Prologue 2

Pro Development Hockey Camp, Ten Years Ago

ETHAN

I clock him the minute that he steps onto the ice, because it’s pretty much impossible not to.

Some bodies announce themselves without trying, simply by existing at a scale the rest of the room has to adjust to. He’s one of those: chest and shoulders and thighs heavy and rippling with muscle, presence so dense it bends the drills around him. He doesn’t skate so much as arrive, each push into the ice deliberate and punishing, like he expects the surface to withstand him or be broken by the attempt.

He moves like a blunt instrument learning speed, all force and fury. There’s violence coiled in him, not just in the way that he hits, but in how he stands, how he breathes, how he occupies space without apology. I’ve played hockey for enough years to have seen this kind of asshole before, so this one should be easy enough to dismiss. For some reason, I can’t do that with him.

When we line up for drills, I feel him beside me before I see him. He’s close enough that I register the heat coming off him through gear and layers, close enough that his size becomes a physical fact I have to account for.

He crowds me deliberately, edging closer under the guise of readiness, testing boundaries the way men like him always do, and I let him. The tension is immediate, crackling, and I’m faintly amused by how obvious he is about it all, how he thinks that he’s the only one who knows how to provoke, how he thinks that all that matters in this game and in this life is physical strength. Like that’s real power.

I don’t move away. That’s not pride, it’s habit burned deep inside me from playing hockey for fifteen of my eighteen years. I never yield space unless there’s a fucking good reason to, and there almost never is.

The whistle blows, and he explodes into motion, strength first, control second. I match his pace easily, staying parallel, refusing to let his size dictate the shape of my play. He glances at me, sharp and irritated, and I give him nothing in return, just a flick of my eyes, bored, dismissive.

The effect is immediate. His skating gets rougher, his movements less precise, like he’s trying to burn something off. It’s almost funny how quickly he tips from dominant to reactive. I say something mild – barely worth calling a comment – and feel rather than hear the way it lands in him. His focus totally fractures.

God, that was pathetically easy.

Assholes like him expect resistance, they expect fear, or bravado, or escalation. What they never quite know what to do with is indifference, or disinterest, or dismissal.

When he slams into another player too hard, the drill falters. A coach shouts, heads turn, and the chaos ripples outward. I hear myself laugh quietly, the sound slipping out before I bother to stop it.

He hears it, and he whirls around, furious.

For a second, we lock eyes – his are coal-black and burning with rage – and I feel something unexpected spark low and brief in my gut. It’s the sudden knowledge of just how much damage he could do if he ever decided to aim all of that fury properly. He looks like he could crush someone without noticing.

That kind of power should be terrifying. Instead, it registers to me as something to be taunted, forced out, then subtly managed and manipulated to my benefit. So subtly that he doesn’t know what’s happening, until it’s all over.

The next drill puts us head-to-head, and his plan to collide with me is so obvious, it’s almost laughable. Sure enough, he barrels straight into me full force, clearly expecting me to give way…. but I don’t. I absorb the impact cleanly, letting physics do the work.

For a second, we’re pressed together – his chest massive and rock-hard, his huge arm pushing into my side – and his closeness is startling, his size suddenly overwhelming. He’s enormous, and the full realization of that lands with a jolt of something unplaceable.

I look up at him and meet his glare, let my mouth curve in a faint, deliberate taunt.

“Is that all you got?” I mutter to him in my most bored tone.

The reaction is immediate: a flare of something wild behind his dark eyes, breath hitching, body tensing like he’s deciding whether or not to hit me. The seconds stretch, taut and volatile, before the whistle cuts through it and pulls us apart.

After training, I take off my gloves and helmet slowly, deliberately, feeling his gaze land on me before I look up. When I do, he’s watching like he’s trying to solve a problem that he didn’t expect to encounter.

Someone says my name, and I turn to face the kid that the monster-sized dickhead face-planted into the ice.

“Yeah?” I say to him.

He nods at the massive guy, who’s now taking off his own helmet, revealing a shock of hair as black as his eyes. “Mercer’s a real asshole, huh?”

I take note of the name, then I glance back over at him, let my expression sharpen into something knowingly irritating, then turn away with a shrug.

“He’s nothing,” I tell the kid. “All bluster and bullshit.”

And yet.

As I stomp down the hallway to the changing room, I’m uncomfortably aware of how my pulse hasn’t quite settled, how my body is still alert in a way it doesn’t usually get over a simple provocation. The thought annoys me enough that I push it aside without examining it too closely.

Still, as I stand under the scalding-hot shower, the image of him follows. Not the specifics of his play or the chaos that he wreaked, but the sheer, excessive fact of him: all that brutal power barely leashed, reckless in its confidence, infuriating in its refusal to be diminished by my indifference. He occupies space the way weather does, impossible to argue with, impossible to ignore.

The realization hits me then, harsh and unwelcome: he’s done something no one has managed to do in years. He’s disrupted my attention, he’s lodged himself where discipline should have held, he’s taken up residence where he doesn’t belong.

He’s inside my head.

I don’t understand how it happened so quickly, or why irritation refuses to stay contained, bleeding instead into something hotter and more persistent. I don’t understand why disdain no longer brings relief, or why my thoughts keep circling back to him.

Idiots like Mercer aren’t meant to linger, they’re meant to be provoked, neutralized, and left behind when the game ends. That I haven’t done any of that feels like a personal failure.

I hate the distraction. I hate the breach.

And I hate him for making me hate him.