Chapter 24 #2
Taz looked at me then, and the expression on his face was the worst thing I'd ever seen. Not anger. Not fear. Grief. The deep, hollow grief of a man who'd been forced to choose between two things he couldn't survive losing.
"He told me to walk away from you," Taz said.
"End the relationship. Create distance. Make it clean, make it public, make it convincing.
And if I did, the data would disappear. Every copy.
Every draft. Every annotation. You'd be offered a good job somewhere else, far from professional sports.
" He swallowed. "And if I didn't, the story would run.
Every reading would be used as evidence of a doping operation.
The league might suspend the franchise. Launch an investigation that would make the betting scandal look like nothing.
" His voice dropped. "Every player on the roster.
Cole, Max, Ember, Ash. Every dragon who's spent their entire life hiding. Every career. Every future. Gone."
I sat very still.
The room was quiet except for the hum of the hotel's ventilation system and the faint, distant sound of traffic on the street below.
The cold radiating from Taz had intensified, not dangerously, just the ambient leak of a man whose control was stretched to transparency.
Frost crept along the edge of the bedspread nearest to him, tiny crystalline fractals that caught the lamplight and glittered like something beautiful built from something terrible.
I watched his face. The tight set of his jaw. The muscle jumping beneath his left eye. The way his hands gripped his thighs hard enough to blanch his knuckles. The particular quality of his gaze, which wasn't meeting mine because he was bracing for impact.
He expected me to break.
I could see it. The careful way he'd arranged the information, leading with the team, with the franchise, with the careers of people we both loved.
He'd built the case the way he built his game: methodically, positioning himself as the last line of defense, making the sacrifice seem structural rather than personal.
He expected me to hear "I chose the team over you. "
But I knew this man. I knew him the way I knew cardiac rhythms and respiratory patterns and the precise temperature his skin dropped to when his dragon was distressed.
I knew him because I'd spent months reading him, not just his vitals but the silences between his words, the things he protected by never saying them, the vast and terrifying feeling he kept locked behind the goaltender's mask. He wasn’t saying it because he didn’t think I was worth it, he was saying it because despite my love, he didn’t think he was.
He was giving me an out. Even though he loved me desperately, he was still giving me an out.
"What else?" I asked.
His head came up. The surprise on his face was so naked it almost hurt to look at.
"What?"
"You heard me." I kept my voice steady. "What else did he say?"
Taz stared at me. His mouth opened, then closed. The frost on the bedspread crackled softly, expanding another inch.
"Cinder, I just told you I chose the team over—"
"No, you didn't." I leaned forward, closing the gap between our knees until they touched.
The cold bit through my sweatpants, sharp and immediate, but I didn't flinch, because the cold wrapped around me and made me feel safe.
"You love me, Taz. I know that. I've known it since before you said it.
I knew it when you shifted on a mountain road to keep me safe.
I knew it when you pressed your forehead against mine in your kitchen and told me you were counting.
I knew it four days ago when you couldn't even bring yourself to say good night properly because the lie was eating you alive. "
His eyes were glassy. The muscle in his jaw had stopped jumping. It had locked entirely, like his whole face was trying to hold itself together through sheer stubbornness.
"So don't tell me you weighed my heart against the team and the team won," I said softly. "Because I don't believe you. Not for a second. Something else made you run. Something he said about me specifically. So I'm going to ask you again, and I need you to answer me honestly."
I reached out and took his hand. "What else did he threaten?"
The sound that came out of him wasn't quite a breath. It was closer to the noise the ice made when it cracked under too much weight, a structural failure that started deep and radiated outward through every layer.
"You," he whispered.
The word landed between us, small and devastating.
"He said if the story ran, you'd be blamed.
" Taz's voice was barely audible now, scraped down to something raw and exposed, nothing left of the goaltender or the dragon or the man who'd spent thirty years perfecting the art of giving nothing away.
"Not just fired. Not just blacklisted. He said the data trail would be traced back to you as the source.
That whoever had leaked it, whoever had sold it or allowed access, the documentation had your fingerprints all over it because it was your work. "
My blood went cold. The human kind.
"He said evidence would show a nurse who documented impossible readings and never reported them through proper channels, who maintained a relationship with a player whose data he was responsible for monitoring, who had a prior history of employment disputes and access to drugs."
The room tilted. Just slightly. Just enough that I had to tighten my grip on his hand to stay anchored.
"He said losing your nursing license would only be the start," Taz said. "He said he'd make sure you went to prison, Cinder. That by the time the investigation was finished, no one would hire you, no one would believe you, and everything you'd rebuilt since Gavin would be gone."
I looked at him. At this man who'd spent four days destroying himself to keep me safe.
Who'd let me believe he didn't want me because the alternative was watching me burn.
Who'd played the worst hockey of his career, absorbed every ounce of that humiliation, and never once cracked enough to tell me why.
He was still bracing. I could see it in every rigid line of his body, in the way his hand sat passive in mine instead of gripping back, in the careful blankness he was trying to rebuild across his features even as the truth leaked out of him like meltwater.
He'd given me the worst of it, and now he was waiting for me to calculate the cost and walk away.
That was the thing about Taz. He always expected people to leave.
Not because he was dramatic or self-pitying, but because everyone always had.
He'd built an entire life around the assumption that love was temporary and proximity was dangerous, and the man in the hallway had known exactly which wire to cut.
I didn't say anything. I leaned forward, took his face in both hands, and kissed him.
Not the desperate, claiming kiss from the locker room.
Something slower. Deliberate. The kind of kiss that said I heard every word you just said, and I'm still here, and I'm not going anywhere, and you are going to have to physically remove me from this hotel room if you want me gone.
I kissed him the way I'd wanted to four nights ago, when he'd lain three inches away and I'd felt the distance like a wound and hadn't understood why it was there.
He resisted for exactly one second. One frozen, trembling second where his whole body locked up, where I could feel the cold spike beneath his skin as his dragon fought between self-preservation and surrender.
Then he broke.
His hands came up and grabbed my wrists, not to pull me away but to hold me there, fingers wrapping around my forearms with a grip that would probably leave bruises, and I didn't care.
The sound he made against my mouth was something I never wanted to hear again and never wanted to stop hearing: a low, shattered noise that came from somewhere so deep it had probably never seen daylight before.
The cold poured off him in waves, frosting the pillows, icing the headboard, crystallizing the moisture in the air between us until we were kissing inside a cloud of our own breath, and none of it touched me.
It never did. The cold parted around me the way it always had, and I felt it recognize me the same way I recognized it.
When I pulled back, his eyes were closed and his lashes were wet, and his hands were still locked around my wrists like he thought I might evaporate.
"Open your eyes," I said quietly.
He did. The gray-blue was almost entirely silver now, bright and liquid and terrified.
"I'm not running," I told him. "I know you think I should. I know you've already built the case for why it would be rational and safe and the smart thing to do. I know you've probably got a speech prepared about how I deserve better than a life spent hiding someone else's secret."
His throat worked. He didn't deny it.
"But I'm a nurse, Taz. I don't leave when things get critical. I stay. I stay and I document and I fight, and if someone threatens to take my license and send me to prison for doing my job, then they'd better be prepared for exactly how stubborn I can be when someone I love is on the line."
The word hit him visibly. Love. His grip on my wrists tightened, then loosened, then tightened again, like he couldn't decide whether to hold on or let go.
"You can't just..." he started, voice wrecked.
"I can. I am. It's done." I brushed my thumb across his cheekbone, catching a tear he probably didn't know was there. "Now. I need you to tell me something."
He blinked, thrown by the shift. "What?"
I held his gaze. Steady. The way I held it when I needed a patient to trust me with something they'd never told anyone.
"What happened with your parents?"