Chapter 5 Cole
COLE
Hell was an ice-cold hockey rink, full of two-hundred-pound men determined to beat Tristan and me to a pulp.
After the first ten minutes of free play turned into a gauntlet, landing both of us on the ice bruised and pissed, Coach blew his whistle and announced we’d be doing lightning drills.
Lightning drills were like suicides, but with increasing distances—red line to goal line to blue line to goal line to center ice to goal line and then working our way all the way across the rink until we were skating goal line to goal line.
Normally, when we were waiting our turn for a drill, we cheered each other on, but today? Fucking silence.
Shame suffused me. Bad enough that Tristan knew. Bad enough that my housemates would if I didn’t do something about my vomit-covered blankets. Fuck.
After an hour, Coach blew his whistle again, the signal to gather around him at center ice. Fuck him. Fuck him and fuck the fact that Tristan and I were taking the heat for hurting Eva when all three of us had done it. The team didn’t know the half of what we’d done. Of what Coach had done.
He looked me in the eye, then Tris, then Massi, then slowly made eye contact with every member of our starting line. “Practice tonight is canceled. Get your heads on straight and come back tomorrow ready to fucking work.”
Massi stiffened. His gaze ping-ponged between me, Tris, and Coach. Fuck. Did Massi know Coach was involved?
Maybe that was for the best. Why should Tristan and I be the only ones to pay the price for Eva’s bullshit?
That perfidious bitch.
She’d fucked with me. She’d fucked with Tristan. She’d fucked with Coach. And now, she was fucking with our team’s championship prospects. Everything in my life that mattered to me, she was fucking up.
I hated how my eyes slid over the bench between drills, looking for her, longing for her, hated the pinch in my chest when she wasn’t there, watching with those bright green eyes as she took notes on our performance.
I hated that I was grateful she wasn’t here to see me hungover and miserable, missing her.
Fucking bitch.
As I left the ice, Massi slammed into me, shoving me into the boards. “Oops,” he said, continuing toward the locker room.
“What the fuck?”
He didn’t turn around.
Tristan wasn’t getting it quite as bad as me.
Deservedly so—I was the one who’d caught him up in Eva’s manipulation.
I was the one who’d dragged him into blackmailing her.
I was the one who’d needed dragging out of bed this morning so I could come to practice and get the shit beat out of me.
Fuck, he’d probably already forgiven her for selling team secrets to my father.
Tristan’s fundamental goodness would have the team forgiving him too—it was just me who deserved their bullshit anyway.
After my shower, I found myself looking for that flash of red hair so I could take Eva to breakfast, make sure she ate something, before I remembered what she’d done.
My phone buzzed.
Delaney
I need a date to an event on Wednesday.
Me
How is that my problem?
Delaney
Our fathers want to announce the engagement.
Fucking great. I’m sure Dad was ecstatic about the shitshow of a weekend.
Oh, he’d find a way to punish me for embarrassing him with my poor performance, but it was one more nail in the coffin of my NHL career, and he’d love that.
The last thing I needed was for my father to announce the engagement I’d only agreed to because he’d threatened Eva.
Delaney
I told my dad it’d be suspicious if we weren’t seen in public a few times first.
Me
Again, not my problem.
The ring of my phone echoed in the empty corridor.
“Don’t be a dick,” Delaney snapped. “I don’t want this either.”
Tristan stepped out of the locker room, and I held up a finger. I hadn’t told Tristan about the engagement yet. Or Eva. Not that it even mattered for the latter. In fact, why was I even doing this if I no longer cared what happened to her or her father?
“Deal’s off,” I snapped at my phone.
“Fuck you, Colton Carter,” she snarled right back. “Do you know what my father’s going to do to me for losing you?”
Fuck. Fuck!
When I didn’t say anything, she continued. “Saturday night. Charity fundraiser. New York City.”
“I have a game on Saturday.”
“In the morning.”
Fuck.
Tristan waited, brows raised.
“Fine.”
“I’ll text you my hotel information so you can pick me up.” And she hung up.
Tristan didn’t say a word, just waited for me to join him to walk out of the sports complex together. Normally, we got breakfast with Eva, and then I went to class while Tristan studied with her until she had class at eleven.
“I don’t want breakfast,” I said, my voice embarrassingly sullen.
Tristan raised an eyebrow. “Too fucking bad.” Then, he turned toward a dining hall and not the student union where we used to eat with Eva.
Yeah, he might be pretending everything’s okay, but he didn’t want to face his memories either.
After the longest fucking day of my life, I hit the weight room like a man possessed. Every rep was punishment. Every burn in my muscles was a welcome distraction from the gaping wound in my chest where my heart used to be.
Rory
Where is Eva?
Cole! What the fuck did you do to her?
She didn’t show up to class today.
Eva never missed class. Ever. Not even when we’d kept her up all night, when she could barely walk the next morning, when Tristan and I had marked every inch of her perfect skin—
Stop.
Rory
Why the fuck aren’t you answering my messages?
Because I was trying not to remember the sound Eva made when she came apart between us. Because every time I closed my eyes, I saw her green gaze looking up at me like I’d fucking hung the moon for her, like I deserved her.
Lies. All of it.
My phone rang, an unknown number. I ignored it.
Unknown
This is Sage.
If you don’t pick up, you’re going to regret it.
Sage was the only one of Eva’s friends who truly terrified me. She seemed sweet most of the time, but every once in a while, I got the feeling she’d look just as sweet committing murder and dismembering the body. I called her back before I could think better of it.
“What do you want?”
“Where’s Eva?”
“What the fuck do you mean, where’s Eva?”
“What the fuck do you mean, what the fuck do I mean? She missed all of her classes today.”
All of them?
I’d punished her more than once for choosing academics over everything else, and by everything else, I meant me. Med school was going to be her ticket out of that shithole neighborhood, her father’s redemption, her entire future.
“How the fuck is that my problem?” The words tasted like poison on my tongue, but I forced them out anyway.
“You’re dating her, aren’t you? Was she at practice this morning?”
Dating. If only it were that simple. If only we’d been dating instead of whatever the hell we’d been doing. Using her. Blackmailing her. Falling for her.
Fuck.
“Why are you calling me and not Tristan?”
“Because I’ll feel guiltier about sending him into the river with cement shoes than I will you.”
Wait. Her friends didn’t know we’d broken up? That Eva had betrayed us in the worst way then quit the team?
“I haven’t seen her since she quit.”
“Eva quit? What the fuck did you do to her?”
“Fuck you, Sage.” I hung up, but the damage was done. Worry gnawed at my gut like acid, eating me alive from the inside out.
Where was she?
Me
Have you seen Eva today?
My fingers shook as I typed. Pathetic. Absolutely fucking pathetic that, even now, my first instinct was to check on her.
Tristan
Nope.
Rory hasn’t either.
Me
Sage called. Eva’s MIA.
Tristan
Shit.
She’s not picking up her phone.
Call her.
The thought slammed into me before I could stop it.
No.
My thumb hovered over her number anyway.
Don’t.
But what if she was hurt? What if my father had decided she’d outlived her usefulness? What if she was lying in a ditch somewhere because I’d been too proud to—
She chose him. The reminder should have been enough to kill the desperate need clawing at my chest, the voice screaming at me to find her, protect her, make sure she was safe.
I hit call anyway. Straight to voicemail.
Fuck. Fuck!
No. Stop.
Eva is not my fucking problem.
I repeated it like a mantra as I grabbed my gym bag, as I walked to my car, as I swung by the liquor store on the way home.
Tristan could white knight her.
I was fucking done.