Chapter 7
Nylah POV
Above the high oak carrels of the third-floor science annex, the wind was driving pellets of freezing sleet against the diamond-paned glass. The radiator beneath the window ledge shrieked, spitting a dry plume of steam that smelled of rusted iron and scorched dust.
My eyes burned, the surface of my corneas dry and gritty from six hours of staring at raw hexadecimal code.
On the screen, highlighted in flashing crimson, sat the notice from the NCAA Division I Compliance and Eligibility Portal:
AUDIT TRIGGER: FILE #884-OWEN, R. ANOMALOUS TELEMETRY REPORTED. IMMEDIATE CROSS-REFERENCE MANDATE. SUBMISSION WINDOW CLOSES: 02:00 AM EST. FAILURE TO RECONCILE WILL RESULT IN ADMINISTRATIVE WITHDRAWAL OF ATHLETIC CLEARANCE AND RESEARCH SPONSORSHIP.
Someone had filed an expedited inquiry. Julian Vance’s family had three booster lawyers on the athletic advisory board, and their fingerprints were all over the sudden audit.
If I couldn't cross-reference fourteen days of biometric output against forty-two distinct shift logs before the server locked down at two in the morning, Ryan was benched for Friday’s game against Vermont.
And my research grant—the funding that paid my tuition and secured my recommendation to Colorado Springs—would be frozen pending an academic misconduct tribunal.
My fingers hovered over the keyboard, shaking so hard I couldn't hit the backspace key cleanly.
The heavy oak door of the annex creaked open.
Heavy, deliberate boot steps echoed across the parquet floor. I didn't have to look up to know who it was. The air in the narrow room shifted instantly, charged with that familiar scent of cold rain, crushed cedar, and the hot-metal tang of sharpened steel.
Ryan dropped his black duffel bag onto an empty table with a dull, concussive thud. His hair was damp from the storm outside, dark strands clinging to his forehead, his jacket glistening with melting sleet.
He took one look at my face, then at the crimson banner flashing across my screen.
"Vance's uncle," he said, his voice flat, devoid of surprise.
"The compliance portal moved the certification deadline up by twelve days," I whispered, my voice hitching as a frantic tremor locked up my diaphragm.
"The raw files from the server are corrupted.
The timestamps from the arena cameras don't match the telemetry logs from Sub-Level Two. I have to manually recalibrate three hundred thousand data points in four hours. It’s impossible. I can't—"
"Collins."
He was beside me before I could finish the sentence. He stripped off his wet jacket, tossing it over the back of an oak chair, and planted his right palm flat on the wood desk right beside my keyboard.
His hand was huge, his bruised knuckles scarred and rough, his fingers splayed wide. The heat rolling off his skin cut straight through the freezing draft coming off the window.
"Take your hands off the keys," he commanded, his gravelly baritone dropping into a calm, immovable register that acted like an anchor dropped into a storm.
"You don't understand," I said, my throat tightening as the panic pressed hard against my ribs. "If this isn't uploaded, you don't skate Friday, and my fellowship recommendation is dead."
"I understand fine," Ryan murmured, leaning down until his face was level with mine. The pale grey of his eyes was steady, fixed on my dilated pupils. "You're spiraling. Stop."
He reached out, his thick fingers closing gently around my right wrist. He didn't pull; he simply held my hand still, his thumb resting firmly against the tendon until the frantic twitching in my fingers subsided under the heavy pressure of his grip.
"We have four hours," he said, pulling an oak rolling chair up right beside mine, so close the armrests knocked together. "We don't need twelve days. Tell me what needs to be fixed."
* * *
The annex shrank down to the circle of green light cast by the brass desk lamp.
Ryan rolled his grey thermal sleeves up to his elbows, exposing forearms corded with muscle and crisscrossed with faint white friction burns from hockey pads. He dragged a stack of yellow legal pads toward himself, uncapped a black pen with his teeth, and pointed at the split-screen monitor.
"Show me the first corrupt block," he said.
"The third period against Maine," I said, my voice steadying as the rhythm of work took over.
"The sensor clocked an abnormal lateral force spike on your left side at forty-eight minutes.
The algorithm flagged it as an acute joint collapse because there's no official hit logged in the official box score. "
Ryan leaned closer, his shoulder pressing against mine. The contact was solid, unyielding, his body heat soaking through the knit wool of my cream sweater.
He squinted at the timestamp on the screen.
"That wasn't a joint collapse," he said, not a single trace of hesitation in his voice.
"Forty-eight minutes, twelve seconds. Faceoff in our defensive zone.
Their center hooked his stick through my left skate blade on the draw.
I kicked out to stay on my feet, planted the outside edge, and drove him into the circle. "
I stared at him, my pen hovering over the log. "You remember the exact twelve-second mark from a game two weeks ago?"
"I remember every second I’m on the ice, Collins." He looked at me, his eyes dark in the green lamplight. "I remember who was on the ice, where the puck was, and how many inches of blade I had on the ice. Put the notation in. Secondary stick interference. Offset load."
I typed the parameters in. The crimson error line on the screen flickered, turned yellow, and cleared into a clean green checkmark.
A breath left my lungs in a sharp, involuntary rush.
"Next," Ryan said.
We fell into a brutal, synchronized cadence. There was no posturing. No sharp retorts or territorial warnings. The hostile friction that had defined every second since October was redirected into a single, high-velocity channel.
He knew the physical reality; I knew the mechanical formulas.
When the code lagged, he reached across the desk without a word, sliding his stainless-steel thermos of hot black coffee in front of my hand.
When my head dropped, my neck cramping from the glare, his thick knuckles brushed against the corner of my laptop, tilting the screen back three inches to cut the reflection.
Under the desk, his long legs stretched out into my space. His right knee rested against the side of my leg, heavy and warm through my dark denim.
Neither of us moved away. The constant, grounding pressure of his leg against mine kept the fog of exhaustion from swallowing my thoughts.
"Period two against Boston College," I muttered, rubbing my gritty eyes with the back of my wrist. "Twelve-minute mark.
You took eighty pounds of pressure on the left ribs, but your acceleration increased by four miles per hour immediately after the collision.
The compliance software is reading it as a hardware malfunction. "
Ryan let out a low, dry sound that was almost a laugh.
"That wasn't a malfunction," he said, his pen scratching rapidly across the legal pad as he calculated the shift duration. "That was Davies getting caught out of position on the breakout. I had to sprint seventy feet to cut off their winger before he got inside the hash marks."
He paused, his hand stilling on the paper. For a fraction of a second, that deep, haunted shadow crossed his face—the same darkness I had seen when he spoke to his father in the basement.
"I don't let people fall behind me," he added, his voice dropping an octave, so low it barely carried over the hissing radiator. "Not on the ice."
I stopped typing. I looked at the hard, unyielding set of his jaw, at the faint white scar cutting through his eyebrow, and felt a dull, heavy ache settle right beneath my ribs.
"Put the code in, Nylah," he murmured, not looking up from his paper. "Clock’s ticking."
* * *
The digital clock in the lower corner of the screen read: 01:56 AM.
My index finger hovered over the blue submission key. My lungs felt flat, empty of air, my chest tight as the progress wheel spun against the grey portal interface.
Processing...
Validating cryptographic hash...
A sharp, chime sounded from the laptop speakers. The screen flashed bright white, then resolved into a solid green slate:
AUDIT CLEARED. STATUS: FULL COMPLIANCE. ATHLETIC ELIGIBILITY CONFIRMED. RESEARCH PROTOCOL VALIDATED.
The breath left my body all at once.
The adrenaline that had been keeping my spine rigid for four straight hours evaporated in a single, devastating wave, leaving my limbs feeling as heavy as lead.
My forehead dropped back against the curved oak headrest of the chair.
My eyelids fluttered shut, stinging with exhaustion, my hands falling limp onto the desk blotter.
"We did it," I whispered, the words barely carrying past my lips.
Beside me, Ryan didn't move.
The heavy, rhythmic sound of his breathing filled the quiet carrel. The sleet had stopped, replaced by the soft, muffled hush of heavy snow falling against the dark glass outside.
My mechanical pencil rolled off the edge of the notebook, sliding across the polished oak toward the floor.
On pure reflex, my right hand shot out to catch it.
At the exact same instant, Ryan reached down.
His fingers didn't hit the pencil. They closed over mine.
The contact was blistering, sudden, and heavy. His large palm was rough with calluses, his skin burning hot against my ice-cold fingers. Instead of pulling away, Ryan’s hand shifted, slow and deliberate, sliding down until his broad fingers wrapped entirely around my wrist.
He lifted his hand, bringing my arm up between us on the desk, turning my palm upward.
His thick thumb slid into the soft hollow at the base of my wrist, pressing gently against the delicate skin right over my radial artery.
My heart hitched. A violent, erratic flutter leaped against his thumb, hammering against the calloused pad of his skin like an electric pulse.
The room went dead silent.
Neither of us pulled away. I couldn't move. The air in my throat felt thick, hot, impossible to swallow. I opened my eyes, my gaze traveling up the thick, corded muscles of his forearm, past the broad expanse of his shoulders, until I collided with his face.
Ryan was watching me.
His features were cast in deep green shadows from the lamp, his pale grey eyes wide, dilated, tracking the rise and fall of my collarbone beneath the loose knit of my sweater.
He leaned closer, closing the few inches of cold air left between us, his massive frame blocking out the room until there was nothing left in my universe but the heat radiating from his chest.
His rough breath stirred the loose wisps of hair against the side of my neck, sending a sharp, involuntary tremor through the base of my skull.
"Why are you still looking at me like I'm the enemy, Nylah?" he whispered.
His gravelly voice was barely louder than the hum of the heater, rough with exhaustion and something dark, dangerous, and raw. His thumb stroked once over my racing pulse point, a slow, possessive drag that made the skin along my collarbone burn with a sudden, suffocating heat.
My lips parted, but no words came out.
The hatred we’d used to keep each other at bay was gone, burned away in the dark of the annex, leaving only the terrifying, unvarnished truth of what was sitting between us on the desk.