Chapter 86: Dominic Valentine

POV: Georgia

My bad leg is still throbbing from the walk back, the cane I found in the dirt now propped against my desk. I don’t remember most of the walk. I just remember getting inside, locking the door, and not being able to sleep.

I finally connect the last name I’ve been avoiding.

It’s late, past midnight, and the ceiling above my bed has become far too familiar. I haven’t slept properly since the clearing, since the wolf, since the sound of my own voice saying a name I had no business saying out loud. My laptop sits open on the comforter, the screen throwing a cold blue light across the dark room, and I’ve been circling the same search bar for twenty minutes without typing a single letter into it.

My fingers hover over the keys. I pull them back. I press them against my lips instead, like that might stop whatever’s coming.

I already know what I want to look up. I’ve known for weeks. I just haven’t let myself do it.

Back in September, half-asleep at one in the morning, I searched Puck’s name and found an old local sports article. A hockey collision. A hit described as showing "unusual aggression inconsistent with his playing style." The player he hit had a name I skimmed right past at the time, too tired, too unsettled by everything else in the article to let it land. I screenshotted it anyway, some instinct telling me to keep it, and then I let it sit in my notebook for weeks without looking at it again.

I open the notebook now, flip to the page, and find the screenshot pasted in, small and grainy, my own handwriting scrawled beneath it in letters messier than usual. *Add to notebook.* I don’t know why my hands are shaking already, before I’ve even read the name properly.

I read it again. Dominic Valentine.

Valentine.

My stomach clenches tight before my brain finishes the thought. I’ve been hearing that name all semester. Not Dominic’s. Darcy’s. Darcy Valentine, who transferred in with a smile too polished to be real, who knew my competitive skating record down to the season, who listens to me talk about sabotage like it’s the most natural thing in the world and offers, every time, to help me dig.

*It’s nothing,* I tell myself, pressing my palm flat against the blanket like I can steady my own pulse through it. *Valentine isn’t that unusual a name. There could be a hundred of them who have nothing to do with each other.*

I type *Dominic Valentine hockey* into the bar and force myself to read every single result that loads. Fully, this time. Not a half-asleep skim at one in the morning with my eyes barely open.

The first few are the same article I already have, reposted across different sports sites, the headlines shifting slightly while the facts stay locked in place. A promising young player. A collision during a game. An injury severe enough to end a career before it started. I’ve memorized all of this already.

But one of the later results is different. A local paper, smaller, the kind that covers town fairs and high school scoreboards for people who actually live there. The headline runs longer, heavier: *Local Hockey Star Dominic Valentine Faces Uncertain Future After Career-Ending Injury.*

I click on it. My thumb presses too hard against the trackpad.

The article repeats most of what I already know, dressed in gentler language, the kind reporters reach for when they want you to ache for someone. But halfway down, there’s a paragraph I haven’t seen before, one that must have been cut from every version that made it to the bigger outlets.

*Dominic Valentine, 17, is the son of a prominent local family and brother to Darcy Valentine, who has also drawn attention on the youth hockey circuit. The Valentine family has requested privacy during this difficult time.*

I stop breathing for a second. The laptop fan hums louder in the silence, or maybe it’s just my ears ringing.

There it is. Written plainly, in a paper nobody important reads, the detail scrubbed from every other version of this story. Darcy isn’t just a Valentine by coincidence. He’s Dominic’s brother.

I sit very still on my bed, my laptop glowing in front of me, and I let that settle all the way into my bones.

Darcy Valentine, who transferred to Rosethorne this year, whose family has been sending him careful, charming digs about Puck’s temper all semester, sat across from me in the dining hall and told me we’ll figure this out together while holding my hand in both of his.

"We’ll figure this out together," he told me, voice warm as melted honey, thumb brushing slow circles over my knuckles like he actually meant it.

Darcy is Dominic’s brother.

Puck put Dominic in that hospital bed. And Darcy has been standing beside me all semester, listening to every suspicion I voice about the person who did it, offering, again and again, to help me dig deeper into a conspiracy that, if I’m right about any of it, might have started with his own blood.

My hands are shaking now, and I don’t bother telling myself it’s the cold. I press them flat against my thighs and they still tremble, small and traitorous, like my body worked out the truth before my mind caught up.

I scroll back to the part of the original article I’ve read a dozen times, the part that turned my stomach the first time and every time since. I read it again, slowly, my lips moving around the words even though I’m alone in my room.

*Witnesses described the hit as showing unusual aggression inconsistent with his playing style.*

I read it a second time, my voice barely a whisper now, breath fogging faintly against the laptop screen.

*Unusual aggression inconsistent with his playing style.*

I’ve read that sentence enough times to recite it in my sleep. Every other time, some part of me filed it away as exaggeration, a dramatic flourish some local reporter reached for to make a hockey injury sound more interesting than it was. Athletes get hurt. Hits happen. Sports writers love a good villain, and Puck, with his cold eyes and his quiet menace, was probably an easy one to cast.

This time, I don’t dismiss it.

I think about Puck taking a check into the boards hard enough that the sound made my stomach drop, and being back on his feet in under two seconds while the other player nursed his shoulder on the bench, face twisted in a pain Puck never seemed to feel. I think about a pen snapping clean in his fist, splinters of plastic falling like confetti he didn’t notice. I think about handprints bent into solid steel, four clean divots pressed into a door frame like it was clay. I think about a wolf standing at the edge of a clearing with gold eyes and a stillness that didn’t feel like anything human, watching me like it knew exactly who I was.

*Unusual aggression inconsistent with his playing style.*

"That’s not a temper," I whisper into the empty room, my own voice startling me in the quiet.

I don’t think that sentence is about a bad temper anymore. I think it’s about a boy who lost control of something he was never supposed to lose control of, in front of a rink full of people, and it cost another boy his entire future in the space of a single hit.

And now that boy’s brother sits at my side every time I fall apart, filing away everything I tell him behind a smile I used to think was kind.