Chapter 13
Chapter thirteen
Holding - Grabbing or restraining an opponent with hands, arms, or stick.
Taz
He sat. I sat beside him. And for a long time, neither of us said anything.
The tea went cold in his hands. I watched the steam thin and vanish and didn't push.
My dragon was coiled tight, a low vibration of fury I was barely containing—not at Cinder, never at Cinder, but at the man who'd made him look like this.
Small. Hunted. Like someone who'd learned to expect the worst and had just been proven right.
"You can take the bed," I said eventually in case he thought I expected anything. "I'll sleep out here."
His head turned. "No."
"Cinder—"
"I'm not sleeping alone tonight." The words were flat, matter-of-fact, delivered with the same clinical precision he used to report vital signs.
But his eyes told a different story—wide and dark and holding on to me like I was the last solid thing in a room that wouldn't stop spinning. "If that's okay."
"That's okay," I said immediately. "That's more than okay."
He nodded once, then set the cold tea on the coffee table with deliberate care, like the act of placing a mug required all his concentration. "I keep thinking about what they touched. What they looked at. All my personal info."
"We'll deal with it tomorrow." I reached for his hand. He let me take it. "Tonight you're safe. That's the only thing that matters right now."
His fingers curled into mine, and I felt the tremor running through him—fine and persistent, like a wire drawn too tight. My dragon pressed forward, wanting to wrap around him, shelter him, freeze everything that had ever hurt him into a solid wall of ice that nothing could penetrate.
I reined it in. Barely.
We ended up in my bed, tangled together in the dark, his back pressed against my chest and my arm across his waist. He was warmer than me—everyone was warmer than me—but tonight his heat felt essential. Necessary. Like sunlight on permafrost.
"Taz?" His voice was barely a whisper.
"Yeah?"
"There's something different about you." A pause. "I've known it since the first time I took your temperature. I've been trying to explain it away, but I can't. And I need you to know that whatever it is, I'm not going to run."
My chest constricted. The cold flared once, sharp and sudden, before I pulled it back.
"I know," I said. "And I'm going to tell you. Everything. I promise."
"When?"
"After tomorrow's game. I want to take you somewhere. Somewhere I can show you properly." The mountains. Open sky. Space enough for what I needed to become so he could see me—all of me—without the walls of a two-bedroom apartment getting in the way.
"Show me," he repeated softly, like he was testing the weight of the words.
"Trust me?"
He turned in my arms, facing me in the darkness. I could just make out the shape of him—pale skin, sharp jaw, eyes that caught what little light leaked through the curtains.
"I trust you," he said. "I don't know why. I have every reason not to trust anyone. But I trust you."
I kissed his forehead. Held my mouth there, breathing him in. "Tomorrow," I promised. "After the game. I'll explain everything."
He settled against me, and eventually his breathing evened out—slow and deep, the rhythm of someone who'd finally stopped fighting sleep. I lay awake longer, listening to the city outside, feeling the cold pulse steadily beneath my ribs.
Tomorrow. I'd take him to the ridge Keegan had shown me—the one forty minutes up the mountain road, secluded enough that I could shift without risking exposure. I'd let him see the ice dragon I kept caged inside my bones. And then I'd let him decide.
The thought terrified me more than anything I'd faced in thirty years.
But he deserved the truth. All of it. Even the parts that could freeze a man where he stood.
The Sunday afternoon game was a grind.
Calgary came in physical, targeting our defensemen early, clogging the lanes in front of my crease with bodies and sticks and elbows that found creative ways to avoid penalties. I stopped thirty-one shots. We lost three to two even on a late goal from Cole that sent the arena into hysterics.
I barely registered any of it. Even though we were into play-off math. Or scores that would decide if we made the top of the division.
My mind was already on the mountain. On the words I'd rehearsed in my head a hundred times during stoppages in play, during TV timeouts, during the anthem when everyone else had their eyes on the flag and mine were on the back of Cinder's head three rows behind the bench.
I'm a dragon. An ice dragon. My body temperature isn't a medical mystery—it's what I am. And I think you might be the person I've been waiting for my entire life.
Too dramatic. Too much. Dial it back.
There's a reason I run cold. I need to show you something.
Better. Simpler. Let the shift speak for itself.
After the game, I showered fast, dressed faster, and found Cinder in the medical office finishing his post-game notes.
Nancy was already gone. He looked up when I appeared in the doorway, and the smile he gave me—tentative, warm, still carrying shadows from last night—made my dragon surge against my ribs so hard I had to grip the doorframe.
"Good game, despite the end result," he said.
"Thanks. Are you done?"
He glanced at his tablet, then back at me. Something in my expression must have told him this wasn't casual, because his posture shifted—alert, attentive, the nurse in him reading my body language the way he read vital signs.
"I'm done," he said. "Where are we going?"
"The mountains. There's a place I want to show you."
He didn't hesitate. "Let me grab my coat."
Twenty minutes later we were heading west on I-70, the city falling away behind us as the foothills rose on either side. Cinder sat in the passenger seat, his coat zipped to his chin, watching the city fading behind us.
"You're nervous," he observed.
"A little."
"More than a little. Your knuckles are white."
I loosened my grip on the steering wheel. "There are things I need to tell you that might change how you see me."
"You said that before." His voice was gentle. "And I told you I'm not going anywhere."
"You might want to. After."
"Taz." He reached over and put his hand on my thigh, and the warmth of it cut through the cold like a blade through ice. "Whatever this is, we'll handle it. Together. That's what we said."
I nodded, not trusting my voice. The turnoff was coming up—a fire road that led to the ridge, narrow and unpaved and rarely used this time of year. I signaled and began the turn.
That’s when I saw the car.
A flash of blue in my rearview mirror.
Too close. Too fast.
The sedan tore around the bend behind us, engine roaring as it accelerated straight up our lane like the driver had something to prove. For half a second I thought he was just an idiot trying to pass on a blind curve.
Then he didn’t pull back.
“What the—”
The blue sedan surged up on my left, crossing the center line and sliding alongside us so fast the rush of air rocked my truck. He was close enough that I could see the glare of the sun on his windshield, the dark shape of the driver behind it.
And he didn’t back off.
I wrenched the wheel right, gravel spraying as my tires bit into the shoulder.
The sedan stayed with us.
Matching my speed.
Door to door.
For one sickening second, I thought we were going over.
The driver jerked his wheel toward us, and the sedan’s fender kissed my driver’s side door with a shriek of metal that sent vibrations through the entire frame.
Cinder grabbed the dashboard. “Taz—”
I braked hard, trying to drop behind him, but the driver anticipated it. The sedan slowed too, trapping us against the narrow shoulder where the road dropped away into a ravine thick with pines.
My headlights caught the guardrail—or what was left of it. Rusted. Buckled from some previous impact. Barely a suggestion of safety between us and the drop.
The driver accelerated again, slamming his sedan into my quarter panel.
The impact jolted through my arms, through my chest, through the place where the dragon lived. The steering wheel shuddered, and I fought to keep us on the road, tires screaming against loose gravel, the back-end fishtailing toward the edge.
Then—just as suddenly—
He was gone.
The blue sedan roared ahead, engine screaming, taillights shrinking to red pinpricks around the next curve before vanishing entirely. Like he'd made his point. Like terror was the message and delivery was complete.
I pulled over. Or my body pulled over—I wasn't sure I was making decisions anymore. The truck lurched to a stop on the shoulder, engine ticking, dust settling around us in the golden light.
Cinder was talking. I could see his mouth moving, could see the fear carved into every line of his face, his hands reaching for me across the console. But his voice sounded like it was coming from underwater—muffled, distant, drowned out by the roar building inside my chest.
Not my heartbeat.
Something else.
Something older.
The cold hit first. It always hit first—that deep, tectonic shift in my core, like the temperature of my blood dropping twenty degrees in a single heartbeat.
Frost crackled across the steering wheel beneath my fingers.
The windshield fogged, then froze, ice crystals blooming in intricate spirals from the points where my breath touched glass.
"Taz?" Cinder's voice broke through, sharp with alarm. "Taz, your hands—"
I looked down. My knuckles had gone white—not from gripping, but from ice.
Actual ice, spreading from my skin outward, coating the leather, crawling up the dashboard in jagged crystalline veins.
The temperature inside the cab plummeted so fast that Cinder's next breath came out in a thick cloud of vapor.
"Get out," I managed. The words scraped through my throat like broken glass. "Cinder, get out of the truck."
"I'm not leaving you—"
"GET OUT."