(Max’s POV)
Knox came at me fast.
Faster than practice, faster than anything he’d shown me over the past week, stick low, blades cutting the ice with a sound like tearing fabric. I remembered exactly one thing Knox had drilled into me, ’keep your knees bent, don’t panic, panic is what gets you run over’ — and I held my ground for exactly half a second before he was already past me, puck gone, a clean, easy goal that took him maybe four seconds total.
"Again," Coach Reyes said, not even looking up from his clipboard.
We reset. The second time, I anticipated the same angle and got burned by a different one entirely, Knox cutting hard right where I’d braced for left, leaving me flailing after a puck that was already rattling the back of the net.
Somewhere near the boards, I heard a low mutter not laughter exactly, just the sound of people watching something they already knew the outcome of.
"You’re overthinking it," Knox called, skating back to the faceoff dot, not unkind. "You keep bracing for what I did last time. Watch the shoulders, not the stick. Shoulders don’t lie."
"Easy for you to say."
"It’s easy for me to say because it’s true." He grinned, tapping his stick against the ice. "Again, Coach?"
"Again," Coach said.
Third time, something shifted. I didn’t think about it, didn’t have time to — Knox came at me and instead of trying to read his angle, I just moved, body reacting a half-beat before my brain caught up, and I got my stick into the passing lane clean, knocking the puck loose.
The whole rink went quiet for a second.
I scrambled after the loose puck, Knox recovering fast behind me, and for three full strides I actually had it, actually felt what it meant to be ahead of someone on the ice instead of always chasing, before he caught up and stole it back with an ease that still outmatched anything I could do.
But I’d had it. For three strides, I’d had it.
"Better," Coach Reyes said, tapping his pen against the clipboard. "You’ve got instinct. No technique yet, but instinct. That’s actually rarer than technique." He glanced toward Knox. "Again. Full speed, Ashford, I mean it this time."
"I wasn’t holding back," Knox said, breathing hard, grinning despite himself. "He got lucky."
"Lucky reads passing lanes at full speed after a week on skates?" Coach Reyes didn’t look convinced. "Again."
The fourth rep, Knox came harder, and I braced for another blur of failure, except something in me had already recalibrated, some quiet, unfamiliar certainty settling into my legs that hadn’t been there twenty minutes ago.
I read the fake before he’d even fully committed to it, cut across his angle, and for one impossible second I was actually between him and the net, stick out, body low.
He clipped my skate going around me, not dirty, just fast, faster than either of us expected and I went down hard, sliding into the boards with a jolt that rattled up through my whole spine.
The whistle blew immediately.
"You good?" Knox was already skating back, real concern breaking through the competitive edge, offering a hand down.
"Fine." I took it, hauled myself up, shoulder throbbing where it hit the boards, adrenaline burning too hot to register the pain properly yet. "I’m fine. Really."
Coach Reyes was watching me with something new in his expression not impressed exactly, but recalculating, the way he’d looked at the clipboard when Knox first vouched for me. "You went down hard. You want to sit the rest out?"
"No." The word came out faster than I expected, sharper than I meant it. "I’m fine. Let’s go again."
"That’s not what I asked." His pen hovered over the clipboard, waiting.
"I know what you asked. My answer’s still no."
A few of the guys near the boards exchanged glances. Somebody muttered something that sounded almost like approval.
I looked toward the boards without meaning to, and found Lucian exactly where I expected stick resting against his skates, arms crossed, watching with an intensity that hadn’t wavered once through any of it.
He wasn’t cheering. He wasn’t reacting the way the rest of the team was, with small nods and muttered comments. He was just watching, jaw tight, something coiled and unreadable behind his eyes that made the cold rink feel several degrees warmer.
"Last rep," Coach Reyes said. "Then I’ve seen enough."
Knox skated back to the faceoff dot, shaking out his shoulders, grinning at me across the ice. "No hard feelings if I embarrass you one more time."
"Do your worst."
"Careful what you wish for." He rolled his neck, still grinning. "I’ve got three older brothers. I don’t know how to hold back, it wasn’t in the curriculum growing up."
"Comforting."
"You’ll live. Probably." He winked, and something about the easy confidence of it made me square my shoulders instead of bracing for another failure the way I might have twenty minutes ago.
The whistle blew.
This time, I didn’t wait to react. I moved the second the puck dropped, cutting hard toward the passing lane before Knox had even fully committed to his angle, and for a full two seconds I actually had control of the puck, actually felt the ice moving under me the way it was supposed to instead of fighting against every stride.
Knox recovered fast, of course he did, he was better than me, would be better than me for a long time yet, but I got a shot off before he could strip it clean, weak, badly aimed, nowhere near the net.
The whistle blew again, final this time.
I stood there, chest heaving, sweat cooling fast in the frigid air, waiting for Coach Reyes to say something, anything, that would tell me whether the last twenty minutes had meant I belonged here or just meant I’d survived long enough to be told I didn’t.
Coach Reyes clicked his pen shut, tucked the clipboard under his arm, and looked at me for a long, unreadable moment.
"Ashford," he said finally, not looking away from me, "you’ve got competition for that starting spot faster than I expected."
Knox let out a short laugh, more startled than offended. "Seriously?"
"Seriously." Coach Reyes flipped a page on his clipboard, already half-turned toward the rest of the team. "He’s raw. Sloppy footwork, no real sense of angle yet, still thinking half a beat behind where he should be. But he reads a play faster than half the guys who’ve been skating since they could walk, and he doesn’t flinch when he hits the ice. That’s not something I can teach. That’s just in him."
"So what, he’s starting lineup now?" One of the defensemen near the boards, not quite hiding his skepticism.
"Nobody said starting lineup." Coach Reyes didn’t even look over. "I said competition. There’s a difference, and you’d know that if you’d stop resting on the fact that you’ve been here longer." He turned back toward the group at large, voice snapping into its usual brisk cadence. "Rest of you, back to drills. Max — good work. We’ll build from here."
The rink exploded back into motion, drills resuming, sticks tapping, the ordinary chaos swallowing the moment whole.
Knox skated over and clapped a hand on my shoulder, delighted despite himself.
"Competition. Did you hear that? He said competition."
"I think he was being generous."
"Coach Reyes doesn’t do generous. Ever." Knox was grinning wide now, genuinely pleased. "A week ago you couldn’t stand up straight. Now you’re stealing pucks off me in live drills. That’s not generous, that’s just true."
I laughed, something warm and disbelieving loosening in my chest, and glanced toward the boards again, half-expecting Lucian to have already turned away, already gone back to his own drills like the last twenty minutes hadn’t touched him at all.
He hadn’t moved. He was still watching me, and this time, when our eyes met across the ice, he didn’t look away first.
He skated over, slow, deliberate, cutting through the chaos of the drills like it wasn’t even there, and stopped close enough that I had to tip my head back slightly to hold his gaze.
"You went down hard," he said, low, just for me. "On that hit."
"I’m fine."
"I know you’re fine." Something in his voice had dropped, quieter than I’d ever heard it, edged with something that wasn’t quite anger and wasn’t quite anything I had a name for yet. "That’s not what I said."
"Then what did you say?"
He didn’t answer right away. His eyes moved once, briefly, to the fading mark on my shoulder visible where my jersey had shifted, then back to my face, like he was deciding how much of the truth he was willing to hand over.
"I said you went down hard," he said finally, low. "I watched you go down hard, and I couldn’t do anything about it, and I don’t like that."
I didn’t have an answer for that. I just stood there, breath still uneven from the drill, watching him watch me, the rest of the rink fading into noise somewhere far away from the two feet of ice between us.
Then his hand came up, slow, deliberate, like he was giving me every chance to step back before he actually did it and brushed, just barely, against the shoulder that had taken the hit.
The whole rink kept moving around us.
Neither of us did.