Page 1 of Back in the Game (Pride in the Game #1)
“He looks so much like our mother.”
Luca had her soft, brown hair. He had her warm, whiskey-coloured eyes. He had her pale, freckled skin that always burned fast in the sun.
And even though he knew his brother’s features like how he knew his father’s cologne smelled, or what his grandmother’s knitted blankets felt like wrapped around him on long car rides, something was wrong.
“Killinger!”
Something had twisted the sight of his brother’s face in his vision.
There was something about how those brown eyes stared past him like they weren’t seeing him.
Like they were looking at the stars beyond all the clouds and the rain that wouldn’t stop soaking his shirt, and not at him, where they should be.
“Killinger! Hey!”
There was so much noise. He could hear Taylor’s voice, but he sounded entirely too close and far away. And there was a ringing sound, as though someone had set an alarm off on the inside of his skull and he couldn’t find the off-switch.
He couldn’t think. He couldn’t see or feel past the pain, and he couldn’t hear over the sound of the ringing.
How had they ended up here? Where was here?
Hadn’t they just been driving the car? What was he doing sitting in the rain holding his baby brother?
“Harrison, please , we have to get off the road. The next person who drives by us is going to hit us.”
“He looks so much like our mother.”
Harrison brushed a strand of wet, brown hair out of Luca’s face, and blood smeared across his skin with the motion .
They had been celebrating. He remembered suddenly as his leg throbbed, making his vision darken only until lightning tore across the sky.
He was celebrating because he had just been drafted into the NHL.
After years of dedication, training, and a whole childhood spent growing up on skates, he had hit it big.
A one in a million chance. He had flown back home to see his family and his best friend.
Eat good food, drink good beer, and take a week’s break before leaving for a training camp in Toronto.
Harrison blinked back frustrated tears. He felt sluggish, and trying to think through his mental fog was a task he couldn’t accomplish right now.
He was sitting on the pavement in the middle of a torrential downpour with no recollection of what led him there. He didn’t know why he was in pain or why Luca wasn’t laughing at his stunned expression. All he knew was that if the ringing didn’t stop, he was going to vomit on himself and Luca.
Thunder rumbled after another flash of lightning, and he heard Taylor curse.
Harrison was ready to go to sleep. He needed to get a nap in before getting on the plane and dealing with the long flight. He held Luca closer, trying to keep him warm as his eyes began to close, and exhaustion took over.
Arms suddenly wrapped around him, crushing his already bruised lungs. The pain in his leg became unbearable, and there was no holding back the hoarse scream that tore from him.
“Out of the road,” Taylor kept saying. “We have to—oh fuck, someone help me !”
Hands were tugging at his arms, trying to pry Luca out of his grip.
“Let him go! He’s gone!”
Gone where? Luca was right there with him. He was just too busy daydreaming and looking at the sky to pay attention, like he always did.
When Taylor’s hands kept trying to loosen his grip, Harrison jerked away from him, and the motion made him light-headed enough to make his vision go dark.
Dark. Everything was so dark. Where had all the light gone?
“Oh shit.”
Warm, yellow light slowly burned in his eyes, and Harrison only had seconds to glance up and see what looked like the yellow eyes of a demon barreling toward him before he was abruptly pulled off the ground and thrown.
The impact his body made when it hit the pavement was deafening. Rubber tires squealed to a halt, and glass shattered—then someone was screaming.
It was all too much.
He ended up on his back, his eyes blinking unseeingly into the darkness, and he suddenly understood why Luca had found the sky so fascinating.
He felt like he was flying through a sea of stars, and all he wanted to do was follow his brother home.
“He looked so much like our mother.”
Harrison had missed the funeral.
He lay in his private hospital room, eyes staring at the white ceiling until they became too dry, and he had to blink the tears away to see.
He had missed the other funeral too, but he still didn’t know how he felt about it.
He couldn’t remember much about the night he was brought in four weeks ago, but he remembered the day he finally woke up and got his brain to focus on something other than pain, the sounds of beeping and the smell of clean hospital sheets.
They had been drunk. They had snuck out. They wanted to get snacks and drive to the lighthouse to watch the storm waves break over the causeway wall. And between Harrison’s home and the lighthouse, Taylor lost control and flipped the car.
Luca wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. The bumper on Harrison’s side had ended up wrapped around a pole. His leg had been shattered, now only held together by metal bolts, the miracle of modern medicine, and a dedicated surgeon.
Luca died on impact after he went through the windshield, and Harrison had crawled out the same way and dragged his broken body to his little brother’s side.
Taylor was hit by the next driver passing by the scene, unable to see through the heavy rain .
In the hour it took the ambulance to get to them, Taylor had died too.
Harrison had been the only one who had taken a trip back to the hospital that night alive, and everything in his heart wished he hadn’t.
If he were dead, he wouldn’t have to hear people whisper about him like he was some fallen hero, and Taylor was a storybook villain. If he were dead, maybe it would have tipped the scales toward a different outcome, and Luca would be the one staring at the ceiling right now.
If he were dead, he wouldn’t have to look at his mother’s face and think about how much Luca resembled her, and hate himself even more.
If he were dead, it would have been better for everyone. Now all he had were the pieces of his shattered dream held in his broken fingers, soaked in the blood of the two people he had loved most in the world.