Lahat ng Kabanata ng Pucking My Hockey Rival : Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 9

Luca POVThe crowd was so loud I could feel it in my chest before I even stepped onto the ice.Twenty thousand people packed into the United Center, all of them screaming. Banners waving. Lights cutting through the smoke above the rink. The Chicago Phantoms versus the Boston Bruins, Game Seven of the Eastern Conference Finals. The kind of night that ended careers or made them. The kind of night that got replayed in highlight reels and locker room speeches for the next decade. And I was already bleeding.I had taped my shoulder myself in the locker room, wrapped it so tight the circulation in my left arm felt like it was working against me. Three weeks ago I had taken a bad hit in Game Four and something had shifted inside the joint, something that grated every time I raised my arm above my head. The team doctor had recommended I sit out. Management had strongly suggested the same. I had smiled at both of them and told them I was fine.I was not fine.But losing to Ronan Calloway was n

Luca By morning, the fight was everywhere.I woke up to forty-seven missed calls and a text from my publicist that was mostly capital letters. The clip had been viewed eleven million times before midnight. Sports analysts were doing frame-by-frame breakdowns of the moment I dropped my gloves. Commentators were calling it a meltdown, a loss of composure, a side of Luca Devereaux nobody had seen in a decade. One panel show ran a fifteen-minute segment titled The Captain Cracks and used photographs of my face mid-fight that I had not known existed until that morning.And underneath all of that, in the comment sections and fan forums and the place on the internet where people said the things they would not say to your face, another conversation was happening.People were talking about how Ronan had crouched down beside me.Not the hit, not the fight but the moment before it, when he had gotten close and said something that the cameras had not picked up. Someone had slowed down the footag

LucaI did not sleep, I sat with the photo on my screen until the city outside my window went from dark to that particular gray that is not quite morning. I enlarged it, studied the angle and the timestamp and the framing, and tried to read the context from every direction. The corridor was recognizable, the time was real. The way we were standing was real, and that was the part I could not dismiss because the image looked like something even if I insisted nothing had happened.What I could not determine was who had taken it.The media would have published it already. Management would have come to me directly. That left teammates, facility staff, someone from the Bruins organization, or a person with building access I had not accounted for. Every option had a different set of consequences and I spent the gray hours before practice cycling through all of them without arriving at anything that felt like a plan.By the time I stepped onto the ice, I was running on nothing.Practice was

RonanI drove home with both hands on the wheel and the radio off. That was how I knew something had shifted. I always drove with music. It was the one habit I had carried from my rookie year, something about filling the space between the game and the person I had to be by morning. But tonight I needed the silence because the silence was the only place I could put what was happening inside my chest without it spilling somewhere I could not clean up.The tunnel kiss had not felt like a victory. That was the part I had not prepared for. I had imagined, in the abstract, logical way I planned everything, that if Luca ever closed the distance between us the feeling would be something I could categorize. Relief, maybe. Or satisfaction, the way you feel when a play you designed finally works on the ice the way it worked in your head.It was not that. It was enormous. That was the only word that fit. The moment his mouth found mine it was like something that had been compressed for three year

Sienna ValeI had done my research before I agreed to anything. That was the first thing people always underestimated about me. The smile, the lifestyle content, the carefully curated aesthetic of someone who made everything look effortless. People looked at all of that and decided I was decorative. It was one of the most useful misunderstandings of my life.I knew who Luca Devereaux was before Diane Marsh called me. I knew his stats, his public image, his sponsorship portfolio, and the specific narrative problem currently attached to his name. I had watched the exhibition game clip three times, not because I was curious about the gossip but because I wanted to understand exactly what I was being asked to walk into.The arrangement made sense for both of us. My partnership deal with Vertex Sports Nutrition was contingent on demonstrating meaningful reach in the professional sports space. Two appearances alongside one of the NHL's most recognizable captains would do more for that metri