Chapter 1: The Crown & The Chaos
The weight of the Miller legacy wasn’t a crown; it was a cage made of polished silver and expectations.
Jaxson Miller sat in the Boston locker room, the silence of the morning skate still ringing in his ears. He adjusted the tape on his stick with surgical precision. Every wrap had to be perfect. If the “Prince of Boston” had a stray thread on his jersey, the sports media would spend three segments discussing if he was losing his edge.
“Jax, check the feed,” Miller’s defenseman, Miller’s best friend, and the only person allowed to see him without his ‘Captain’s Face’ on, tossed a smartphone onto the bench.
Jaxson didn’t have to look to know what it was. The notification headline was already burning a hole in the screen: LUND LANDS IN NEW YORK: “THE VIKING” PROMISES TO TOPPLE THE KINGS.
He swiped up anyway. The video was a clip from a press conference held twenty minutes ago. Soren Lund sat at the podium, his blonde hair too long, his smirk too wide, and his New York jersey looking criminally comfortable on his broad shoulders.
“Soren, you’re joining the division with Jaxson Miller,” a reporter’s voice crackled. “The two of you have been compared since the draft. Thoughts?”
Soren didn’t even blink. He leaned into the mic, that signature Swedish lilt dripping with a jagged kind of honey. “I do not think about Miller. I think about winning. If Jaxson wants to be a Prince, he can stay in his castle. I am here to play hockey. He plays like he is afraid to get his hair messy. I am not afraid of anything.”
Jaxson’s grip tightened until the wooden shaft of his stick creaked. “He’s a circus act,” Jaxson muttered, tossing the phone back.
“He’s a circus act who just put up forty goals for Stockholm last season,” Miller countered, leaning against the lockers. “And he’s coming for your throat, Jax. The media is already salivating. They’re calling the season opener ‘The Prince vs. The Pirate’.”
“He’s a distraction,” Jaxson said, standing up. At six-foot-three, he commanded the room, but his heart was a frantic drum against his ribs. He hated people like Soren Lund. People who didn’t care about the sanctity of the game, who treated the ice like a stage for their own ego.
Jaxson had spent twenty-six years being the perfect son, the perfect captain, and the perfect secret. He had a brand to protect—the Miller name was hockey royalty in America. His father, a Hall of Famer, had taught him that the only way to survive was to never give them a reason to look closer.
And here came Soren Lund, a man who lived to be stared at, throwing stones at Jaxson’s glass house before he’d even laced up his skates on US soil.
Jaxson walked toward the tunnel, the blades of his skates clicking rhythmically against the rubber floor. “Let him talk,” Jaxson said over his shoulder, his voice as cold as the sheet of ice waiting for him. “He’ll find out soon enough that it’s a lot harder to talk when you’re pinned against the boards.”
He ignored the way his stomach flipped at the thought of those boards. He told himself it was anger. He told himself it was the rivalry.
He didn’t want to admit that for the first time in his life, someone had looked at him and seen through the “Prince” facade—even if that someone was a Swedish prick with a mouth that needed to be shut.
