Chapter 21 #2
I wanted to call him. Wanted to hear his voice—that particular quality it had late at night, softer and less guarded, the clinical precision giving way to something warmer and more human.
I wanted to tell him everything. The man in the hallway.
The threat. The reason I'd let three inches of mattress become a canyon.
I wanted to say I'm sorry and I love you and I'm terrified and none of this was because I stopped wanting you—it was because wanting you felt like the most dangerous thing I'd ever done, and I've faced down things that would make most people run screaming. But I didn’t.
My phone rang.
Not Cinder. The screen read Ignatius, and the sight of that name at this hour—after a loss, on the road, when nothing about my life was functioning the way it should—sent a jolt of ice through my veins that had nothing to do with my nature.
I grabbed a towel, stood, and walked out of the locker room into the concrete corridor beyond. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting everything in that flat, institutional glow that made hospital hallways and hockey arenas feel interchangeable.
"Ignatius," I said, pressing the phone to my ear.
"Taranis." His voice was measured—the careful register he used when delivering information that required precision. "I have two things to tell you, and I need you to listen to both before you react."
My dragon coiled tight, every frozen instinct screaming alert. "Go ahead."
"First: Gavin Mercer is dead."
The words didn't land immediately. They hung in the air like a puck suspended at the moment of a shot, weightless for one impossible second before gravity reasserted itself.
"What?"
"His neighbor called emergency services this evening. Paramedics pronounced him at the scene. The police are treating it as an apparent suicide, pending toxicology and a full investigation." Ignatius paused. "I've already spoken to Cinder. He's shaken, but he's safe."
I leaned against the concrete wall and felt the cold radiate out of me in a wave I couldn't contain—frost spreading across the painted cinder blocks in delicate, branching patterns that climbed toward the ceiling like frozen lightning. My breath came out in visible plumes.
"This wasn't us," Ignatius said, and the steel in his voice was unmistakable. "This wasn't the Council. This wasn't my people. I told you I would handle Gavin through legal and financial pressure, and that is exactly what we were doing. Slowly. Methodically. The way I handle everything."
"Then who—"
"I don't know yet. But the timing concerns me." He let that settle. "Now. The second thing."
I closed my eyes. The frost on the wall crackled softly, spreading further. Somewhere down the corridor, a pipe groaned.
"I watched the game tonight, Taranis."
The words were quiet, but they carried the particular weight Ignatius gave to statements that were actually indictments. I said nothing.
"I have watched you play through injuries, through grief, through the kind of isolation that would have broken lesser men. I have never seen you play like that. Not once."
My throat worked. Nothing came out.
"So I'm going to ask you a question," Ignatius said, "and I need you to answer honestly. Not as a goaltender. Not as a dragon who's spent three decades hiding. As a man."
The silence stretched. I could hear the distant thump of music from the locker room, the muffled voices of my teammates, the steady hum of the building's ventilation system pushing recycled air through concrete arteries.
"What happened?" Ignatius asked.
And maybe it was the loss. Maybe it was Gavin's death and the sick realization that the web surrounding us was darker and more tangled than I'd understood.
Maybe it was the frost climbing the walls of a corridor in a Vegas arena, visible evidence that my control was fracturing, that the cold I'd held in check for thirty years was finally outpacing my ability to contain it.
Or maybe it was just that I was tired. Bone-deep, soul-deep tired of carrying this alone.
"Someone approached me," I said. My voice came out raw—scraped clean of the goaltender's composure, the dragon's discipline, everything I'd ever used to keep the world at a manageable distance.
"After the win. At the bar. A man. No name.
No identifying features. The kind of person designed to be forgotten. "
Ignatius went very still on the other end of the line. I could feel it—not silence, but the particular quality of attention that radiated from an ancient dragon who'd just caught the scent of something dangerous.
"He had Cinder's notes," I continued. "All of them.
The cloud data—every anomalous reading, every flagged temperature, every impossible cardiac rhythm I've produced since Cinder started.
Annotated. Cross-referenced with game performance stats.
He had a draft story ready to send to three outlets and the league's Department of Player Safety. "
"Taranis—"
"He told me to walk away from Cinder. End the relationship.
Create distance. Make it clean and public and convincing, or the story runs and the franchise burns.
Not just me. Everyone. Cole. Max. Ember.
Every player whose data doesn't add up. Every dragon on the roster.
He said the league would frame it as doping, and we'd lose the chance of a playoff berth, and every career on this team would be destroyed.
" I didn't say what else he'd threatened. The final nail.
But still the words poured out of me like meltwater—fast, unstoppable, carrying debris from weeks of silence.
I told him everything. The forty-eight-hour deadline.
The reference to Phoenix. The implication that this was the same operation, the same ghost, the same patient, precise, invisible architecture targeting the people closest to dragons rather than the dragons themselves. Until me.
"And the man's reference to Phoenix," Ignatius said, his voice dangerously quiet. "He used that name specifically?"
"He said 'the man who tried before didn't find me, and he had considerably more resources than a hockey player with a drug problem.' He was talking about your investigation after the All-Stars. He knew you'd looked. He knew you'd failed."
The silence that followed was the longest I'd ever endured from Ignatius.
Not empty silence—loaded silence, the kind that preceded seismic shifts, the kind that meant centuries of calculation were being rerun in real time behind those gray eyes I couldn't see but could somehow feel through the phone.
When he finally spoke, his voice had changed. Not louder. Not angrier. Colder—and I knew cold better than anyone alive.
"You should have told me immediately."
"I know."
"You should have told me before you pulled away from Cinder. Before you let this man dictate the terms of your life. Before you sat on a bench in Las Vegas and fell apart in front of eighteen thousand people and a national broadcast audience."
"I know."
"Then why didn't you?"
The question was simple. The answer wasn't.
"Because he was right," I said, and the admission tasted like blood on frozen metal.
"Not about the blackmail. Not about the threat.
About the math. Cinder's proximity to me is a vulnerability.
The data exists. The exposure risk is real.
And I couldn't—" My voice fractured, a hairline crack running through decades of composure.
"I couldn't be the reason this team burns, Ignatius.
Not after everything they've given. Not after what Cole went through.
Not after you spent months protecting Phoenix and rebuilding something that mattered. I couldn't be the one who—"
"Stop."
The command was absolute. Not raised. Not harsh. Just final, in the way that mountains were final—immovable, unarguable, older than the language being used to challenge them.
"Taranis Rees," Ignatius said, and the use of my full name sent ice cascading down my spine that had nothing to do with my own nature.
"You are not a liability. You are not a variable to be optimized.
And you do not get to make unilateral decisions about the safety of this community by sacrificing the one person your dragon has chosen in nearly three decades of solitude since you were relocated to Canada. "
My eyes burned. I pressed my free hand against the frozen wall and felt the ice melt under my palm, reforming instantly, a cycle of thaw and freeze that matched the chaos inside my chest.
"He will find me," I said. "If I go back to Cinder, he'll release the story."
"Let him."
I blinked. "What?"
"Let him try." Ignatius's voice dropped into a register I'd only heard twice before—once when Cole's father had attempted to reclaim his son, and once when a Council member had suggested that urban dragons were an acceptable loss.
It was the voice of something ancient and territorial and utterly without mercy.
"This man has been operating in shadows because shadows are the only place he has power.
He approached Phoenix with cash and threats because Phoenix was alone and vulnerable.
He approached you in a hallway because you were isolated and afraid for your mate.
He preys on separation, Taranis. He succeeds when we fracture. He fails when we don't."
"The data—"
"The data is already being handled. My team identified and contained the cloud breach within hours of our meeting.
Every copy Gavin downloaded has been traced, flagged, and is in the process of being rendered forensically useless.
The draft article your hallway ghost showed you?
It references data points that, as of seventy-two hours ago, no longer exist in any accessible format. "
I went still. Completely still—the dragon kind of still, where even my heartbeat seemed to pause.
"You—"
"I told you I would handle it. Did you think I meant eventually?
" A thread of exasperation wove through his voice, almost fond.
"The digital containment was phase one. Phase two was identifying every outlet and individual who'd received any version of the data and ensuring it was discredited, deleted, or both.
Phase three—which is ongoing—is building a counter-narrative robust enough that if a single number surfaces in public, it will be attributed to equipment malfunction and outdated monitoring software, supported by documentation from three independent medical technology firms who owe me favors older than your hockey career. "
My legs gave out. Not dramatically—I just slid down the wall until I was sitting on the concrete floor of a Vegas arena corridor, frost spreading beneath me in a circle that would have been beautiful if I'd been capable of appreciating anything beyond the sound of my own world rearranging itself.
"The data is gone?" I whispered.
"The data is neutralized. There is a difference, and the difference matters, but for your purposes tonight—yes. Whatever leverage this man believed he held is already crumbling. He simply doesn't know it yet."
I pressed the heel of my hand against my eye socket. The frost on my lashes crackled.
"And Gavin?" I asked, because the timing—Gavin dead the same week I'd been threatened—couldn't have been coincidence, and the shape of that non-coincidence terrified me in ways I couldn't fully articulate.
"That," Ignatius said, and his voice went flat in a way that meant he was genuinely unsettled, which was itself unsettling because Ignatius was never unsettled, "is what concerns me most. Gavin was a tool.
A blunt, desperate, easily manipulated tool.
His usefulness ended the moment the data was no longer viable leverage, and his debts made him a liability to whoever had been extending his credit. "
The implication settled over me like a second skin. “What about Cinder?”
“Professionally he is protected. Personally, to say you screwed up is putting it mildly. I don't know what else the man threatened you with, but I know it was personal.”