CHAPTER 6
1407 Words
Wern’ POV
The hospital smelled like bleach and panic.
Half the team was already in the waiting room when we arrived. Petrov sat against the wall with his head in his hands. Two freshmen whose names I still mixed up were pacing by the vending machine. Coach Maddox stood at the nurses' station arguing with a woman in scrubs who clearly outranked him and didn't care about his season record.
Kael walked straight to Maddox. I followed.
"What do we know?" Kael asked.
"He left the arena at nine-thirty. Alone. Someone hit him in the parking lot, east side, near the dumpsters." Maddox's voice was flat but his hands were shaking. "Security footage shows two individuals. Hooded. One had a bat."
"How bad?"
"Broken arm. Fractured orbital. They're checking for bleeding on the brain."
"The jersey," Kael said. "Talk about the jersey."
Maddox looked at me. Then back at Kael. The look that passed between them made my stomach drop through the floor.
"Holloway pulled a jersey from the equipment room before he left. He was wearing it over his hoodie. It was Calloway's. Number eleven."
"Why was he wearing my jersey?" I asked.
Nobody answered.
"Why was Holloway wearing my jersey?" I said again, louder.
Petrov looked up from his hands. His eyes were red. "Because somebody wrote something on your locker this afternoon. Holloway saw it before you did. He cleaned it off and took the jersey so you wouldn't see it."
"What did it say?"
"Wren—" Kael started.
"What did it say, Petrov?"
Petrov's jaw tightened. He looked at Kael. Kael gave a small, sharp shake of his head but Petrov was already talking.
"It said: 'Girls don't belong on ice. We'll prove it.'"
The waiting room tilted. Fluorescent lights. Linoleum. The mechanical hum of a building designed to keep people alive and the cold understanding that someone had tried to hurt me and had hurt Holloway instead because he'd been wearing my name on his back.
"This isn't random," Kael said to Maddox. "This is targeted."
"We don't know that."
"They attacked a man wearing her jersey in the dark. In a parking lot with one camera angle that just happens to have a blind spot." His voice was the ice version. Captain. Commander. The one that moved rooms and ended arguments. "Someone on this campus has a problem with her. And they just escalated from locker vandalism to assault with a weapon."
"I'll contact campus security…"
"Campus security is a guy named Dale who locks the gym at ten. Contact the police. File it tonight. I want the footage pulled before someone decides it's not worth the paperwork."
Maddox stared at him. Kael stared back. There was a conversation happening between them that had nothing to do with words and everything to do with who actually ran this team.
"I'll make the call," Maddox said quietly, and walked toward the exit.
The waiting room rearranged itself. Petrov went back to staring at his hands. The freshmen stopped pacing. A nurse appeared and told us Holloway was out of surgery and stable but not conscious. Family only for the next twelve hours.
One by one, the team filtered out. Petrov left last, squeezing my shoulder on the way past without saying anything, which was the most words he'd ever communicated to me.
Then it was just me and Kael in a hospital waiting room at two in the morning.
He was sitting two chairs away. Elbows on knees. Staring at the floor between his feet. The controlled, arrogant, ice-cold captain was gone. What was left was a man whose teammate was in a hospital bed because of a jersey with my number on it.
"This is my fault," I said.
"Don't."
"If I wasn't on the team…"
"Then whoever did this wins." He looked up. "Is that what you want?"
"I want Holloway to not be in surgery because someone hates me."
"Someone doesn't hate you. Someone is afraid of you. There's a difference, and the difference matters."
"It doesn't feel different from where I'm sitting."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he stood, crossed the two-chair gap, and sat down next to me. Not touching. But close. Close enough that I could feel the heat of him through the cold hospital air.
"When I was sixteen," he said, staring straight ahead, "I played on a team with a kid named Declan Marsh. Best skater I'd ever seen. Faster than me. Better hands. The kind of player you build a franchise around."
He paused. I didn't prompt him. I'd learned that Kael Thorne spoke when he was ready and not one second before, and the fastest way to make him stop was to ask him to continue.
"Declan was Black. Only Black kid in the league at that level in our district. Someone put a note in his skates before a playoff game. He read it on the bench. Didn't tell anyone. Played the game. Scored twice. Then he quit the next morning and never played again."
"What did the note say?"
"I don't know. He never showed anyone. But I watched the best player I'd ever shared ice with walk away because someone decided he didn't belong, and nobody on that team did a single thing about it until it was too late." He turned to face me. "I will not let that happen again."
"You've spent two weeks telling me I don't belong on your ice."
"I know."
"You told Coach to cut me."
"I know."
"You said the team was wrong to vote me in."
"I know what I said." His voice was low. Stripped. "And I knew it was wrong the second I said it. I knew it was wrong because you skated harder after I said it, and you scored two assists in the scrimmage, and you looked at me like I was exactly the kind of person who says that kind of thing, and you were right."
"Then why did you say it?"
He looked at me. Those November eyes, the ones I'd spent two weeks trying to read and failing, were finally readable. And what I saw in them was not hate, not resentment, not the arrogant superiority of a man protecting his territory.
It was fear.
"Because if I admitted you belonged," he said, "then I'd have to admit why I couldn't stop watching you. And I wasn't ready for what that meant."
"And now?"
"Now Holloway is in a hospital bed wearing your jersey and I'm sitting here realizing that every second I spent making you feel unwelcome was a second someone else was planning something worse. And I will carry that for the rest of my life."
My eyes burned. I blinked it back. Crying in hospital waiting rooms was a thing I'd done before, for different reasons, in a different life, and I wasn't going to do it now. Not in front of him. Not when he was finally being honest.
But he saw it anyway. Of course he did. He saw everything about me. He had a list.
His hand moved. Settled on the back of my neck. Warm and heavy and nothing like the grip on the ice, nothing like the coaching adjustments or the hip corrections. This was just a hand on the back of a neck in a hospital at two a.m. The simplest touch he'd ever given me. The most honest.
"Nobody is going to touch you," he said. "Not while I'm breathing."
"That's not your call."
"I'm making it my call."
"Kael…"
"I'm making it my call, Wren." His grip tightened. Not painfully. Possessively. The grip of a man who had spent his whole life controlling everything around him and had finally found the one thing he couldn't control and decided to stand in front of it instead. "And anyone who has a problem with that can come find me on the ice."
I leaned into his hand. Just slightly. Just enough.
We sat there, in the fluorescent hum and bleach-scented silence, until the sky through the windows turned from black to grey.
And in the morning, when we walked back to the apartment together, he held my hand the entire way. In the open. Across campus. Past the arena where Holloway's blood was still on the parking lot asphalt.
He didn't look around to see who was watching.
He wanted them to.
- Writer
