Semua Bab Claimed by the Ice Captain: Bab 31 - Bab 40

The league memo came through official channels on a Monday morning, distributed to captains and medical staff across the entire organization. It leaked within thirty-six hours because nothing in professional sports stayed internal long enough to matter, and I found out because Jax sent me a screenshot before seven in the morning with no accompanying message, which was his particular way of communicating something that required my immediate attention. I was still in bed when it arrived. I read it on my phone with the room still dark and the city outside not yet fully awake, and I had the specific feeling of something you have been half-expecting for a long time finally arriving at your door. The league was formalizing an investigation into what the document called performance-adjacent physiological suppression compounds. Legal language, careful in its careful-ness, nothing named, no individuals referenced. An announcement that the investigation was ongoing, and that voluntary disclosu

Reyes was not subtle and he was not, it turned out, unobservant. He had simply been waiting for the right moment when both of those qualities could be most useful at once, and that moment arrived on a Thursday afternoon in the parking lot after the optional skate. He fell into step beside me as I walked toward my car, hands in his jacket pockets, breath making small white clouds in the cold air, with the energy of someone who had been building toward a thing for a while and had finally arrived at the moment of it. "So," he said. "Careful," I said. "I'm being very careful. I'm not going to name the thing directly. I'm going to say: I know. The team knows in the way where everyone knows but nobody is making it into a conversation. And none of us care in any direction that would cause you a problem." He kept his pace steady beside me. "I just wanted you to know you don't have to use energy on the pretending anymore. Pretending costs something real, and you use the energy better out on

The fight started the way the significant ones always started, over something small enough that it could have been released and wasn't.We were in his office on a Wednesday afternoon reviewing the road schedule. The meeting had become comfortable over recent weeks, easy and practical, and I had stopped bracing for it the way I used to in September.He made a correction about my line positioning in the previous game. Specific and fair, the kind of note he made regularly, and I received it regularly because he was usually right.I disagreed with this particular one. I said so directly.He restated his position. I restated mine. We were in the frustration of two people looking at the same play in their respective memories and arriving at different conclusions, where the argument is not about facts but about which facts carry the weight."You were too far forward on the second setup," he said."I was in the lane you specified in the pre-game. If I held back any further, I would have been

The Columbus game was the following night and I played it the way you played things when the rest of your life was in a temporary holding pattern: with everything I had, because the ice was the one place where the rest of it didn't follow me. We won 3-1. My two assists came from reads that were a half-second ahead of everyone else on the ice, which was what happened when you stopped using mental energy on the calculation and put it into the game instead. Jax set up both plays and I converted both plays and in between we moved like two people who had been doing exactly this for years, because we had been doing exactly this for years. In the locker room after, the win was warm and specific around us. Reyes was back on the road trip, hamstring cleared, and he celebrated with the uncomplicated joy of someone who had spent ten days watching from the stands and was furious to have missed anything. Torres played eighteen minutes and looked like he had been on this line his entire career.

The bus was dark and the highway was flat and the team was asleep and I had been holding my phone for nine minutes without pressing a single button. The screen kept lighting up and going dark and lighting up again, counting its own time, waiting.Jax sat beside me. His book was closed on his knee. He was not reading and had not been reading since we left the arena, and he was not going to say anything, and I understood this as the specific thing it was — not indifference, not pressure, just him being present in the way he had learned to be present. Available without demanding. Beside me without requiring anything from the silence.I dialed.It rang once.She picked up. "Leo.""Vance." My voice was low. I was conscious of the rows behind me, the breathing of sleeping teammates, the specific quiet of a team bus at night that made everything feel closer and more audible than it was. "I am on the bus. About two hours from Columbus. Most of the team is asleep.""Is Jax with you?""Right be