Page 2 of Pucking Inevitable: Bonus Scene

“The day you were born was fucking horrible,” I tell her. “And I want you to understand that I say that with complete sincerity. Horrible for me specifically. I have been through worse things by most objective measures, but none of them felt like that, because none of them were completely out of my hands.”

I was at practice. I had told Toren to rest, she had ignored me, which is her default response to instructions she disagrees with, and she had come to the rink instead because, as she explained it, she felt better when she wasn't alone. I didn’t tell her that I also preferred it when she wasn't alone. It would have given her too much satisfaction.

I was in the middle of running a drill, third period of practice, the team finding their rhythm, scouts in the upper tier making notes I had already decided I didn't care about, when I looked up and saw her lurch to her feet in the front row.

Both hands went to her stomach.

Her eyes found mine across the ice.

And I just knew.

I was over the boards before the whistle finished blowing.

Full gear. Skates on ice, then skates on concrete, which is not a sound that inspires confidence from anyone watching, and I was aware on some distant level that the entire team had stopped moving, that the scouts were now watching something that had nothing to do with hockey, but I didn’t slow down for any of it.

Carnage already had her.

He had materialized from wherever he had been sitting the second she stood up, one arm around her back, his other hand at her elbow, and he was speaking to her in that low, even voice he uses when he is managing a situation that requires nobody to escalate.

He looked at me over the top of her head.

His expression said, stay calm.

My expression said, fuck you.

“What happened?” I reached them and took her face in both hands and looked at her, at her eyes, her color, whether she was in pain, doing the rapid assessment of someone who needed data and needed it immediately.

“Her water broke,” Carnage said.

The rink noise around us went somewhere distant. I heard it the way you hear things through walls, present but irrelevant.

“How long ago?” I ask.

“Just now. Xaden, I'm⁠—”

“Don't say fine.” I dropped my hands from her face and got one arm around her back instead, taking her weight from Carnage, who stepped aside without being asked because he understood the particular energy I was operating at. “You are forty weeks pregnant and your water has broken in a hockey rink, Toren. You are not fine. Fine is not a word that is fucking available to you right now.”

“I was going to say okay,” she said.

“Same fucking thing.”

“It really isn't⁠—”

“Cas.” I turned. He was already in street clothes. I genuinely do not know when he changed. I have known Caspian Vought for a while now and he still occasionally does things that I have no explanation for. He had his keys in his hand and his phone already raised and he was looking at me with the brisk expression of a man who had already run through the next twenty minutes in his head and was waiting for everyone else to catch up.

“Car's at the curb,” he said. “I called ahead to the hospital. Harper's coming.”

“You called—” I looked at him. “When.”

“The second she stood up.”

Of course he did.

“Move,” I said, and we moved.

Getting through the rink was its own particular problem. The team had gathered at the boards, I could feel them, that collective presence of twelve men who had stopped existing as individuals and become one large, confused animal and several of them had started toward us with the reflexive helpfulness of people who wanted to do something and had not yet been told what.

“Back,” I said, without turning around.