Alle Kapitel von Behind the Ice Wall : Kapitel 71 – Kapitel 80

SKY’S POV I woke up on my own couch, still dressed, the photographs exactly where we’d left them scattered across the kitchen table. Amira was asleep in the armchair across from me, curled awkwardly, a blanket half fallen off her shoulder. Neither of us had made it to an actual bed. Somewhere around four in the morning, exhaustion had just won. I made coffee quietly, trying not to wake her, and stood at the counter looking at the four photographs again in the gray early light. They looked different in daylight. Less like evidence and more like a record of an entire life someone had decided wasn’t allowed to stay private. My phone buzzed. Reyes. “Anything?” I answered, before he’d said a word. “Nothing solid. I asked around, carefully, nobody official. Whoever’s behind this hasn’t left tracks anywhere I can see. No unusual security requests, no strange access logs, nothing pointing at anyone specific.” “So we’ve got nothing.” “We’ve got nothing yet,” Reyes said. “That’s differe

SKY’S POV Reyes called two days later with a name, though he delivered it carefully, like he wasn’t fully sure yet what to do with it. “Marty,” he said. “Team transportation coordinator. Been with the organization almost as long as I have.” “What about him?” “He requested access to the road trip scheduling system last week. Not unusual on its own — it’s literally his job. What’s unusual is the specific date range he pulled. Matches almost exactly with the hotel stay from last spring. The one where someone photographed you in the hallway.” I sat with that a moment, trying to place Marty’s face, coming up mostly blank beyond a vague memory of a quiet, efficient man who coordinated buses and flight manifests, someone who existed at the edges of team operations without ever really registering as a person I’d thought twice about. “Why would he need that information?” “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Could be routine. Could be nothing.” Reyes paused. “Could also be exactly the

SKY’S POV We tried to get back to something normal that week, the way people do when a threat doesn’t announce itself again immediately and the silence starts to feel, dangerously, like safety. Amira came over Thursday night, the two of us cooking together in my kitchen, deliberately ordinary about the whole evening — chopping vegetables, arguing lightly about how much garlic a dish actually needed, the particular ease that comes from choosing to believe, even temporarily, that nothing outside this room could touch what was happening inside it. “This is nice,” she said, echoing something she’d said months earlier, back before any of the photographs, back before the messages. “I keep waiting to feel guilty for enjoying it. Like relaxing means I’ve stopped taking the threat seriously.” “You’re allowed both. Taking it seriously and still wanting an ordinary evening.” “I know. Doesn’t always feel that way, though.” We ate at the counter, the same as we always did, and for a while t

SKY’S POV I couldn’t stop the memories once they’d started, that first one pulling loose a whole thread of others I’d spent years keeping carefully buried. By thirteen, hockey had stopped being something I did and become something I was, the distinction mattering more than I understood at the time. My father’s demands grew alongside my ability, every improvement met with a slightly higher bar rather than any lasting satisfaction. “You’re better than you were last season,” he told me once, after a tournament where I’d allowed only four goals across five games. “That doesn’t mean you’re where you need to be.” I remembered nodding, absorbing the correction the way I’d absorbed every correction before it, filing away the specifics of what I’d need to improve rather than sitting with whatever disappointment the moment might have otherwise produced. I remembered, too, the particular quiet of the car ride home after that tournament, my father running through every soft goal in exacting

SKY’S POV The arena that night held more people than I’d ever played in front of before, the noise was a physical thing pressing against the boards from the opening puck drop, and for the first period, I barely noticed any of it. I played clean, focused, the particular calm that comes from a body that knows exactly what it’s doing regardless of what else might be happening in the mind attached to it. Eleven saves in the first period alone, most of them routine, a few that weren’t, and I skated to the bench at the intermission feeling, briefly, like the version of myself that could actually carry this. My father sat somewhere in the family section, close enough that I’d spotted him during warm-ups, his expression unreadable the way it always was during games. I knew my mother was watching too, from a hospital bed two states away, a television propped where she could see it, my father having promised to keep his phone on in case she needed to reach him during intermissions. Our goa