Page 359 of Power Play

“I made him feel like I was ashamed of him.”

“You did,” Aura answered.

“I made my best friends feel like I didn’t trust them.”

“You did.”

“I made all of you choose sides.”

Bliss wiped beneath her eyes. “You did.”

The accountability hurt exactly as it needed to.

I nodded through my tears. “Go fix things with your men.”

Aura’s mouth trembled. “We aren’t leaving you.”

“You don’t have to leave me forever.” I looked around the cabin Ryan chose because he remembered what Vivi needed. “Stop making everyone else pay for what I did.”

Bliss crossed the room first. For one second, I thought she would leave without touching me. Then she wrapped her arms around my neck. Aura joined us, closing herself around my back while I stood between my best friends and cried for every truth I had been too afraid to give them.

They held me without pretending that holding me erased what I had done.

26

Ryan

By the time practice ended, my body had stopped distinguishing between the damage Briggs caused the night before and the damage I’d done to myself that afternoon.

Coach kept us in video for nearly an hour before putting us through conditioning drills that had nothing to do with Saturday’s game and everything to do with making sure none of us mistook Thanksgiving for permission to become lazy. I skated every sprint as though Lance Harlen stood behind the net. Every turn carried Charm’s silence with me, and every shot became the key I’d ripped from her ring.

Anything that followed me onto the ice could be weaponized. Stepping off it was where the trouble started.

My left knee stiffened before I reached the hallway. My ribs pulled whenever I breathed too deeply, and the bruise beneath my eye had darkened enough that two teammates asked whether I’d spent Thanksgiving introducing my face to a door. I told them the door lost, and the story worked until I walked into the cold and found four assholes tailgating in the nearly empty parking lot.

Cade sat on the lowered tailgate of his SUV with a beer between his hands. Easton leaned against the side, his backward cap covering his hair, while Rider dug through an open cooler. Briggs occupied a folding chair he must have bought on the way there because no one carried patio furniture in his vehicle without planning something obnoxious.

He saw me first and raised his beer. “Look who survived.”

I stopped beside my truck and stared at them. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Tailgating,” Rider said as he straightened from the cooler.

“The game is tomorrow.”

“We’re early.”

“The parking lot is almost empty.”

“Better service.”

Cade lifted the beer in his hand. “Come here.”

“I need a shower.”

“The apartment has one.”

“I’m aware.”