Enforcer's Bargain

Chapter Nine: Portland

Delaney

The schedule had been set months before any of this started, which meant there was no version of the season where the Ironclads didn't eventually have to play Portland, the team Beckett had once centered for, the team whose new enforcer, a mountain of a man named Dax Holloway, had spent the last two seasons building a reputation for hits that made even Roman's worst moments look restrained.

"He's going to target you," Delaney said, three days before the game, watching Roman lace his skates in the equipment room with the particular calm he reserved for things that actually worried him. "Holloway. Everyone's saying it. Portland's been chirping about payback for Beckett's shoulder for two years and they finally get you on home ice."

"Let them chirp." Roman didn't look up from his skates. "I've been hit before. I'll survive being hit again."

"That's not comforting, that's a threat assessment you're failing to actually assess." She sat down across from him, arms crossed, doing the thing Priya had once called smitten and Delaney now simply called worried. "You have a responsibility here that's bigger than pride. To the team. To me, if I'm allowed to factor into your risk calculus at all these days."

Something in his face softened at that, the specific softening she'd learned to watch for over two months of dismantling every defense he'd built before her. "You're allowed," he said. "You're factored in. But I can't skate scared, Voss. The second I start protecting myself instead of playing the game, I become worse at the job, and worse at the job gets other guys hurt, not just me. That's not bravado. That's just how the position works."

"I know how the position works. I dated the last guy who found out the hard way."

"That's fair." He met her eyes, steady. "I'm not going to promise you I'll be careful. I'm going to promise you I'll be smart, which is the version of careful that's actually available to me." He reached over, took her hand, thumb tracing the same small, careful circle he'd started doing weeks ago without either of them commenting on it. "I need you in the stands Thursday. Row two. Same coat."

"You're worried."

"I'm always worried before Portland games now. New development. Started right around the same time I started being worried about a lot of things I never used to think about before you." He almost smiled, tired and honest. "Turns out having something to lose changes the math on every hit I take. I didn't used to have anything in Row Two worth skating careful for. Now I do."

Roman

Portland arrived Thursday night loud and confident, and Dax Holloway made his intentions clear inside the first shift, a borderline hit along the boards that drew a warning glare from the referee and a roar of approval from the visiting bench.

Roman skated past their bench on the next shift change and said nothing, which was its own kind of message, the specific silence he'd perfected over a decade of not giving opponents the satisfaction of a reaction.

He found the actual confrontation in the second period, Holloway lining up a hit on their rookie call up, a nervous kid named Ashworth who'd been in the league eleven games and had no business absorbing a hit built for a veteran. Roman got there first, took the impact meant for Ashworth on his own shoulder, and the two enforcers went down together in a tangle that the crowd rose for, screaming, the specific electric roar that meant everyone in the building knew exactly what they were watching.

He came up first. Holloway came up slower, and something in the delay made Roman's chest go cold in a way it hadn't in years, because he recognized the specific slowness, the particular grimace, from a night two years ago in a different arena, watching Beckett Reyes take exactly this long to get back up.

Roman skated to the box for the resulting penalty, and this time, without needing to remind himself, he looked back the entire way, watching Holloway skate off under his own power, favoring one side but upright, walking, fine. Watching, properly, the way he'd learned to since a woman in Section 114 had once decided his failure to do so made him a villain worth writing four hundred thousand words to understand.

Between periods, Priya found him in the tunnel, phone already out. "That's going to be everywhere by morning. You took a hit meant for your rookie and you looked back at Holloway the whole way to the box. That's not enforcer footage, Kade, that's a highlight reel for the exact redemption arc we needed."

"I didn't do it for footage."

"I know," Priya said, and for once, her voice had actual warmth in it instead of strategy. "That's why it's going to work so well."

Delaney was waiting by the tunnel exit after the game, third period won, Ashworth uninjured, Holloway walking under his own power on the visitors' side of the ice.

"You looked back," she said, before he'd said anything.

"I told you I'd learned to."

"I watched you do it live, this time. Not on a broadcast delay two years too late." Something in her voice had gone thick, unguarded, the same way it had in his kitchen weeks ago. "I don't think I've ever actually watched you do it before tonight. Every other hit I know about, I only had the footage. The delay. The chance to be angry before I understood anything."

"And now?"

"Now I watched it happen in real time, and all I felt was terrified you'd be the one who didn't get back up." She stepped into him, careful of the shoulder he'd taken the hit on, and pressed her forehead against his chest, steady, present. "I think that might be the actual difference between fiction and this. In fiction I got to control the outcome. Tonight I just had to trust you'd handle it, and you did, and I don't have a category in my head yet for how big that feeling actually is."

He held her there in the tunnel, shoulder aching, adrenaline still working its way out of his system, and thought about Ashworth, safe on the bench, and Holloway, upright and walking, and a woman in his arms who'd finally watched him choose someone else's safety over his own pride in real time instead of through a two year old broadcast delay.

"For what it's worth," he said, quiet, into her hair, "I've got a category for it. I've just been too careful to say the word out loud yet."

"Say it anyway."

He pulled back, just enough to look at her properly, and said it plainly, without hedging, for the first time since a hallway six weeks ago had started all of this with a phone and a blackmail and a fic he'd read twice before ever admitting why it mattered.

"I love you, Delaney Voss. Not the fake version. Not the version built for cameras. This one. The real one, in a tunnel, smelling like ice and adrenaline, still shaking a little from a hit I'd take again tomorrow if it meant Ashworth walks off the ice instead of me."

She didn't answer with words. She didn't need to. The way she kissed him, right there, in front of the tunnel camera that Priya would later confirm had, in fact, caught the entire thing, said everything the article, the blackmail, and every chapter of Enforcer's Mercy had been building toward from the very beginning.