Chapter 12 #2
“I know.” He brushes a strand of hair from my face.
The gesture so casual, so familiar, so normal in the middle of the most abnormal night of my life that it makes my eyes sting.
“But for the record, when we get out of here? I’m picking you up at the door and taking you somewhere that isn’t a mall or a closet or an ice-fishing tent. ”
“Oh, fancy.”
“With actual food. Maybe candles.”
“What, no flashlights?”
He grins. “No promises.”
Cole shifts again, pulling his sleeping bag a little higher, completely oblivious. It’s almost comical. My world has changed tonight, flipped completely upside down. And he’s…snoring.
“Wake him up,” I say. “We’ve got a ceiling to crawl through.”
Cole surfaces from sleep like a man pulled from deep water—gasping, eyes wild for three seconds before context reassembles.
“Wh—are they—”
“No. But we’re leaving. We’ve got a plan to get out of here.”
“What kind of plan?”
I pick up the hockey stick, turn it over in my hands. I look at Beckett. He looks at me. Morning-blue eyes. The gold I didn’t see from far away.
“The kind that involves a ceiling, a ladder, and a set of bolt cutters,” I say. “On your feet, Thompson. We’re going up.”
BECKETT
Only a little more terrifying than the thought of running into the goons roaming the halls is the realization that I have to talk to Everly’s father. My coach.
Because you don’t just date the coach’s daughter. Not unless you want to find yourself benched for the season, possibly jumped in the parking lot by a brood of professional hockey players. One versus twenty. Not really a fair fight.
No, I’ll have to face him.
Not today, but soon. I’ve been running it through my head ever since we left the camp. I’ll sit in Coach’s office and say I need to talk to you about Everly. And he’ll know before I finish the sentence, because Duncan Hart didn’t build a coaching career by being slow on the read.
He might say no. He might say This is a distraction, Benson. And I’ll absorb it the way I absorb every hit—feet planted, standing strong—and then I’ll say She’s worth it. And I’m asking because I respect you, not because I need your permission.
Because there’s no question about whether she wants me. I mean, you saw it, right? She kissed me back. And I can’t stop running it on replay in my head. The split second where her head tilted back, her lips brushing mine, an answer to my question. I’d like that.
It makes me dizzy.
I didn’t realize how much the past weighed in my soul.
Seventeen years of history hauled like a bag of sand tied to my skates, so constant I’d stopped noticing the drag.
And then the bag opened. Last night. The confessions.
The moment she said I forgive you and I felt the weight shift into a shape I could carry instead of one compressing my spine.
I’m lighter. That’s the simplest way to say it. Lighter than I was twenty-four hours ago, and the lightness is unfamiliar, like stepping off a treadmill and discovering the ground doesn’t move.
“Bolt cutters should be in the hand-tools section,” Everly says at the entrance to Iron & Oak—arrived at without incident, thankfully. “Ladder, back wall. Let’s grab them and get out of here.”
“What about me?” Cole is behind us, vertical but barely, the haunted look retained.
“You carry the bolt cutters. Consider it penance,” I say.
“For the closet?”
“For everything. But especially the closet.”
I grab the thirty-six-inch bolt cutters. Hand them to Cole. Everly pulls the ladder from the back wall, extends it, tests the locks, retracts it. It’s so E.J. Hartley, testing the plan. It makes me smile.
“So, I think we enter here,” I say, pointing to a corner of the shop near the wall—most likely place to hold weight. “Keep going that way”—my finger draws a line in the air eastward—“sixty feet or so, and we should be able to drop through near the south exit.”
“And I cut the chains,” Cole says, hefting the bolt cutters, seemingly grateful for purpose.
“If we can get to them. They’re on the outside, so we’ll have to get the doors cracked open and slide the bolt cutters through.”
Everly looks up toward the ceiling, something resigned crossing her face. Then she steps back, pulling her laptop bag from her shoulder.
“What are you doing?” I ask, watching as she surveys the inventory on the back wall.
“I’m looking for somewhere to hide my bag. It’s heavy, and I’m going to need my hands free.”
“No way you’re leaving your laptop here. Your work’s on that computer. All your books.” I hold out my hand, sliding my backpack off with the other. “Give it to me. I’ll put it in my backpack.”
She hesitates, her eyes studying mine for a moment. Trusting. She hands it over.
The bag is heavier than expected. “Oof, what have you been carrying all night, dictionaries?”
I try to stuff the laptop bag into the backpack. The front flap falls open.
Something falls out.
An envelope. White. Standard size. It hits the floor with a soft, papery sound. Innocent.
I bend to pick it up on reflex.
Stop.
I see the handwriting. My handwriting.
The world stops. Not the way it stopped when she kissed me—not the warm, expanding pause. A cold stop. An icy stop. The stop that happens when you’re skating full speed and the boards appear where they shouldn’t be.
The envelope is addressed to Sutton Blake. Care of Stratton Publishing. The address I’ve been writing to for six months.
My envelope. My letter. In Everly Hart’s bag.
It’s been opened, but I don’t need to pull out the letter to know what I wrote.
And three things hit me at once.
First—Everly must be Sutton Blake. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Hockey is in her blood, whether she wants to admit it or not. Of course she’d write hockey rom-coms.
Second—she knows me. As in the me who wrote to her about…well, stuff. The inner places, the secrets. I feel stripped.
And finally (and this is the part that burns the most), she’s known this the entire night we’ve been together. And. Said. Nothing.
So, here I am—feeling naked, furious, and stupid.
I’m…I’m going to be sick.
I look at her, and she glances at the envelope, and her face goes white—instantly, the expression of a person caught with the goods.
“I can explain—”
I’m about to say something—like How? Or even Save it—when the sound of a papery-fiberglass tile dragging and being dislodged rips through the quiet of the mall, followed by a loud thud as a small piece of aluminum framing crashes to the floor.
Cole glances down from the ladder, teeth bared in a grimace. “Oops.”
Oh, I’m going to oops him—
From the concourse sounds footsteps. Fast. Multiple sets. The crash of Cole’s mistake has carried through the dead building like a siren, and now the men hunting us are on their way.
“Cole, get down!” I hiss.
Cole comes down the ladder fast, bolt cutters clanging. I dive under the gate and back into the mall’s concourse.
The flashlight beams are fifty yards away and closing.
I shove the letter into my jacket pocket, then grab Everly’s hand. Not because I want to. I blame muscle memory and panic, and clearly, the bomb that just went off in my brain hasn’t quite reached my heart.
But it will. Oh, it will, and I need to be away from here and someplace quiet when it does.
So my best option is to shove it away and…run.
We head west, back toward the shadowy arena.
Behind us—Cole’s voice. He’s stopped running. Turned around. And is now facing the hired muscle with the bolt cutters across his body.
“Go!” he says. “They want me. Not you.”
“Cole, don’t—”
“This is my mess, Benson. Let me clean it up.”
All true. I let him take one for the team.
Everly grabs my arm. “Blue Line Books—go!”
We leave him there and duck inside the bookstore, past the display tables, into the deep stacks where the aisles narrow and the shelves create a maze and a modicum of safety.
We drop behind the back shelves. Footsteps hit the concourse outside. Beams lance past the open gate—white light cutting through the entrance, sweeping the register, the bestsellers. They move on. Fast sweep first. They’ll come back, but right now they’re moving on.
Huh. Where is Cole? Maybe he’s leading them away—a fake puck play.
We wait until our heart rates level out and our breathing steadies.
I let go of her hand. Step back. Put space between us.
It’s almost comical. The sun’s about to rise, and this is the coldest it’s been yet.
“You lied to me,” I say. The words frost the frigid air.
“Beckett, please—”
“You’re Sutton Blake.” I pull the letter from my pocket. “You’ve been writing to me for six months. Making me feel like someone actually cared. And you knew.”
And then, something terrible, horrible, sickening, dawns on me.
She’s not the only one who knew about my letters.
“You work for that author?”
“You caught me.”
“Really?”
“Don’t sound so surprised.”
“I’m not surprised. I’m making conversation in an elevator.”
“What’s she write? That author.”
“Thrillers, mostly. Crime fiction.”
Elevator girl is her—Everly Hart. The voice from the elevator, the one who said everyone deserves a second chance. It was her the whole time.
I don’t know how I know it, but I do. I can see it through the dark lines of my memory—the presence of her. The sound of her voice. Her humor.
Everly.
Not E.J. Hartley’s assistant or her lawyer—or whoever might work with her. “Tell me, E.J.,” I say, the words sharp, pointed. “How’s your assistant doing these days?”
Everly’s eyes go wide, a look of sickening guilt etched deep in every line of her face in the amber glow of the emergency lights.
I close my eyes. I can’t even look at her. “I poured my heart out to you in that elevator, and you said nothing, Everly.”
“I was scared—”
“I told you things in my letters I’ve never told anyone.” My chest feels like it’s breaking. “And every conversation tonight—at Blake’s, the furniture store, the tent—you knew exactly what to say to make me feel like you cared. Like we were—”
“What? We were what?” she says, and her eyes are filling.
I can barely say the word. “Friends. Maybe more…” And I can’t believe I said that, but there was kissing, so…But I follow it with “And the whole time, you had the cheat sheet!”
She flinches, and it just solidifies the truth. Every confession tonight, she already knew the answers. Here I was, thinking I was being truly open for the first time to a real human and…well, she already knew all of it.
Even the part about the girl in the elevator.
Because it was her. Wow. I shake my head. “You lied to me, even in the elevator.”
“I didn’t know it was you, Beckett, until the very end. And what was I supposed to say?”
A few things come to mind, but I just shake my head. And then…wait…
“I preordered your next book. Ice Cold Heart. About a hockey player with a sordid past finding a second chance—that’s me, isn’t it?”
Her mouth opens, and weakly, she says, “It’s fiction.”
But I can see the truth in her eyes. Oh, wow. “What am I to you—research?”
Her brows rise, and for a liar, she isn’t very good at concealing the truth.
Wow, just…wow.
“The book started before I knew it was you.” There’s a thread of steel underneath the breaking. “Those letters didn’t tell me anything about the scandal—only how you felt ostracized by your team, how the pressure to perform was too much—”
“And you, what, picked the rest right out of the tabloids?” The words taste like battery acid. “My voice. My words. My pain, repackaged as entertainment.”
“Would you have preferred I didn’t write back?”
The question hits like a puck off the crossbar. No angle to play. Because the answer is no. Her letters were the only thing that kept me sane during the worst six months of my life. The lifeline was real. The comfort was real.
My teeth clench, holding back my answer.
“I loved your letters,” she whispers. “In the elevator, I meant what I said. That your letters meant something to me. And when I realized who you were, I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. I mean, we weren’t exactly friends.”
“What about the kiss, Everly? First-person research? Did tonight give you enough material?”
She flinches. Hard. She’s crying—silently—tears falling straight down without sobs.
And suddenly, I’m back in the arena, yelling at eleven-year-old Everly. My chest feels split in two. I never wanted to see that again.
I turn my back to her, shut it out. “I need to think,” I say, retreating to the place inside me I know is safe. Back behind the blue line. Defense. Hard and strong. “Cole is still in danger. We need to get out and get help. That’s the priority.” I look at her. “Everything else waits.”