Blind Ice (Razors Ice Book 5) Read online

  Within the first five minutes of play, the home team scored and sent all 16,492 spectators to their feet. Lucas Leighton found a hole in their defense, careened the puck up under the crossbar and across the blue paint. The Vegas goalie angrily swiped the puck out of his net and cursed a string of colorful words together. In reply to the goal, the Greenbacks tightened up their defense. They wouldn’t let that kind of mistake happen again.

  Halfway through the first period the net was knocked off its moorings and the referee blew his whistle. The interruption gave both teams a much needed breather. Sebby was holding strong between the pipes and was determined to shut this team out and send them packing back to Sin City.

  When play resumed, Trik made a long pass up the middle. Before he could shoot, a Greenbacks player swooped in, zoomed back toward the Razors net and made a wraparound goal.

  The fans booed and the boys on the bench rallied together and encouraged each other to keep their heads up. They had two more periods to gain their momentum back and come out on top. All they had to do was feed off the energy in the building and keep focused.

  Cody fended off a Vegas player and played the puck off the boards to himself. He pivoted, passed it to Logan and Logan saw the opportunity and fired it at the net. The goalie gobbled up the puck and the whistle was blown.

  “Next time,” Cody reassured Logan.

  There would always be a next time.

  A few minutes later, when Logan and his linemates were catching their breath on the bench between shifts, Matti Nieminen was high-sticked in the mouth by Greenbacks enforcer Aleksi Nikkola. It was a brutal hit and Matti’s lip was busted open as a result. Mattie had been called up from the Vikings, the Razors’ minor league affiliate, and his first game in the UNHL wasn’t turning out as he had hoped. He went into the locker room for repairs and came out later with a jagged row of stitches.

  “How’s the lip?” Trik asked Matti when he scooted back onto the bench.

  “Thixteen thitches,” the Finn replied. His bottom lip was so swollen that it looked like he’d just come from having botched back-alley Botox.

  Trik cracked up laughing. “It’s an improvement on your English, that’s for sure.”

  Matti started to grin, but the stiches reminded him that wouldn’t be a good idea. He groaned and ducked his head in pain while his teammates laughed.

  At the end of the second period, Cody made a beautiful pass to Trik. Logan was skating toward the net from the corner when Trik unleashed a slap shot that was redirected off the stick of Nikkola.

  One minute Logan was telling Trik he was open and the next there was an explosion behind his left eye that radiated pain out to his cheekbone. Logan clutched at his face and fell to the ice in a heap. The pain took his breath away and he gasped for air and pulled his knees up to his chest. The only thing he remembered was writhing in pain until the trainer rushed to his side. That and holding his hand over his eye as if his eyeball might fall out if he didn’t.

  He couldn’t hear the fans react or see the replay on the JumboTron. A collective gasp came from the stands when everyone saw the incident replay again and again on the giant screen.

  Finally, he heard the trainer’s voice in his ear asking him if he was all right.

  “My face,” Logan repeated over and over. “It’s my fucking face!”

  Cody skated over and leaned down over his fallen teammate. “You okay, Logs?”

  “What the fuck happened?”

  “A puck hit you. Come on, bud. Let’s get you off the ice.”

  It hadn’t dawned on him that he’d taken a puck to the face. He’d had a skate blade slice him in the leg once, but it had been nothing like this. Nothing compared to the explosive pain next to his nose.

  The excruciating pain surprised the hell out of him because he’d been poised to hit the puck out of the defensive zone and them bam! lights out.

  He wished he could say he’d been distracted or focused on something besides the puck, but he hadn’t been. He’d kept his eye glued to it just like he always did. One second it was on the ice being hit by Trik’s stick and the next it was deflected and hurtling through the air.

  He hadn’t even been thinking about Kate, dammit.

  And, besides the pain, that’s what made him mad most of all.

  * * *

  The scene on the ice was harrowing. Kate was on her feet without even realizing she’d stood up from her seat.

  Watching from a distance didn’t diminish the terror roiling in her gut. The butterflies were long gone, pure horror had doused them out the second Logan hit the ice. He was in pain. She could tell by his body language.

  And then she saw the blood.

  There was blood everywhere. Logan’s blood. Splattered on the ice, dropping from his face…

  As if an invisible hand touched her arm and said “go to him,” Kate bolted out of the suite and through the maze of tunnels and hallways that led toward the locker room. She heard footsteps behind her and realized Dr. Mallan was right behind her. He didn’t say anything, he just met her step for step, knowing his medical expertise would be needed if Logan’s eye was injured.

  Kate hadn’t run in years, probably since gym class in high school, and now she was breathing hard. She stuck to yoga and Pilates and shied away from intense cardio. But now, with Logan’s health and safety hanging in the balances, she ran like a cheetah was chasing her.

  Everything happened in slow motion and lightning fast all at once. As fast as her legs pumped, the concrete walls of the tunnel seemed never-ending. The tunnel echoed with the sound of her pounding footsteps, but she couldn’t hear the sound over the pounding of blood in her ears.

  And then they were there. Up ahead, she heard voices and skidded to a stop. Dr. Mallan placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. It took everything she had not to shrug it off.

  Inside the medical room in the locker room, the medical staff surrounded Logan. He sat on the exam table, blood dripping from his face. The red blood merged with his red jersey and absorbed into the fabric. Kate wouldn’t let herself look away from the gruesome scene.

  Inwardly, she cringed. The sport of hockey was notorious for these kinds of injuries, but that didn’t make it any easier to witness. This was Logan, her Logan, not just a faceless, nameless patient.

  “Hey, Doc,” Logan greeted her over the din of voices. His voice held an acrid bitterness she didn’t fully understand. “Gang’s all here, I guess.”

  Logan’s head throbbed and his face felt like it had been cracked open. What did he expect taking a puck to the face at eighty miles an hour?

  He wanted the doctors to patch him up as best as they could so he could get back out on the ice. He’d wear one of those stupid helmet cages if he had to, he just wanted to play. The team needed him. There was no way they had the offense to beat the Greenbacks without him. And he wasn’t about to let those smug Nevadans walk out of his building with a win.

  “Get me back out there,” he demanded. His team would need him for the power play. “Stitch me up and do whatever you have to do, just get me back out there.”

  Dr. Mallan moved passed Kate and went to Logan’s side. “We need to get you to the hospital right away.”

  “Shit,” Logan murmured. This wasn’t how his night was supposed to end.

  Nothing good ever came from a hockey player being transported to the hospital.

  * * *

  Kate followed behind the ambulance in her car, her hands gripping the wheel like a life preserver ring. Swirls of fog disappeared under the bumper like defeated ghosts.

  Dr. Mallan was more qualified to be in the ambulance with Logan and the trainer than she was, but she wished she was with him all the same. She wanted to pull over and be sick on the side of the road or to cry, to have a long, hard cry, but she didn’t. She couldn’t cry because then she wouldn’t be able to see the road. But the tears came hot and fast anyway, and she blinked them away as the road swirled with the light from her headlights. />
  The image of the ice kept flashing before her eyes. There had been so much blood. It had mixed with the moisture from the ice and created a pool of catastrophe.

  There could be any number of things wrong with Logan. He could have a fractured orbital bone, clotting under the eye, scratched cornea…

  As much as her eyes burned and her stomach churned, Kate gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white and kept on driving. Traffic was surprisingly light for a Monday night, but most of Red Valley was at the NorCal Center watching the remainder of the game. She didn’t care which team ended up winning the game, she just wanted Logan to be okay.

  Cool air blew in from the vents and Kate shivered. She’d forgotten her cardigan in the suite, but somehow she’d had the right mind to grab her purse when she’d run to the locker room.

  The inside of the hospital was sterile and drab, yet familiar. Kate was reminded of a time when she’d rushed Julia here after she’d stubbornly insisted she could change the filter in the air conditioner herself and had broken her arm falling off the stepstool.

  As the medics rushed Logan to a room, Kate sat in the waiting room. She wanted to pace but sat in the cold, hard plastic chair and waited instead. She should be in there helping him, talking with his other doctors, something.

  But she wasn’t qualified to treat such an extensive injury. She knew that. She wasn’t an MD who specialized in ophthalmic surgery like Dr. Mallon. She administered glaucoma tests, diagnosed conjunctivitis, and dispensed contact lenses to grateful teenage girls.

  And then she immediately felt selfish for thinking only of herself. If she was feeling this helpless imagine how Logan was feeling right now.

  * * *

  Logan dropped his head against the pillow and cursed his bad luck. After receiving thirteen lucky stitches and an x-ray revealing multiple fractures to the orbital bone, his entire face was throbbing. And now Dr. Mallan was telling him he had a scratched cornea along with a bunch of other medical jargon he didn’t understand. But the terminology wasn’t the issue. An incident like this could set him back for months. And that was a reality that didn’t sit well with him. But if his vision had been affected…

  Well, he didn’t want to think about that reality.

  “There’s a small chance of blindness if we operate, but an even bigger chance if we don’t.”

  Dr. Mallan’s voice was beginning to irritate the hell out of him.

  “If? I’m not going under the knife with an if, Doctor,” Logan said bitterly.

  “I advise you to have the surgery, Logan. As soon as possible.”

  Logan shook his head. “I don’t know. I just don’t fucking know yet.”

  The doctor’s voices echoed in his head. Surgery, blindness…the words were a death sentence.

  All he wanted to do was play hockey.

  * * *

  Before Dr. Mallan disappeared with Logan, he had reassured Kate that he would take good care of Logan. Kate trusted him, but it didn’t mean she wouldn’t have liked to be in the room with Logan. How could she comfort him from out here? How would he know that he wasn’t alone if she was here in the waiting room?

  When Kate looked down at her phone and saw the incoming call was from Julia, she felt some small comfort in the midst of her inner turmoil. “Hello?” she answered weakly.

  “I’m coming down,” Julia said matter-of-factly.

  Kate could hear the snap of Shamus’s harness being secured. “No! You don’t have to do that.” The last thing she needed was to worry about Julia out and about at night by herself. With or without Shamus.

  “But I am,” Julia argued. “You need me. I’ll take a taxi and be there in no time.”

  “Okay,” Kate relented. It would be nice to have someone to keep her company while she waited. The whole reason she had insisted on Julia getting a service dog was so that she wouldn’t have to worry quite so much. She would always worry, but she trusted Shamus’s ability to protect her sister.

  A TV mounted in the corner of the drab waiting room showed highlights of the game. As far as comebacks went, the Razors’ was short lived. Apparently they had fallen apart after Logan was carried from the ice because they lost 4-1. It would have been nice to see them get a win, but the hockey gods were stingy when it came to doling out victories.

  Within the next half hour, Shamus arrived at the hospital with Julia in tow. He immediately recognized Kate standing by the coffee machine in the waiting room and wagged his big tail in greeting.

  “Is he going to be okay?” Julia asked Kate without bothering with pleasantries.

  “I don’t know. He’s going to need surgery and…” Kate lowered herself to one of the plastic chairs, leaned down and put her arms around Shamus’s sturdy neck. He licked her arm and his compassion made her choke up even more. “You didn’t have to come,” she said softly.

  “I’m here to show my support. Don’t let the word get out, though. I have a reputation to uphold.”

  Kate sighed as Julia sat down next to her. “The way he fell down to the ice…” Her voice trailed off as she replayed the scene in her mind. It had been awful.

  As much as Julia wanted to show her support, she couldn’t imagine what it had felt like to see Logan go down like that and then flail on the ice like—

  “I’m sorry.” Julia put her arm around her sister’s shoulders and squeezed tight.

  “Me too.”

  Julia waited with Kate for a while and when it was clear they were waiting in vain, she told Kate they should probably head home.

  Kate shook her head. She knew she should probably leave and give Julia a ride home, but she couldn’t get herself to stand up from the chair. Logan needed her. “You go on home. I’m just going to wait a little longer. I’ll call you a cab.”

  “Okay.” Even though she felt like she hadn’t done enough, Julia went back home and left Kate to wait alone.

  When Logan’s physician found her in the waiting room, Kate sprung from her seat. “Can I see him?” she asked, her voice sounding small and weak.

  “He’s resting. Logan has expressed that he doesn’t wish to have any visitors,” he said gently.

  Even me? she wanted to ask. But she didn’t. Logan didn’t want to see her. After everything they’d shared and confided in each other, Logan didn’t want her by his side during this difficult time.

  Two weeks days ago, they had made love in her living room during SportsCenter. She had sunk low into the couch cushions as their bodies joined. Two days ago, they had been in Cabo making love in a room overlooking an ocean so blue it looked Photoshopped. And yet today, Logan might as well have been a thousand miles away from her.

  He didn’t want to see her.

  He just needed some space and time, she told herself. He had been through a lot during these past few hours and had experienced a traumatic injury. Their relationship was still new yet and she didn’t have any real claim on him anyway. Tomorrow he would ask for her and she’d hold his hand and kiss his forehead and reassure him that everything would be okay.

  Tomorrow.

  She’d already waited this long. She could wait until tomorrow.

  The doctor gave her shoulder what was meant to be a comforting pat and then turned and left the waiting room.

  A while later, a few of Logan’s teammates showed up at the hospital. They were freshly showered and still wearing their game-day suits. They strode into the waiting room looking out of place in the stark white room.

  They didn’t look surprised when they saw her there. Logan must have told them about their relationship. She recognized Cody Lambert from his appointment with her last month and she knew Trik Levine was his good friend and linemate.

  As captain, Cody assumed the role of spokesman for the group. “How’s he doin, Doc?” he asked.

  “He’s stable, but they aren’t allowing any visitors.”

  Cody nodded.

  “Where on his face did it hit him?” Trik asked.

  “It
looked like his nose,” Leo Larsson chimed in.

  “I thought it was his cheekbone,” Pete Fontaine added.

  “It was his eye,” Kate replied somberly.

  The guys murmured their concern. They knew all too well the consequences that came from an eye injury. There was no way to sugarcoat an injury like Logan’s. It wouldn’t be a question of whether he could play hockey again or not. The real miracle would be if he didn’t lose his sight in that eye altogether.

  The players milled around for a while and when Dr. Mallan reiterated Logan’s request for no visitors, they said goodbye to Kate and plodded down the hall, leaving her alone in the waiting room.

  * * *

  Dr. Mallan frowned at Kate, who was perched uncomfortably on a plastic chair. For a woman who always looked so put together, she looked oddly disheveled. He’d never seen her look so frazzled before. “You’re still here.”

  “Yes.”

  What was she still doing in the waiting room anyway? she asked herself. Waiting to see someone who didn’t want to be seen? Waiting for word—or more specifically the “everything is going to be all right” word?

  She stood up and her legs felt shaky from one too many vending machine coffees. “Can I see him?”

  “Mr. Murray has asked not to have any visitors at this time.”

  “Oh.” They were the same words his doctor had said to her. As his optometrist, she could probably override that request, but she didn’t. Logan had made it crystal clear he didn’t want to see her. Or even his teammates for that matter. But that wasn’t any consolation.

  Will he be able to see out of his eye again? Will he be able to play hockey again? Will he ever speak to me again? Dozens of questions bombarded her, but she just nodded solemnly at her colleague and clutched her purse in front of her like a designer life preserver.

  Dr. Mallan’s hand was strong and reassuring on her shoulder. “Go home, Kate.”