Chapter 19 #2
Not that we were stupid. We were on the road again tomorrow, but tonight Cinder was safe, he was with me, and we were in the playoffs.
The bar was loud enough that no one noticed me slip away from the table.
Or if they did, they assumed what anyone would—too many beers, too much celebration, the usual postgame bladder situation.
Max was telling a story that involved hand gestures wide enough to knock over drinks, and Cinder was laughing—actually laughing, that rare, full sound I'd been collecting like evidence of something good—and I didn't want to pull him away from it.
The hallway to the restrooms was narrow and dim, the kind of afterthought corridor you found in old Denver bars that had been renovated just enough to pass inspection but not enough to feel modern.
Exposed brick. A single flickering sconce.
The muffled thump of music from the main room fading to something distant and hollow the farther I walked.
I pushed through the men's room door, handled my business, washed my hands.
The mirror above the sink showed me a face I almost didn't recognize—flushed from the win, from the drinks, from the unfamiliar experience of sitting in a bar surrounded by people I cared about and not wanting to be anywhere else.
I looked almost happy. It was unsettling.
I dried my hands and pulled the door open.
He was standing in the hallway.
Not leaning. Not casual. Just standing, centered in the narrow corridor, blocking the path back to the bar with the kind of deliberate positioning that told me this wasn't accidental.
Average height. Nondescript build. A face designed to be forgotten—the kind of face that slid out of your memory the moment you looked away, all soft edges and neutral features, like someone had built him specifically to disappear in crowds.
He was wearing a dark jacket over a button-down, no tie, hands in his pockets. Nothing about him screamed threat. Nothing about him screamed anything. And that, more than anything else, made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
My dragon surged—hard, fast, ice crackling along the inside of my ribs like a warning shot.
"Mr. Rees," he said. His voice was pleasant. Modulated. The kind of voice that came from practice, not personality. "Congratulations on the win. Quite a performance tonight."
I didn't move. The door swung shut behind me, cutting off the last thread of noise from the restroom, and the hallway went very quiet.
"Do I know you?" I asked. My voice came out flat. Controlled. Goaltender's voice—the one that gave away nothing.
"No," he said simply. "But I know you. I've known about you for quite some time, actually.
" He tilted his head, studying me with the detached interest of someone examining a specimen.
"Thirty-three saves tonight. Impressive.
Especially considering the cardiac output required to sustain that level of performance over sixty minutes.
" He paused, letting the words land. "Cardiac output that, according to some very detailed nursing notes, shouldn't be physiologically possible. "
The ice inside me went from warning to weapon. I felt it press outward, felt the temperature in the hallway drop by several degrees, felt the moisture in the air begin to crystallize at the edges of my breath. I held it. Barely.
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.
"Of course you do." He smiled—thin, professional, utterly devoid of warmth.
"Core temperatures averaging ninety-one point four degrees Fahrenheit during high-exertion periods.
Resting heart rate of forty-two beats per minute without corresponding loss of consciousness.
" He recited the numbers with the casual precision of someone who'd memorized them.
Who'd studied them. "Your nurse is very thorough.
Meticulous, even. The kind of documentation that would hold up beautifully under scrutiny. "
My hands clenched at my sides. The cold bit into my palms, frost forming against the skin of my knuckles where no one could see.
"What do you want?" I asked.
"I want what I've always wanted, Mr. Rees.
To protect the team." He removed one hand from his pocket—slowly, deliberately, the way you'd move around an animal you knew was dangerous—and adjusted his cuff.
"But since you're asking what I want from you specifically, I'll be direct.
I want you to step away from Cinder Adair. "
The name hit me like a physical blow. Not because I was surprised—I'd known, the moment I saw him standing there, that this was about Cinder—but because hearing his name in this man's mouth felt like contamination. Like something clean being touched by something rotten.
"No," I said.
He didn't blink. "That wasn't a request."
"I don't care what it was."
"Then let me reframe it."
He shifted his weight slightly, hands sliding back into his pockets, his expression unchanged.
"Right now, I have comprehensive physiological data on you.
Data that documents performance metrics so far outside the range of normal human capability that there is only one possible explanation: that your team is running the most sophisticated doping program in the history of professional sports. "
He let the words settle between us.
The hallway felt like it was shrinking.
"What do you think the league will think when they see those numbers."
My stomach turned to ice.
"They won’t ignore it," he said calmly. "They can’t. Not after the betting scandals, not with the money involved in playoff races. The moment this data lands on the commissioner’s desk, the league opens a performance-enhancing investigation."
He spoke like he was outlining the weather.
"First, they suspend you pending review. Then they audit the team’s medical staff. Trainers. Doctors. Conditioning coaches. Every supplement, every treatment, every test result your franchise has recorded for the last three seasons."
My chest felt tight, the air in my lungs suddenly too thin.
"And while they do that," he added mildly, "they interview the rest of the roster. Armstrong. Renaud. Shaw. Anyone who’s shared a locker room with you. Drug tests. Blood panels. Biological passport comparisons."
He tilted his head slightly.
"Playoffs don’t pause for investigations, Mr. Rees."
The words landed like blows.
"Reporters camp outside the arena. Headlines start asking how a player on the Colorado Dragons managed to produce physiological numbers that defy basic human biology."
My fingers had gone numb.
"And maybe," he continued, voice almost sympathetic, "maybe the league eventually decides there’s nothing illegal happening. Perhaps they conclude it was an equipment malfunction. Faulty monitoring software. A data anomaly."
He shrugged.
"But by the time they reach that conclusion, the damage will already be done."
His gaze held mine.
"The Colorado Dragons lose their goalie in the middle of a playoff run. The team spends weeks under investigation. Every win is questioned. Every player dragged through scrutiny they didn’t ask for. Sponsors disappear."
A faint smile touched his mouth.
"You know at your age you won't survive that, Mr. Rees."
"You're bluffing."
"Am I?" He reached into his jacket—again, slowly, choreographed for my benefit—and produced a phone.
He held it up, screen facing me. On it was a document I assumed was Cinder's shorthand notation system, the abbreviations and margin notes and flagged entries that only made sense if you knew what you were looking for.
Someone had known what to look for.
The entries were annotated. Highlighted. Cross-referenced with game dates and performance statistics that had been pulled from public sources. And at the bottom, in a font that was crisp and professional and utterly devastating, was a draft headline:
COLORADO DRAGONS: THE DATA THAT DOESN'T ADD UP
"This goes to three outlets simultaneously if I give the word," he said, pocketing the phone.
"Sports media. Mainstream news. And one very interested party at the league's Department of Player Safety who's been waiting for exactly this kind of tip since the betting scandal made the Dragons a liability. "
The ice pressed against my skin so hard I thought it might break through. I could feel it crawling up my forearms beneath my sleeves, crystallizing along the veins, my dragon screaming to shift, to freeze, to eliminate the threat standing six feet away with a smile that didn't reach his eyes.
I held it. God help me, I held it. Because if I lost control here—in a bar, in a hallway, with my teammates thirty feet away and civilians on every side—the exposure wouldn't come from a media leak. It would come from me.
"Walk away from Cinder Adair," the man said again, and this time the pleasantness was gone.
What was underneath was cold in a way that had nothing to do with my dragon.
"End the relationship. Create distance. Make it clean, make it public, and make it convincing.
He will be offered another job. You go back to being the goaltender who doesn't let anyone close. "
"And if I do that," I said, my voice a scrape of ice against my throat, "what happens to the data?"
"The data disappears. Every copy. Every annotation.
Every draft headline. You'll never hear from me again, and neither will anyone on your team.
" He said it like he was offering a gift.
Like he was being generous. "Your franchise keeps its playoff berth.
Your teammates keep their careers. And Cinder Adair goes on to a perfectly respectable position somewhere far from professional sports, none the wiser.
He will have a job offer he can't refuse within forty-eight hours. "
I stared at him. The frost on my knuckles was thickening—I could feel it spreading beneath my sleeves, climbing toward my elbows, the dragon pressing so hard against my ribs that each breath felt like swallowing broken glass.
The hallway sconce flickered. The exposed brick nearest to me developed a thin sheen of ice that crept outward in fractal patterns, delicate and deadly.
He noticed. His gaze flicked to the wall, then back to me, and for the first time something shifted behind those carefully neutral eyes—something that wasn't quite fear but was adjacent to it. A recognition, perhaps, that the man standing in front of him wasn't entirely what he'd calculated for.
Good. Let him wonder.
But wondering didn't change the math. And the math was devastating in its simplicity.
If I refused, the story broke and the data went public.
If the data went public, every anomalous reading Cinder had ever documented would be dissected by people who didn't need to believe in dragons to destroy me—they just needed to believe in doping.
And the league, still raw from the betting scandal, still looking for proof that they'd cleaned house thoroughly enough, would come down on the Dragons with the kind of institutional fury that left nothing standing.
If it was just me, I would disappear immediately. But it wasn't.
Cole. Max. Ash. Ember. Every kid on that roster who'd poured their guts into clawing this franchise back from the dead. Gone. Not because of what they'd done, but because of what I was. Because of who I loved.
The irony was exquisite. Twenty years of hiding.
Twenty years of meticulous, suffocating control—every temperature reading explained away, every cold snap attributed to poor circulation or a quirky metabolism, every relationship held at arm's length so no one got close enough to notice the impossible.
And now a man I'd never met was standing in a bar hallway telling me the price of love was everything I'd spent my life protecting.
Not just my secret. Everyone's. "The data you have on me won't bring the team down. I can resign."
He sighed. "I see. Then I realize I will have to blame someone else." He leaned forward and whispered his other threat, and his words made the ice my dragon produced feel like a June day.