POV: Gunner
Gunner Jäger stalked his way down the long corridor alone with heavy, choppy strides, the sharp blades of his skates cleaving deep, clean cuts into the padded rubber matting that lined the hallway floor.
The few people he had passed moments ago had scampered toward the wall, giving the seriously agitated man room to get by without him accidentally knocking them into the concrete or spearing them with his stick. Nobody wanted to be the one to set him off. You could see it in the way they moved, fast and sideways, like small animals clearing a path for something larger and meaner and completely indifferent to their existence.
His cobalt eyes were on fire. Blue hair damp and matted flat against his head. Shoulders heaving under the protective pads with every breath he dragged in and shoved back out.
He was a large enough man to begin with, six foot three, every inch of him built from muscle and bad intentions. Add several pounds of hockey equipment, shoulder pads, thick gloves, and skates, and he didn't just walk down a hallway. He occupied it. His presence pushed the air ahead of him like a bow wave.
Somewhere behind him, one of the team's young assistants was picking up the gloves and helmet Gunner had shed somewhere back around the last corner. The helmet had bounced off the wall before rolling like a warped bowling ball all the way to the far end of the corridor. The kid had retrieved it without a word. He was smart enough not to follow.
The cheques he brought home didn't have nearly enough zeros on them for that.
Gunner hit the locker room before the rest of the team. He wanted it that way. He was already clawing at his jersey before he cleared the doorway, peeling it up and off in one savage motion and dropping it somewhere behind him without looking. His fingers went straight for the padding underneath, working at the straps with shaking hands.
He wanted it off. All of it.
Everything was sticking and bunching and pressing against him and he couldn't get it off fast enough. The need to be out of this gear was overriding everything else, the anger, the noise still bleeding down the corridor from the arena, the image of Santos that kept flashing behind his eyes like a bad signal. He was hauling in breaths like something had its hands around his throat.
But each layer he stripped away only seemed to release more heat into the air around him, like cracking open a furnace door. By the time he was whipping his elbow pads across the room and launching his stick into the far corner, he'd stopped pretending he was calming down.
He crossed to his locker. The one with the number six painted in black, high up on the wooden frame, positioned with the kind of deliberate pride that was supposed to mean something.
He looked up at it and snorted.
The Soul Reapers' infamous number six. Right now he felt like a big fat zero.
A low growl built in the back of his throat. He turned away from the locker before it could go anywhere worse.
He needed to get out of here. Cool off. Get somewhere that wasn't this building, wasn't this corridor, wasn't this particular radius of Santos Khyle's orbit.
Calming down was the priority. He knew that. He wasn't going to put himself behind the wheel of his newly repaired sports car until the urge to commit actual homicide had dropped to manageable levels. If he could just get clear of the noise and the bullshit and the one specific thing that was pissing him off, he might feel less like the world needed to be on fire.
Then maybe he'd find someone to take care of him for the night. That usually helped.
He dropped hard onto the wooden bench and went to work on his skates, wrenching at the laces with both hands until each one finally popped free. They came off releasing a wave of warm, ripe air directly into his face as he leaned forward. He wrinkled his nose, gagged slightly, and lobbed both skates over his shoulder without ceremony. They hit the base of his locker with a heavy clatter.
He stood. Tested his right ankle with a slow rotation, then put his full weight back on it. It ached, same as it always did after a game. The old injury from the pre-season car accident, the one that had nearly cost him the whole season before it had even started. It wasn't stopping him. It was just there, same as always, a dull persistent reminder that he'd come back when most people had written him off.
He began stripping the rest of his gear in systematic order. Socks, shin guards, pants, all of it going into the hockey bag one piece at a time. Then the cup, thumbing the straps free and working it down over his thighs, grunting as it pulled clear.
He stood there for a moment with his thoughts and the particular physical consequence of being an aggressive, hot-blooded man who'd just spent the better part of an evening in close combat with someone who made his blood run hot for all the wrong reasons.
Fucking Santos.
It was always like this after they went at it. The adrenaline had nowhere else to go. His body hadn't gotten the memo that rage and arousal were supposed to be separate departments. It was one of God's more irritating jokes on men like Gunner. Get worked up. Get worked up in every possible direction at once.
So what if he was more animal than man. So what. He didn't need some smartass rookie mouthing off about his playing style like he'd personally invented the game of hockey nine weeks ago and the rest of them were just living in it.
He'd been ejected. Again. Third period, five minutes left on the clock, and the refs had finally decided they'd seen enough of him rearranging Owen Schiffer's face. He'd had Owen down on the ice, and he'd gotten a few extra shots in before anyone stepped in, and one of those had connected clean with the back of Owen's head against the ice. Lights out. The Hollows' team doctor had been rolling out the stretcher when the officials finally pulled Gunner clear.
He didn't feel bad about it.
Owen had been a condescending, emotionless little prick the entire time Gunner had played for the Hollows, and tonight he'd spent two full periods high-sticking and slashing Gunner behind the play like he had a personal grudge and absolutely no fear of consequences. When Gunner had gone to the ref about it, twice, loudly and with creative vocabulary, the officials had looked directly through him both times.
So he'd handled it himself. That was what he did.
The five minute major for fighting he'd expected. The game misconduct was the part that had sent him into the hallway at a speed that endangered anyone standing between him and the exit. The game misconduct was supposed to be a cooling off measure. In Gunner's professional opinion it was the single stupidest rule in professional hockey, because all it actually did was marinate him in his own anger for ten minutes with nothing to hit.
But if he was being honest with himself, and he generally preferred not to be, Owen wasn't the real problem tonight.
Owen was just the match.
Santos was the fuel.
There was something about the way the kid looked at him. Had been, from the first week they'd shared ice. Something in those flat brown eyes that said, clear as a headline, you're not good enough, I don't respect you, I'm better than you. And the infuriating part was that Santos didn't even seem to be trying to communicate it. It just sat there in his face, natural as breathing, like Gunner's inadequacy was simply a fact he'd catalogued and moved on from.
And then he'd gone and said it out loud. Not in those exact words, but close enough. Right to Gunner's face, in front of the team, like it was a reasonable thing to say to a man his size.
The kid had been with the Soul Reapers nine weeks before Gunner got cleared to play. Nine weeks of being the golden boy, the up-and-comer, the guy everyone had high hopes for. And he'd walked in already acting like he owned the franchise.
Gunner had come in late. He'd gotten hurt in a pre-season fender bender, a nothing accident that had jacked his ankle badly enough that the coaching staff had written him off for the entire season. Written him off. He'd spent two weeks in his apartment, laid up and useless, watching everything move forward without him and feeling like a ghost in his own life.
Then the team's injury count had started climbing. Forwards dropping out one by one. And suddenly the coaching staff was a lot more interested in Gunner's recovery timeline. He hadn't waited for them to call. He'd seen the body count rising and he'd pushed his physio to the limit, trained every waking hour he could manage, and called them himself the moment the numbers looked desperate enough.
He'd missed training camp. He'd missed the pre-season. He'd missed nine regular season games. But he'd come back. Because that's what he did.
And then Santos Khyle had looked at him like he was an inconvenience.
Gunner could pinpoint the exact moment it had turned personal. Third game they'd shared a line. He'd been open, actually open, calling for the puck with a clear lane to the net, and Santos had looked right at him. Right at him. Then turned and taken the shot himself. Missed it wide. Cost them the play. And when Gunner had gotten in his face about it after the whistle, the kid had looked at him with those flat brown eyes and said, cool as you please, "You weren't in position."
Gunner had been in perfect position.
He'd been thinking about that look ever since.
At first he'd told himself Santos just didn't like passing in general. But it hadn't taken long to figure out it was more specific than that. Khyle passed to everyone else. Everyone. Just not Gunner. Which meant that every time they shared a line and Khyle scored, which was with nauseating frequency, Gunner didn't even get a lousy assist. His stats were slipping. His value on paper was shrinking. And Santos was doing it one deliberate puck at a time.
He was stealing Gunner's thunder.
And that wasn't right. That wasn't fair. Gunner hadn't clawed his way back from a career-threatening injury, hadn't worked himself half to death in a physiotherapy room, hadn't fought his way back onto the roster twice now, just to have some twenty-one year old fresh off a farm team waltz in and start rewriting the order of things.
Gunner was on his way to becoming a complete player. Not just an enforcer, not just a bruiser with a grudge and a short fuse, but a power forward. A player who could hit hard and score clean and do both in the same shift. He had the size. He had the instincts. He had the mobility and the puck handling and the offensive read that he hadn't had two years ago. He'd built all of it deliberately, painstakingly, game by game. He wasn't just muscle for hire.
Santos didn't see that. Or he saw it and didn't care. Either way, he was making Gunner look like a chump in front of the team, in front of the league, in front of every stat sheet that would follow him into next season.
He was the king.
Not Khyle.