave a sudden, painful thud. "What did you say?"

"Just get to the owner’s suite, Jaxson. Now. He doesn't like to be kept waiting."

Moretti??.... Is that Lukas????

Lukas’s POV

I didn’t just buy the New York Rangers this morning. I bought a graveyard.

Standing at the floor-to-ceiling window of the owner’s suite, I watched the zamboni clear the ice below. It looked like a clean slate, but I knew better. Underneath that fresh layer of white were the scars of every game, every hit, and every lie told in this arena.

The door behind me creaked open. I didn't turn. I didn't have to. I could smell the phantom scent of winter and painkillers that had haunted my nightmares for eight years.

"I was told I was fired," a voice rasped. It was deeper now, eroded by time and agony. "So let’s get on with it, whoever you are. Give me the papers and let me go."

I took a slow sip of my scotch, the ice clinking against the glass. "You always were impatient, Jaxson. It was your greatest flaw. You hit too hard. You didn't wait to see if the target was already dead."

I turned around.

The silence that followed was heavy enough to crush a man’s ribs. Jaxson Vane looked like a man who had been living in a war zone. His hair was streaked with gray at the temples, his face lined with the kind of weariness that sleep couldn't fix. But his eyes... they still had that dark, magnetic intensity.

"Lukas," he said in shock. His face was filled with surprise and horror.

"Mr. Moretti," I corrected, my voice as flat and sharp as a scalpel. I walked toward him, the "Golden Boy" nowhere to be found. I was a king in a black suit, and I had come to have my vengance. 

"You look terrible, Jaxson. The years haven't been kind to the Devil, have they? You’re limping. You’re shaking. And you’re still wearing that pathetic blue jersey."

"I thought you were dead," he said, his voice cracking. "I spent eight years looking... I searched every city, Lukas. I thought Dominic killed you that night in the hospital."

I let out a short, cold laugh. "Dominic? My dear Uncle Dominic is the man who saved me from you. He’s the one who told me you paid for the hit on me. He’s the one who held me while I learned you had my father murdered in his cell."

Jaxson flinched as if I’d struck him with a stick. "What? Lukas, no... I never... My father—"

"Shut up about your father," I hissed, stepping into his space. I could see the sweat on his brow, the physical toll his crumbling spine was taking. "I don't care about your excuses. I bought your team today. I bought your mortgage. I bought the very air you breathe. You owe me eight years of my life, Jaxson. And I’ve come to make sure you serve me"

I reached into the desk drawer and threw a pair of rusted, dull-bladed skates at his feet.

"On your knees, Jaxson."

He stared at the skates, then at me. "Lukas, please. Just listen to me for one minute—"

"I am the owner of your life!" I roared, the "evil" finally bubbling to the surface, my aura darkening the room. 

I grabbed his jaw, my fingers digging into the bone. "I’m not the boy you broke. He’s buried in a potter's field next to his father. I’m the man who’s going to make you beg for the end. Now. Get. On. Your. Knees."

I watched him sink. I watched the great Jaxson Vane, the Devil of the NHL, crumble to the floor because he had no choice. The power shift was absolute. I felt a sick, twisted sense of triumph as I looked down at his bowed head.

"Guess they didn't deliver my message well to you. You haven't being fired. You’re on the fourth line now," I whispered, leaning over him. "You’re going to be the punching bag for a rookie I trained personally to end you. His name is Julian. He’s faster than you, stronger than you, and he hates you as much as I do."

I turned my back on him, heading for the window. "Get out of my sight. Go sharpen some skates. Go be the nothing I’ve turned you into."

Jaxson stood up, his movements agonized, and gathered the rusted skates. He didn't say another word as he limped out of the suite, his shadow trailing behind him like a funeral shroud.

The door clicked shut. I stood there, my hand trembling as I gripped my glass. I had won. I had him. So why did I still feel like I was drowning?

I didn't notice the door to the side office opening.

A shadow moved within the room. Not Jaxson. It was an older man, his face a map of regret and whiskey. Silas Vane. Jaxson’s father. The man who had started the embezzlement. The man who had framed my family.

He stood in the doorway, watching me with eyes that were terrifyingly lucid. 

"He didn't do it, Lukas," Silas whispered, his voice a ghost from the past.

"How did you get into my office, old fool. Get out," I snarled, not even turning around. "I’ll have you arrested for trespassing, Silas. You’re as dead to me as my father is."

"Dominic is coming for you," Silas continued, ignoring my threat. He stepped closer, his hand reaching out as if to touch the boy he once knew. "He knows you're back. He knows you're squeezing the board. He’s already called in the contract. He doesn't want you owning the team; he wants you silenced."

"Y’all are just lying to me. I can handle Dominic," I snapped.

"You can't," Silas said. "But maybe I can. My son...he’s a better man than I ever was, Lukas. He didn't kill your father. He’s been the lightning rod for eight years so Dominic wouldn't go looking for you in the shadows."

I finally turned, my eyes full of ice. "You're lying. You're both liars."

Silas didn't argue. He just looked out the window at the parking lot below, where Jaxson was limping toward his beat-up car. Silas saw something I didn't a black sedan idling across the street, a glint of a rifle barrel in the window.

"Watch your back, Golden Boy," Silas whispered. "And tell Jaxson... tell him I’m sorry."

He turned and slipped out the back service door before I could call security.

I stood in the center of my cold, expensive empire, the "evil" I had cultivated for eight years suddenly feeling like a lead weight. I looked down at the rink, wondering if I had truly come back for justice... or if I had just come back to be the monster Jaxson always wanted me to be.

Have I been wrong all these years???