Page 140 of The Fall

A muscle along his temple feathers as his eyes find mine and hold. That furious storm is gone, the waves have pulled back, and what’s left on the shore is wreckage. It’s not anger in his eyes now. The captain’s fury has burned away.

“I can take hits,” he says. His voice is soft. “I’ve taken worse than tonight. Ican’ttake you breaking yourself for me. Don’t. Don’t, Torey.”

The silence stretches, taut enough to snap us both in half. His hand lifts again, and his fingers brush the edge of the tape on my knuckles, so light I might have imagined it.

I want to close the distance. I want to map every mark on him with my fingertips, catalog each hurt and heal them with my touch. I want to taste copper and salt on his mouth.

I want everything I shouldn’t.

Then he pulls back, takes a step away, and the spell breaks. The loss of his touch feels like losing gravity. “Ice your hands,” he says, voice back to captain-steady. “Get them looked at properly.”

“Blair—”

“Now.” His voice is steel again, all business. He pushes off the wall, our discussion over, and walks back toward the room.

The torn skin across my knuckles protests when I curl my hand into a loose fist. Each cut reopens, fresh fire spreading through the joints. I’d do it again. I’d shatter every finger, crack every metacarpal, if it meant keeping him safe.

The morning rubs me raw, like I never left the rink. Number thirteen’s shoulder driving into Blair played behind my eyelids all night. My hands ache beneath fresh tape, knuckles tender and swollen despite icing for hours. Gear clatters against thelocker room floor. Someone’s cursing about their skates being too stiff, and Hayes is going on about how a stick curve says everything about a man. Somebody chucks a roll of tape.

Blair’s not here yet.

Hayes drops down beside me. “How’s Rocky doing this morning? Ready to send a few more goons to the ER?”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“Oh it was totally like that, Hotshot.” Hayes grins.

I focus on rewrapping the tape around my left hand, pulling it tight. “He boarded him,” I say. “Could have?—”

The locker room door swings wide and Blair fills the doorway. His Mutineers shirtsleeves are shoved up past his elbows. That split in his lower lip has darkened overnight, purple-black and swollen enough that it must hurt to talk. He strides to the center of the room and conversations die mid-sentence. Hayes’s hand stills on my shoulder. The usual pre-practice chaos evaporates as twenty sets of eyes track Blair’s movement.

He doesn’t ask for quiet. He never needs to. He sweeps the room, taking us all in. When his gaze lands on me, it holds for a heartbeat.

Then he speaks. “We’ve all been close before: to being broken. To being burned out. To being written-the-fuck-off.”

Nobody moves. Hollow stops chewing his protein bar. Hayes gets his serious face on.

“You think you know what hard work is? Or sacrifice? Or pain?” He’s not speaking anymore; he’s growling. “But pain and sacrifice and hard work are not costs: they are the base requirement to succeed.”

An exhale moves through the room.

“Do you want this season to matter? Do youreallywant it?” His jaw flexes. “Most of the league gave up on us before the season started. They said we were a bunch of nothings andhas-beens, and we were a go-nowhere team of guys who hadn’t gotten it together for years. We don’t click, they said.”

I swallow.

“But you know whatIsee when I take the ice each game? I see each and every one of you fighting for every fucking inch he’s got.”

When he turns his head, I catch the stiffness in his neck from last night’s hit.

“I see warriors,” he continues, voice rising. “I see guys who won’t quit when they’re down three goals. I see players who throw their bodies in front of hundred-mile-per-hour slap shots. I see teammates who’d bleed for each other.”

His gaze sweeps the room again, lingering on Hollow, on Hayes, then sliding back to me. Always back to me.

“Last night, somebody tried to take me out of the game.” The words come out sharp as broken glass. “And one of you decided that wasn’t going to stand.”

My taped knuckles throb. The cuts beneath have started to seep through the white gauze, tiny blooms of red spreading like watercolor.

“That’s what this team is about. That’s whatwe’reabout.” Blair’s hands curl into fists. “So when they say we don’t have what it takes, when they say we’re done before we’ve started, we show them they’re wrong.” His split lip pulls when he speaks, and I know it hurts. “We show them what happens when you underestimate the Mutineers. We show them,” Blair says, and now his eyes find mine and stay there, “what loyalty looks like.”