Chapter 150: The Price of a Broken Whistle

Noah’s POV

I should have known these bastards were up to something.

No, that wasn’t true. I knew they were plotting something filthy from the very second they manipulated the athletic board to move the finals forward. But this? Deliberately taking out the head referee with a high stick just to skate their own bought official onto the ice?

Behind the dark cage of my helmet, a cold, vicious grin cut across my face.

The replacement referee glided into the center circle, adjusting his whistle with an arrogant flick of his wrist. Across the red line, the atmosphere on Jenson’s bench shifted instantly. Their players stood taller, their chests puffing out, their eyes gleaming with savage confidence. They looked like a pack of rabid dogs that had just been unclipped from their leashes. Now that they had an official in their pocket who would look the other way, they believed they could do whatever the hell they wanted on this ice.

Steel blades scraped against the ice beside me.

Damon coasted to a stop at my shoulder, leaning heavily on his stick.

"You see what’s happening?" Damon muttered, his voice muffled behind his visor.

"Fuck, I do," I replied, my fingers tightening around the tape of my stick.

I glanced toward Jenson’s forwards. During the stoppage while the real referee was being hauled out on a stretcher, their equipment manager had handed their entire starting lineup fresh composite sticks from their bench rack.

"Look at their hands," I told Damon, my voice dropping into an icy register. "First, they switched their sticks during the medical delay. The shafts are weighted. They filled the composite hollows with lead dust. And now they’ve brought in a referee who won’t blow a single whistle against them."

I didn’t wait for Damon to reply. My gaze instinctively drifted upward, scanning the massive sea of spectators packed into the arena bowl.

My eyes cut through the noise, searching the second-tier press deck above the home bench.

There he was.

Micah was standing behind the metal railing of the media platform, his hands firmly gripping the heavy telephoto camera, completely isolated from the chaos of the lower bowl.

A sharp breath of relief left my lungs.

He was safe. He was nowhere near the front row where stray pucks, shattered fiberglass, or weaponized sticks could reach him.

"The other guys on our lines aren’t going to survive this intact," I said, turning my eyes back to the ice. "They don’t know how to take dirty hits. But since the two of us know exactly what they’re planning, let’s make sure these bastards never see a victory."

Damon chuckled, a raw, manic excitement bleeding into his tone. "You don’t need to tell me twice, Captain."

Both of us were running on borrowed time. My ribs burned with every breath, the fresh stitches under my compression shirt straining against the torn flesh where the bullet had been pulled out hours ago. Damon was nursing bruised ribs and exhaustion. But neither of us could afford to back down. Not when our lives, our team, and our reputation were on the line.

TWEEEEEET!

The bought referee blew his whistle and dropped the puck.

The game restarted, and Jenson’s team abandoned all pretense of playing actual hockey.

They didn’t give a damn about the puck anymore. Their entire focus shifted to hunting our players.

Two minutes into the shift, our left winger carried the puck along the boards. A Jenson defenseman charged him from behind, raising his weighted stick and swinging the heavy shaft like an executioner’s axe directly into our winger’s lower back.

CRACK!

The sound of carbon fiber smashing into unprotected kidney pads echoed off the glass.

Our winger collapsed to the ice, screaming in agony as he slid into the corner boards.

The crowd erupted into furious shouts, but the new referee merely pointed toward the corner and shouted, "Play on! Clean body contact!"

No penalty. No stoppage.

Jenson’s players smirked, emboldened by the referee’s silence.

They became utterly ruthless. They threw vicious cross-checks directly into the necks of our forwards. They slashed wrists after the whistle. They swept their skates into knees.

The innocent crowd in the upper bleachers, who had been roaring with excitement earlier, began murmuring in disgust. Parents were shouting at the ice, students were banging their fists against the glass, and Coach was screaming until his vocal cords tore on the bench. The referee ignored all of it, keeping his whistle clamped firmly between his teeth.

Despite the butchery, Damon and I refused to let our focus slip.

Hockey is a game of numbers. It didn’t matter how many dirty hits they landed; the team with the highest score at the final buzzer wins the championship.

Whenever Jenson swarmed our injured teammates, Damon used his superior edge work to strip the puck out of the chaos. He would fire crisp, pinpoint breakout passes straight up the center, and I would catch them in stride, burying shots into the top corners before Jenson’s defensemen could close the gap.

We kept scoring. 4-0. 5-0.

Minute after minute ticked off the clock, but the toll on our roster was catastrophic.

One of our alternate defensemen took a weighted slash across the wrist that snapped his bone on impact. Another forward took a heavy butt-end strike to the jaw and had to be carried off on a stretcher, spitting blood onto the white ice. Even when Coach sent out the bench reserves, Jenson’s thugs ambushed them within seconds of their skates touching the rink.

By the time the game clock hit the ten-minute mark of the final period, our bench was practically empty.

Realizing that crippling our role players wasn’t stopping the scoreboard, Jenson’s players finally turned their full, murderous attention toward Damon and me.

Three of their forwards converged on Damon in our defensive zone. They formed a triangle, trying to pin him against the boards and cave his ribs in with their heavy sticks.

Their plan failed miserably. Damon was far too fast.

He anticipated their angles, dropped his shoulder in a fake turn, and spun cleanly past two of them, leaving their skates tangled as they crashed clumsily into each other against the plexiglass. Damon cleared the puck out of the zone with a sharp flick of his wrists, yelling at me to move.

Seeing that Damon was impossible to trap, Jenson’s players abandoned him and turned all five of their skaters directly toward me.

FUCK.

A sharp, searing spike of agony tore through my right side.

The painkillers David had given me were finally wearing off. Every heavy stride I took on the ice felt like a razor blade slicing through the bullet wound near my hip. Sweat poured down my forehead, stinging my eyes beneath the helmet, but I gritted my teeth until my jaw ached and pushed my legs harder.

I picked up the loose puck at the neutral zone, accelerating toward their blue line.

Their last defenseman came barreling straight at me like a freight train. He wasn’t even pretending to play the puck. He had both hands wrapped around his lead-filled stick, raising it high above his shoulders, aiming straight for my face to take my head off.

"Die, Miller!" he snarled.

"Fuck!" I cursed under my breath.

I didn’t flinch. I held the puck until the very last millisecond, waiting until his weight was fully committed to the hit.

With a brutal, lightning-fast snap of my wrists, I ripped a slapshot straight through the open five-hole of their goalie.

The puck hit the iron bar inside the net and rattled against the mesh.

In that same split second, I dug my skate edges hard into the ice, throwing my entire body to the left.

The defenseman’s heavy stick slashed violently through the empty air where my head had been half a second ago, the momentum sending him stumbling off balance.

HWOOOOOON!

The arena horn blasted deafeningly overhead.

The final buzzer sounded.

The digital scoreboard flashed bright red: HOME: 6 - VISITORS: 0.

The game was over. We had won the championship.

Yet, as the sound of the horn faded, an eerie, suffocating silence settled over the stadium. Nobody was cheering. The crowd sat frozen in their seats, horrified by the sheer brutality of what they had just witnessed.

Out of our entire varsity squad, only four of us were left standing on the ice. The rest were in the trauma clinic.

The defenseman who had tried to take my head off pushed himself upright, breathing heavily, glaring at me with hatred.

I slowly skated toward him, stopping two feet away, and stretched my right glove out toward him in a standard post-game handshake.

"Huh?" The guy raised an eyebrow, looking thoroughly annoyed and confused. He sneered, reaching his hand out to slap mine away.

This fucking idiot.

The second his glove approached mine, my hand bypassed his wrist. I clamped my fingers around the shaft of the weighted stick in his left hand, wrenching it violently out of his grip before he could react.

The guy flinched, immediately stumbling backward on his skates, throwing both hands up to protect his face. He thought I was going to cave his skull in right there on the center dot.

He didn’t need to worry. I wasn’t going to waste my energy on a brainless pawn.

The bastard truly responsible for this butcher shop was sitting right across the rink.

I turned on my skates, letting the heavy, lead-filled composite stick drag against the ice behind me, carving a deep, jagged groove into the frozen surface with a low, screeching scrape.

SHHHHCK... SHHHHCK...

I skated straight toward the front-row VIP box where George Jenson was standing behind the dasher boards.

Seeing me approach with the weapon, the smug confidence completely drained from George’s face.

"You bastard!" George screamed, his voice cracking in panic as he kicked his chair back. "Stay the fuck away from me!"

George tried to turn and scramble up the concrete arena stairs to escape, but the rubber mats were slick with melted ice. His bandaged hands couldn’t find a grip on the metal railing, and his feet scrambled uselessly beneath him.

I didn’t give him the chance to find his footing.

I vaulted over the dasher boards, planting my skates on the arena concrete.

I raised the heavy, lead-filled hockey stick with both hands, brought it down in a violent, whistling arc, and struck George Jenson across the side of his skull.

CRACK!

The impact was sickeningly loud.

George crashed heavily onto the concrete stairs, letting out a strangled shriek of agony. He curled into the fetal position, his bandaged hands flying up to clutch his bleeding head, writhing in the dirt.

Behind me, the sound of skate blades hitting the boards announced Damon’s arrival. Damon jumped over the wall, landing beside me, holding another weighted stick he had snatched from Jenson’s bench.

The entire arena went deathly, terrifyingly silent. Thousands of people watched in breathless shock, but not a single security guard dared to step between us.

I stepped up the concrete stairs, planting the steel toe of my skate inches from George’s bleeding face. I looked down at him, my eyes completely dead, my voice cutting through the quiet stadium like a frozen razor.

"I promised my dear brother," I whispered coldly, tapping the leaded blade against his temple. "You would be leaving this place in an ambulance before the day was through. So tell me, George... what part of your body would you like broken next?"