21. Nova
Chapter twenty-one
Nova
Asource tips me off at noon.
The Enforcers made contact with Jax. I put my phone face down on my desk and sit here without moving for a long while.
I know what I’m supposed to do. Verify. Follow up. File the story or kill it. That’s the job. That’s been the job and I’m good at it. The problem is I know exactly what the next step is.
But I don’t take it.
Instead I just sit here.
I finally get up, grab my camera bag, and go to practice like nothing happened. Because that’s the other thing I’m good at. Moving through rooms like I’m not carrying anything.
I’ve had a lot of practice.
Brody’s on me first.
He’s always first — something about my energy, apparently. He told me once with complete sincerity and zero irony.
He’s got his blocker off, tape still on his wrists, with a post-practice looseness of a guy who just left everything on the ice. He definitely plays like he promises.
“Shaw.” He drops next to me on the bench. “You look like you’re doing math.”
“I’m always doing math.”
“Bad math.”
“Brody.”
“Just saying.” He stretches his neck. “You know what helps bad math?”
“I’m going to regret asking.”
“Talking to the person the math is about.”
I look at him.
He looks back once — smirks — like he just said something smarter than he meant. Like he surprised himself.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah you do.” He stands up. Grabs his blocker. “FYI I told Jax you were out here already. Just so you know.”
“Brody—”
“Math,” he says. Points at his temple. Walks away.
I sit there.
Great.
I’m doing a loop of the rink when Katarina falls into step beside me.
Two coffees. One extended in my direction without a word. I take it because at this point Katarina offering me coffee is as reliable as sunrise and I’ve stopped pretending I don’t need it.
We walk.
“Conference Final starts Thursday,” she says.
“I know.”
“Big week.”
“Very big week.”
She’s quiet for a moment. We pass the equipment room, the trainer’s office, the hallway that leads to the ice. I’m looking at my coffee. She’s looking straight ahead.
“How are you doing with all of it,” she says.
“Fine. Great. It’s — yeah.”
She looks at me.
“Nova.”
“I’m handling it.”
“I didn’t ask if you were handling it.”
I sip my coffee. She waits. That’s the thing about Katarina — she just waits. No pressure. No follow up. Just enough space that you either fill it or you don’t and she’s fine either way and somehow that’s worse than if she pushed.
We stop at the end of the hall.
I notice her name tag on her jacket, I always read everything — menus, exit signs, name tags, fine print. Occupational hazard.
Katarina Novak.
I almost spit out my coffee.
Novak.
Hanging at the Hard Rock in downtown Tampa. Griffin on his third drink, saying something dismissive about his sister the way he said everything — she made the worst fucking mistake of her life jumping to that joke of a team in Canyon Bay. She always had shitty instincts.
I never asked her name.
I buried that whole chapter — Griffin, Tampa, V. North, all of it — and apparently I buried the last name with it.
Eight months.
Griffin’s sister has been bringing me coffee for eight months.
Not just coffee.
The good kind, too, from the place two blocks over when the arena coffee tasted burnt. The extra napkin tucked under the lid because I always spill. The quiet seat beside me after bad practices when everyone else knew not to ask.
She knows I take cinnamon when I’m pretending I’m fine.
She knows I hate being asked if I’m okay.
She knows I’ll answer anyway if she sits down first and waits me out.
I let her learn me in pieces.
Worse — I liked that she did.
And I never once put the pieces together.
Oh.
Oh no.
Katarina is still talking. I can see her mouth moving. I smile and nod and make the sounds a person makes when they’re listening, but I’m absolutely not listening because my brain just did something I can’t undo.
It isn’t just that she’s Griffin’s sister.
It’s that I let her get close enough to know what kindness works on me.
That’s the part that hollows me out.
Because I do not do that.
I do not hand people the map and then act surprised when I recognize the road.
“Nova?”
“Sorry.” I look up. “Long day. Sorry — what were you saying?”
She looks at me for a second.
“Just that if something belongs to someone else,” she says, “they should hear it from you first.”
She squeezes my arm.
Walks away.
I stand there.
Griffin’s sister’s hand just touched my arm.
A hand I trusted.
I drink my coffee.
It tastes like nothing.
I find Jax in the equipment room. Re-taping his blocker. Thirteen wraps. He looks up when I come in. No recorder. No notebook.
“The Enforcers contacted you,” I say.
He goes still.
Tape in his hands.
“How’d you—”
“Source.” I look at the tape. At the blocker half-done on the table. At 31 on the jersey hanging behind him.
“Why didn’t you tell me.”
He doesn’t answer. Which is an answer. Not the one I wanted. But an answer. I look at him for another second and then I turn and walk out, because if I stay in that room one more minute, I’m going to say something I’ll regret.
Something unfair.
Maybe something true.
That’s the problem.
The elevator takes forever. I watch the numbers go down. Six. Five. Four. I think about the name tag.
Three. Two.
I think about Griffin’s voice. Worst mistake of her life.
One.
The doors open.
He’s in the lobby.
I stare at him.
“Really…six flights,” I say.
“I had something to say to you.”
“You could have texted.”
“No,” he says. “I couldn’t.”
Florida afternoon coming through the glass doors.
Tape still on his hands. Neither of us moving.
“I was going to tell you,” he says.
“When.”
“When I figured out what to do about it.”
“Have you.”
“No.”
I stand there with that.
Six flights of stairs to say he doesn’t have an answer. I don’t know what to do with that. I’ve been packing light and moving fast since I was eight years old and nobody — nobody — has ever taken six flights of stairs before.
“Nova—”
“Whatever you decide,” I say. “That’s yours.” The words come out before I can soften them. Maybe because this is the one thing I can give him cleanly.
Not advice. Not pressure. Not a headline.
Just ownership.
I took that from him once, even if he doesn’t know the whole of it yet. Griffin handed me an angle, and I called it reporting because that sounded better than admitting I wanted the byline badly enough to stop asking better questions.
I’m not doing that again. Not with this. Not with him.
He looks at me.
“I wasn’t going to thank you.” His voice is quiet. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I do.”
I look at him standing there with tape on his hands saying it like it’s already settled and I think about Katarina’s name tag and V. North and everything sitting in my chest that he doesn’t know yet and I think —
The guilt doesn’t move like panic.
Panic burns hot and fast. This sits. Heavy. Patient. Like it knows I’m going to carry it until I do the right thing.
And the worst part is that Jax keeps making it harder by being decent. By giving me space. By trusting me with quiet, like I’ve earned it.
By looking at me like there isn’t still something sitting between us. I have to tell him.
Not today.
I can’t keep fucking doing this.
“Okay,” I say.
I go through the door. My phone buzzes at my car. I expect Griffin. It’s Aurora. A photo. Jax at practice. He’s looking toward the press area. The timestamp is right after I left the building.
Her caption: just so you know.
I sit in the driver’s seat. He watched me leave. I put the phone down. Keys in my hand. Engine off. Florida sun doing that thing through the windshield where everything goes too bright and too hot. Katarina brought me coffee this morning.
Katarina Novak.
I didn’t ask her name because asking meant thinking about Griffin, which meant thinking about Tampa, which meant thinking about the name I buried, which meant thinking about Jax’s face if he ever—
I look away.
Apparently I’ve been looking away for months.
And she was right there the whole time.
How did I not—
Okay.
Six flights of stairs.
I’m not going anywhere.
I put the key in.
Take it out.
I showed up here as Nova Shaw every single day. Did the work. Kept my head down. Built something clean with my own hands.
And it still doesn’t matter, because the piece is still out there.
Griffin knows. Katarina is his sister. Jax is standing in the middle of a career decision that could change everything, and I’m sitting in the Cyclones parking lot with the truth sitting heavy in my lap like something I should have handed over already.
I know I have to tell him, but not like this.
Not today, when the Enforcers are already in his head. Not when telling him would turn his decision into my confession. Not when the only clean thing I managed to give him was ownership of something I once helped take away.
One more day.
The lie is small enough to fit behind my teeth.
That’s what scares me most.