Chapter 27 #2
He looked down at his broken fingers. His breathing stuttered—a panic he rarely let anyone see, certainly not me. Not the team. Not the world that expected him to be untouchable.
"I can lose teeth, Belle." His jaw worked. "Break my toe. Fracture my ribs." He swallowed hard, the sound audible in the kitchen's oppressive silence. "But my hands... my fingers..."
I froze, eyes widening as something cracked in his voice—something vulnerable and terrified that he'd buried so deep I'd never imagined it existed.
"Everything I do on the ice depends on them."
The words landed like blows.
He closed his eyes. Shutting me out. Shutting himself in with whatever nightmare he was seeing behind his eyelids. "If they don't heal right—I'm done."
My stomach dropped. Plummeted straight through the floor. I'd known hockey mattered to him. Seen the trophies lining his study walls, the magazine covers, the way his teammates orbited him like he was gravity itself. Watched him skate with a precision that bordered on violence.
I hadn't known it was everything. Hadn't understood that taking it away would be like cutting out his lungs and expecting him to breathe.
My hands trembled as I pressed the ice more gently against his knuckles. Barely touching. Terrified of making anything worse.
"I didn't know," I whispered.
The confession felt necessary. Essential. Like he needed to hear that I understood the magnitude of what he'd sacrificed even if I'd never asked for it.
His eyes opened. No anger burned in them. No resentment at my ignorance or my role in his destruction. Just honesty. Pure, devastating honesty. And a fear he would never admit to the team. Would never show Coach Edwards or Hades or any of the men who depended on his strength to anchor theirs.
"I didn't care." The words emerged quietly. Steady despite everything. "Not when they had you."
I went completely still. Every muscle locked. Every thought scattered. My breath caught somewhere between my lungs and my throat, trapped behind the understanding crashing over me in waves too large to process.
Because I knew what he was saying.
What he was really saying beneath the simple words.
He chose me over his career. He risked everything—his future, his identity, the only thing he'd ever built that was truly his—for me.
Not because the contract demanded it. Not because I'd begged or bargained or offered him anything in return. Just... because. Because something inside him required my safety more than it required his own survival.
My heartbeat pounded painfully in my ears, too loud, too fast, drowning out everything except the weight of what he'd just given me without asking for anything back.
I stared at him—this man who'd blackmailed me, who'd controlled me, who'd broken me down piece by piece until I couldn't remember who I'd been before him.
This man who'd just shattered his own hand to keep me whole.
My vision blurred. Not from fear this time. From something infinitely more dangerous.
"Gideon..." His name broke apart on my tongue.
He watched me with those dark, unreadable eyes.
Waiting. Not demanding a response. Not forcing me to acknowledge what stood between us now—too large to ignore, too terrifying to name.
Just waiting. Like he had all the time in the world.
Like breaking bones and losing games and risking everything meant nothing if it kept me sitting here beside him.
My chest ached with the weight of it.
I didn't know what to say. Didn't know how to carry this new knowledge without collapsing beneath it.
So I did the only thing I could.
I kept holding the ice against his broken fingers. Kept touching him gently when everything else between us had been rough and violent and wrong. And tried not to think about how much I needed him to heal.
Not for hockey.
Not for the team.
For me.
My throat tightened until breathing felt impossible. I tried to focus on the ice pack. On the swelling spreading across his knuckles in dark, ugly blooms. On the clinical reality of broken bones and torn ligaments and all the mechanical damage I could catalog instead of feeling.
It didn't work.
My voice cracked when I finally spoke. "Why... why would you do that?"
The question hung between us—raw, confused, desperate for an answer that made sense. That fit into the version of him I'd been clinging to. The monster. The manipulator. The man who took what he wanted without caring who it destroyed.
Gideon watched me for a long moment. His expression remained steady. Unguarded in a way that made my chest ache. "Because you're mine."
My breath shattered. Broke apart into jagged pieces I couldn't put back together.
My eyes stung—hot and burning and threatening to spill over despite every wall I'd built to keep him out.
Not because I believed I belonged to him.
Not because the contract made it true or the money gave him rights or any of the thousand justifications he could've hidden behind.
But because I realized—with stunning, terrifying clarity—that part of me was starting to want to belong to him.
Want this broken, dangerous man who fed me and bathed me and destroyed himself protecting me.
Want the gentleness that emerged when he thought I wasn't looking.
Want the version of him that held me through nightmares and bought me pajamas and asked about my mother's favorite books.
The realization hit like a physical blow.
I whispered, voice barely audible, "You broke bones for me."
He nodded once. Calm. Certain. Unapologetic. "I'd break more."
I closed my eyes against the truth of it. Against the weight pressing down on my chest, making it impossible to breathe or think or remember why I was supposed to keep hating him.
I hated him for saying that. Hated the simple certainty in his voice, like shattering himself meant nothing as long as I stayed whole.
Hated myself for trembling beneath the warmth of it—for feeling something shift and crack and reform inside my chest into a shape I didn't recognize.
Hated how my heart was softening despite every logical reason it shouldn't.
But nothing stopped the truth: Gideon Jones got hurt for me. Risked his career, his identity, everything he'd built from violence and discipline and determination.
For me.
And I didn't know how to hate him for that. Didn't know how to keep the walls standing when he kept proving—over and over—that beneath the cruelty and control lived something genuine. Something that needed me as much as I was terrified of needing him.
My hands shook as I adjusted the ice pack.
Gentle.
Careful.
Trying desperately not to make anything worse.