Page 60 of The Fall

“Too bad.” My hands shake with leftover adrenaline, the tape on my knuckles frayed and spotted with blood. “Nobody runs you, not while I’m on the ice. When someone targets you, they target me too.”

“That’s not your job.”

“You think I’m supposed to watch you go down like that and do nothing? What if?—”

“You could have broken your hand, or worse. And again: it’s not your fucking job.”

“Then what is?”

“Staying on the ice,” Blair says, his voice dropping to a hiss.

“You don’t drop gloves because someone messes with me—you score.

You make them pay on the scoresheet. You thread impossible passes and you make them suck wind trying to chase you.

You finish chances no one else sees coming.

You make it impossible for them out there.

You don’t brawl like you’re a fourth-liner, because you’re not .

You play beautiful, brilliant hockey; that’s your job. ”

He’s right and wrong at the same time. He’s describing the player I’ve always been, but that player disappeared the second Blair crumpled. “Beautiful hockey doesn’t mean shit if you’re not there.”

The hallway is too small, the fluorescent lights too harsh. There’s a red mark high on his cheekbone from where his helmet pressed during the hit.

“You’re not a fighter,” he snaps. The scent of medical tape hangs in the air around him, and a tremor in his breath says the hit rattled him more than he’s letting on.

“Leave the fighting to me. That’s my job.

I’m the one who buries guys, and I’m the one who puts them through the glass if they fuck with you . ”

“Then who stands up for you?”

“You think you should?”

“I do.”

His eyes drift shut, lashes dark against his skin. The breath that escapes him—God, it hollows me out. Long and slow and shaking, like he’s been holding it since his body hit the ice.

“Blair—”

He keeps his eyes closed, and when he speaks, his voice scrapes out from somewhere deep inside him. “This can’t happen again.”

Somewhere down the hall, equipment bags zip closed and sticks clatter against concrete. “What can’t happen again? Me defending you? Because that’s not negotiable.”

“No.” The word is absolute. His eyes open. They are no longer unreadable; they are a furious storm. I can’t look away from him.

“We can’t—” He stops himself, jaw clenching. We’re standing too close. The heat rolling off him mingles with mine. His gaze drops to my mouth—a flicker, barely there—before snapping back to my eyes. Then his focus shifts to my taped knuckles. “Let me see.”

“It’s fine.”

“Let me see, Torey.”

The way he says my name makes me give him my hand. His touch is gentle when he turns my wrist, and his fingers burn worse than the splits in my skin.

“You shouldn’t have fought him,” he says.

“I’d do it again.”

His eyes are too direct, too blue. This corridor is airless. His thumb ghosts over the torn skin of my knuckles again, and the touch echoes through every nerve ending.

“Did you land some decent punches at least?”

“You didn’t see the replay?”

“Oh, I saw it. You fucking psycho.”

I grin. “I think he’ll be dreaming about me for a while.”

He snorts. His touch is careful, at odds with the man who throws those punishing hits on the ice. “You could have fucked yourself up.”

“You were down.”

“You were out of control.”

“Are you seriously mad at me for giving a shit about you?”

Blair’s quiet for a long moment. “No,” he says. “I’m not mad.” His breathing is unsteady. Mine matches his. Another silence blooms between us, until he says, “That was a hell of a fucking goal you scored, eh?”

“Broken-stick shot. I can’t believe it went in.”

“I can. That’s skill.”

“That was also my payback.” I smile at him like sugar won’t melt in my mouth. “Hit ‘em where it hurts in both places, yeah?”

His lip is split, but he looks proud when he chuckles. My blood a hot river beneath my skin and my heart is racing. It’s not from my fight, or the game, or leftover adrenaline—It’s from him. It’s always him.

The low sound of his laugh fades, and the humor vanishes from him. “I can’t—” He stops, swallows hard, and his gaze drops again to my scraped knuckles, still held in his hand. When he lifts his head, his stare pins me to the concrete wall. “Don’t fight for me,” he says. “That’s not what I want.”

“I’ll take on the whole fucking league for you, Blair.”

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. I can’t take 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 the locker 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 you really want it?” His jaw flexes. “Most of the league gave up on us before the season started. They said we were a bunch of nothings and has-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 what I see 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 what we’re about.

” 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.”

His voice spikes. “And who on this team has made it his personal fucking mission to prove everybody wrong?” He pauses. “Torey fucking Kendrick.”

I freeze.

“You want to talk about perseverance? You want to ask me what guts looks like? Or what relentless means?”

Every face turns toward me, but I can’t pull my attention from Blair.

“That grit deserves to be immortalized.” Blair strides to the bench, where an equipment bag has been tucked against the wall. He unzips it and reaches in?—

And pulls out my stick, the broken one, the one that shattered last night when I scored. I know that stick, every nick in the blade. The black composite fiber fractured when I put everything I had into that shot.

I stop breathing as he heads for the empty wall space between our stalls and the whiteboard, the wall where nothing has ever hung before, the wall everyone sees first when they enter the room.

And I have seen this before. Vertigo chases the base of my skull. This stick. That wall.

He prepped for this; there’s a hammer and nails on the whiteboard tray. He takes a nail and drives the first through the broken shaft. The hammer strikes again; each impact drives the nails deep, securing my broken stick to the wall where everyone will see it.

And then it’s done—the stick is mounted, forever fractured and forever visible. It leans slightly to the left, imperfect and permanent.

“This,” Blair says, his voice rough, “is every ‘no’ turned into fuel and focus and fire. This is what we do,” Blair continues, his voice gaining strength. “We take what tries to break us and we make it ours. We take their doubts and we forge them into something harder than they’ll ever be.”

Hollow pounds his stick against the floor. Hayes joins him. Then Hawks, Simmer, Divot, Nolan, Novak. The sound builds until the whole room thunders with it, twenty sticks beating in unison.

Blair points to my stick. “That’s staying right there,” he says. “As a reminder of what happens when you never, ever quit.”

The thunder of sticks against floor reaches fever pitch. Blair’s voice cuts through it like a blade. “And if you want something breathtaking, you’d better be willing to burn for it.”