Chapter 17
Chapter seventeen
The Neutral Zone - The area between the two blue lines.
Taranis
The word sat between us like something rotten.
"Harvesting what?" Cinder's voice had gone flat—clinical again, the emotional armor snapping into place. But I could feel the tremor running through his hand. "I didn't tell him anything. I didn't even know what Taz was until yesterday."
"This isn't about that," Ignatius said patiently.
"Think about what you represent, Cinder.
You're a medical professional embedded with an NHL team.
You have direct, hands-on contact with players' physiological data—temperature readings, cardiac rhythms, reflex measurements.
Data that, to the right buyer, is worth a lot of money.
Unscrupulous betting agencies would forgive a lot of debt for that sort of information. "
Cinder pulled his hand from my knee. Not pulling away from me—I could tell the difference—but needing both hands free, the way he did when he was processing something that required his full analytical capacity.
He pressed his fingertips together, staring at the emails.
Cinder was quiet for a long moment. The rain tapped against the study windows, filling the silence with something almost gentle, completely at odds with the ugliness on the desk between us.
"It still doesn't make sense," Cinder finally said, and his voice had that quality I'd come to recognize—the one that meant he'd found the loose thread and was about to pull.
"Gavin is many things. Controlling. Manipulative.
Cruel, when it suited him. But he was never reckless.
Even at his worst—even when he was hurting me—it was calculated. "
“Hurting you?” I snarled the words. “What—”
But Cinder ignored my interruption and gestured at the papers. "This? Running us off a road? Breaking into my apartment and leaving evidence he'd been there? That's not calculated. That's sloppy. That's someone who's stopped thinking about consequences entirely."
I saw Ignatius's eyes narrow—not in disagreement, but in recognition. Like Cinder had arrived at the same conclusion he had. I didn’t let his statement go, though. It would be something we would talk about later.
"You're right," Ignatius said quietly. "It is out of character. Which suggests one of two things. Either his desperation has genuinely eroded his capacity for rational behavior—"
"Or someone else is pushing him," Cinder finished.
Ignatius glanced my way and held my gaze for a beat too long.
"That," he said carefully, "is the possibility that concerns me most. Gavin's gambling debts didn't accumulate in a vacuum.
Someone extended him credit long past the point any legitimate platform would have cut him off.
Someone allowed him to keep betting, keep losing, keep sinking deeper—until the debt became leverage.
Most of this escalation has happened since you took the job with the Dragons. "
Cinder's breath caught. "You think someone's using him."
"I think someone recognized a desperate man with a connection to a medical professional inside an NHL franchise and saw an opportunity.
" Ignatius closed the folder with a soft, decisive sound.
"Gavin may believe he's acting on his own initiative.
Chasing a story, paying off debts, reclaiming some sense of control over a life that's spiraling. "
My dragon pressed hard against my ribs, a cold fury building in my chest that I had to breathe through carefully. Someone was pulling strings. Someone who knew enough to target the people around us. Around the team.
"Do you know who?" I asked.
Ignatius's jaw worked. "Not definitively," Ignatius said, and the admission cost him—I could see it in the way his shoulders tightened beneath the navy suit, the way his jaw set like he was biting down on something that tasted foul. "But there is precedent."
He moved to the window, hands clasped behind his back, and for a moment he was silent—staring out at the rain with the kind of stillness that made the room feel smaller, heavier, as if the air itself was being compressed by the weight of what he was about to say.
"At the beginning of the year," he began, his voice measured in a way that told me he was choosing every word like a surgeon choosing instruments, "during the period surrounding Cole Armstrong's All-Star selection, a man approached Phoenix."
Cinder glanced at me. I shook my head slightly—I didn't know the details either. I knew Cole and Phoenix were together now, knew Phoenix had become a fixture at games, knew there was a story there that nobody told in full.
"Phoenix was in a precarious position," Ignatius continued.
"No family safety net. No financial resources.
A history of survival that left him vulnerable to exactly the kind of pressure that was applied.
" He turned from the window, and the look on his face was one I'd only seen once before—the night he'd told me about my father.
Ancient fury, controlled so tightly it barely registered as emotion at all.
"A man contacted him. Offered money. Substantial money.
In exchange for getting close to Cole and reporting back. "
Cinder's breath left him in a sharp exhale. "Reporting what?"
"Anything. Everything. Cole's movements, his emotional state, his relationships, his physical condition.
The man hinted he worked for Cole's father—Edward Armstrong-Wells—and even though the threat he used as leverage was specific and credible, for many reasons, that didn’t make sense.
" Ignatius paused, and something in his expression hardened further.
“Phoenix had a close friend. Ricky. A bartender at the Avalon Hotel. Ricky has a partner, Sarah, and a sick baby. The man threatened the family directly. Made it clear that if Phoenix didn't cooperate, Ricky's family would suffer."
The silence that followed was the kind that pressed against your eardrums.
"Phoenix took the money," Ignatius said, not with judgment but with the weary understanding of someone who'd watched desperation drive good people into impossible choices too many times across too many centuries.
"He took it, and he got close to Cole, and it very nearly destroyed both of them when the truth came out. "
"But it didn't," I said quietly, because I'd seen them together. At games. In the stands. The way Cole's eyes found Phoenix in every crowd like a compass finding true north.
"No," Ignatius agreed. "It didn't. Because Phoenix ultimately chose Cole over his own survival, and Cole—after considerable pain—chose to understand rather than condemn.
" A ghost of something that might have been admiration crossed his features.
"They are remarkable, those two. But that is not the point. "
He returned to the desk and opened a second folder—thinner than the first, its contents sparse in a way that felt deliberate. Like whatever was inside had been carefully, methodically scrubbed.
"The point," Ignatius said, "is the man who approached Phoenix.
We never found him. He used a burner phone, disconnected after Cole's All-Star weekend.
Paid Phoenix in cash—untraceable, no serial number patterns that led anywhere useful.
No CCTV footage that produced a usable face.
No digital footprint worth the name." Ignatius's voice was flat now, almost clinical.
"My investigators—and I employ very good investigators, Cinder, the kind governments hire when they want problems to vanish—found nothing.
A ghost. Someone with the resources and the expertise to approach a vulnerable target, apply precise psychological pressure, and disappear without leaving a single thread to pull. "
Cinder leaned forward. "You said he claimed to work for Cole's father."
"Not verbally. It was an assumption. Edward Armstrong-Wells had every motive, he'd been controlling Cole for years, using him as a financial asset, binding his dragon through means I won't describe in detail because they make me want to burn things.
" Ignatius's composure flickered for just a moment, a flash of heat in his gray eyes that reminded me, viscerally, that this man was not human.
"But the deeper we dug, the less the connection held.
Wells was many things—cruel, possessive, obsessed with control—but his methods were institutional.
Lawyers. Contracts. Corporate structures.
He operated through systems he owned. He didn't hire anonymous strangers to bribe street kids with envelopes of cash. "
"Someone used Wells as a cover story," I said, the realization settling into my gut like ice water. "A convenient bogeyman. Someone Phoenix would believe without questioning, because Wells was already the villain in Cole's story."
"Yes." Ignatius's voice carried the weight of someone who'd spent months turning this over and finding only sharp edges.
"And now we have Gavin. A different target, a different approach, but the same method.
Find someone vulnerable. Apply pressure through something they care about—Phoenix's friend, Gavin's debts.
Direct their attention toward a player on this team.
And disappear before anyone can trace the thread back to its source. "
Cinder's fingers had gone white where they pressed against his thighs. I could feel the tension radiating off him, not panic, not yet, but the particular stillness of a mind working at full capacity, assembling pieces into a picture he didn't want to see.
"You think it's the same person," Cinder said.