Then our fragile connection broke.

“You’d better go, dude,” Ziggy, our second-line left wing, suggested with a warning grimace.

“I’m sorry.” With one last sad glance at Jock and an accusatory glare at Bria, Vanderbuel escaped to the safety of his vehicle and tore out of sight.

I snapped into action. “Jock, let’s go in the house.”

I looked at his teammates, and they read my mind and nodded. They let go of him and backed away, not quite leaving yet, as we had one more problem to settle.

Jock’s attention turned to his cheating wife, and his face clouded with intense sadness shrouded behind a façade of anger.

“Jock, go in the house. I’ll deal with her.”

He studied me for a moment and nodded, fully realizing his fiery younger sister might do a better job of ridding themselves of this woman than he had over the years.

“Thanks, guys,” I said to his friends after Jock trudged up the steps and disappeared inside. “I’ll handle it from here.”

“You sure?” asked Kaden with a suspicious eye on my sister-in-law.

“Positive.”

They, too, left like their ample hockey asses were on fire, anxious to get away from this situation. In seconds, I was alone with this loathsome woman.

“Get out of here,” I hissed.

“I didn’t know he was a hockey player.”

“Get. Out. Of. Here. Now.”

“I need my car.” I recalled she’d taken a cab earlier to her alleged girls’ night out.

“Call a cab.” I was hard and unyielding. I wasn’t letting her anywhere near the house. I didn’t care if she had to walk. “And get a hotel. You’re not staying here.”

“But—”

The deadly intent on my face stopped her from saying more. She spun around on her impossibly high heels and stalked off, phone to her ear.

I headed into the house to find my dear, sweet brother sitting on the couch in the living room, head buried in his hands. His shoulders shook either from rage or from tears. I didn’t know which. With fourteen years’ difference in our ages, different fathers, and raised in different parts of Canada, we didn’t know each other growing up. Jock moved to Seattle five years ago, and we’d connected since I’d lived in Vancouver, BC.

I’d reveled in having a normal relative for once since the rest of the people sharing my DNA were dysfunctional as hell. Jock had been raised in Quebec by his father, a hardworking construction worker, and I’d been raised in Vancouver by my dad, who ran a motorcycle repair shop and had sketchy ties to an outlaw motorcycle gang. Our mom had cheated on his father with my dad, then cheated on my dad with a member of the local Sacred Hearts MC chapter.

From what I gathered, Jock’s childhood had been relatively benign and filled with hockey, while mine had been anything but. That was okay. What didn’t kill a girl made her stronger. I prided myself on being pretty damn strong.