(Max’s POV)
The puck caught him square in the shoulder pad, hard enough that I heard it from the stands — a flat, ugly thwack that spun him half a step sideways before he caught his footing.
"Cross, what the hell was that?" The coach’s whistle again, sharper this time. "Head in the game!"
Lucian didn’t even glance my way. He just shook it off, jaw tight, and skated back into position like it hadn’t happened at all, like I hadn’t just watched him take a hit because he couldn’t stop looking at me instead of the play.
I told myself it didn’t mean anything. I mostly failed.
"Cross, again!"
The coach’s whistle cut through the cold air the next morning, sharp enough to sting, and Lucian didn’t even wait for it to finish before he was moving, blades biting into the ice with a sound like tearing paper.
I’d gotten used to the rhythm of his practices by now — the drills, the shouted corrections, the particular economy of his movement that never wasted a single stride.
This wasn’t that. This was a scrimmage, full contact, full speed, and Lucian was playing it like the whole season depended on the next ninety seconds.
He took the puck off a faceoff clean, spun away from a check that should have knocked him sideways, and drove up the ice so fast the defenseman trailing him had to actually sprint to close the gap.
"Cross, man, ease—"
"Move your feet." Lucian’s voice snapped out flat and hard, not even breathless, cutting off whatever complaint the guy had been building toward. "You’re standing still. I can skate around a fence post faster than you."
The guy’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t argue. Nobody argued with Lucian on the ice. I’d figured that out fast — off the rink, people tested him, poked at the edges to see what they could get away with.
On it, there was no edge to poke. Just him, and whoever was unlucky enough to be standing between him and the net.
He put a shot past the goalie a minute later, top corner, so fast I barely tracked the puck leaving his stick before the net rattled.
"That’s not how you defend a two-on-one!" he shouted across the ice, already circling back for the faceoff, voice carrying easy over the sound of blades and boards. "Cover the pass, not the shooter! How many times—"
"We heard you the first four times, Cap," someone called back, half-laughing, and Lucian didn’t dignify it with anything except lining up for the next drop.
I stood at the glass near the players’ bench, arms crossed against the cold radiating off the ice, and watched him run the scrimmage like he was the only one who actually understood what the drill was for.
Nobody argued. Nobody rolled their eyes where he could see it. He barked corrections and people absorbed them, adjusted, tried again — not because they liked being told, I didn’t think, but because he was usually right, and being right that consistently earned you a silence most people never got.
One guy — silver hair, broad through the shoulders, moving with an easy confidence that was different from Lucian’s, looser, more like he was enjoying himself instead of executing a war plan — caught a pass from Lucian mid-rush and finished it off with a quick wrist shot that beat the goalie clean.
"There it is," he said, grinning, skating a slow victory lap past the bench. "That’s what I’m talking about."
"Don’t celebrate a scrimmage goal like it’s the Cup," Lucian said, but there was something almost like approval buried under the flatness of it, gone again before I could be sure I’d actually heard it.
Practice wound down maybe forty minutes later, whistles and shouted last reps giving way to the looser noise of gear being unstrapped, sticks clattering against the boards.
I stayed where I was, half out of habit now, waiting for Lucian the way I usually did.
That was when the same guy skated over to the bench door, pulled his helmet off, and hopped the boards straight toward me instead of heading for the locker room.
"You’re Lucian’s brother, right?"
I nodded, still recalibrating who was talking to me and why. "Max."
"Knox." He stuck a hand out, easy, no hesitation in it at all, the kind of handshake that didn’t seem to be measuring anything. "Saw you at the last practice too. Figured I’d finally introduce myself instead of just staring."
"You weren’t staring."
"A little." He grinned, unbothered by his own admission. "Not every day Cross brings someone new around. He’s usually allergic to people."
"I heard that," Lucian said, arriving at the boards behind him, helmet already off, hair damp and pushed back, expression settling into its usual flatness the second his eyes landed on the two of us together.
"You were meant to." Knox didn’t even flinch. If anything, his grin widened. "C’mon, Cap, lighten up. I’m being friendly to your brother."
"Don’t."
"Relax." Knox turned back to me like Lucian’s tone hadn’t registered at all, easy and unbothered in a way that made something in my chest loosen slightly, just from the novelty of it. "So. You play?"
"No." I shook my head. "I don’t really know how to skate, even."
"That’s fixable." Knox said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world, already gesturing toward the ice behind him. "You should join. Seriously. We could use more bodies for scrimmage numbers, and Cross clearly already treats you like you belong here."
"I don’t—" I started, and Lucian cut across it before I could finish.
"He can’t."
It landed flatter than anything he’d said all practice, final in a way that closed the door before I’d even decided whether I wanted to walk through it. And something about the certainty in it — the assumption that he got to decide that for me — made heat rise up the back of my neck before I’d fully thought it through.
"I don’t know how to play hockey," I said, correcting him, my own voice steadier than I expected it to be. "That’s different than can’t."
Lucian’s eyes cut toward me, something flickering behind them that I didn’t have time to name before Knox spoke again.
"See, that’s the spirit." Knox clapped a hand lightly on my shoulder, grinning like he’d just won something. "You’ll learn. Everybody starts somewhere. Do you want to join?"
I glanced toward Lucian without meaning to, some old instinct checking for permission I hadn’t asked for.
He held my gaze for a second — long enough that I thought, stupidly, hopefully, that he might actually say something that wasn’t a wall — and then he exhaled through his nose, short and clipped, and reached for his stick where it leaned against the boards.
"Do whatever you want," he said, already turning toward the locker room, voice giving away nothing at all.
I watched him go, that thin, familiar disappointment settling low in my stomach, before Knox’s voice pulled me back.
"So?" Knox was still watching me, patient, genuinely waiting rather than pushing.
I thought it through fast — faster than I probably should have. Joining meant more time near Lucian, more reasons to be somewhere he already was, more chances to be something other than the stranger his father had installed in his house.
It meant Mom would probably cry a little, the good kind of crying, the kind she did when something finally seemed to be going right for both of us. It meant Damian, at dinner, might actually look pleased instead of tired.
It meant trying, the way I’d already decided to try, just with skates on now instead of just good manners.
"Yeah," I said. "I’ll join."
Knox’s grin widened into something genuinely pleased, and he clapped my shoulder again, firmer this time. "Good. Come tomorrow, early — I’ll introduce you to the coach before anyone else gets here, get you sorted with gear before it turns into a whole production." He was already pulling his phone out, holding it toward me. "Give me your number. I’ll text you the time."
I typed it in, handed it back, watched him save it under a name that made me smile despite myself — Max (Cross’s Brother, RIP) — before he pocketed the phone and skated backward a few feet, already turning to head for the locker room himself.
"Tomorrow," he said again, pointing at me like he was sealing the deal. "Don’t chicken out."
"I won’t."
He disappeared through the door a moment later, and I stood there a while longer in the cold, alone at the boards, replaying the whole exchange — Lucian’s flat he can’t, the sharp certainty in my own voice pushing back against it, the way he’d looked at me for that one long second before deciding, apparently, that he didn’t care either way.
Do whatever you want.
I told myself that was fine. I told myself it didn’t matter that some small, stupid part of me had wanted him to say something else entirely.
I didn’t quite believe myself.
But I zipped my jacket up against the cold coming off the rink, and headed for the exit anyway, already thinking about tomorrow morning, already wondering — with a nervousness that had nothing to do with skating — what it would feel like to be out there on the ice with him instead of just watching from behind the glass.