Rory
The arena was louder than I'd ever heard it, and I hadn't even stepped onto the ice yet.
Qualifiers meant something different than a regular season game — the crowd knew it, the team knew it, Coach Reyes had spent the last week running drills with the specific grim intensity of a man who understood exactly how much rode on the next sixty minutes. Win, and the season kept its pulse. Lose, and everything the team had built since September evaporated into an early offseason nobody wanted.
I laced my skates in the trainer's room with hands that were, for once, unsteady for reasons that had nothing to do with my disguise.
The first period blurred past in a wash of adrenaline — hard checks, harder saves, the specific electric tension of a building that knew it was watching something tha
