Chapter 31
Nylah POV
The cheap plastic exhaust fan in the ceiling rattled with a rhythmic, vibrating drone that made the bone behind my ear ache.
Outside the frosted, narrow bathroom window of my off-campus flat, the distant hum of municipal snowplows scraped across the asphalt of Wharf Street, accompanied by the muffled, rhythmic blare of game-day traffic heading toward The Foundry.
The regional championship game against Boston University was five hours away.
I sat on the cold hexagonal tiles, my knees pulled tightly against my chest, the heels of my wool socks digging into the grout.
On the white porcelain rim of the sink, resting between my toothbrush and a ceramic soap dish, lay the white plastic test stick.
Beside it, my phone screen was illuminated, the digital stopwatch counting down the final seconds of a three-minute timer:
00:18... 00:17... 00:16...
My mouth tasted of stale tap water, copper, and cold bile.
A sour, spasming nausea was coiled in the pit of my stomach, clenching with every heavy, concussive thud of the pulse hammering against my windpipe.
My arms were wrapped around my shins like vice grips, my fingernails digging through the denim into my kneecaps to keep the fine, violent tremor in my quadriceps from shaking me apart.
Today was Saturday, March 18.
My cycle had been projected for February 26—the morning after the coastal blizzard that had trapped us inside his apartment for forty-eight hours.
When the first sudden wave of morning sickness had hit me in the café on Tuesday, March 14, I had calculated that I was sixteen days late.
Now, four days of agonizing silence later, the calendar stood at twenty days past due.
Twenty days.
In twenty-two years of life, my cycle had never deviated by an hour.
I had spent my entire academic career building an impenetrable fortress of predictive models, honors citations, and empirical precision.
I had structured every hour of my day so that no one—not my father, not the athletic board, not the university trustees—could ever look at my work and find a flaw.
I had mapped my trajectory straight to an Olympic fellowship in Colorado Springs, calculating every risk to ensure I was never vulnerable to someone else's leverage.
And now, every metric, every five-year plan, and every equation had narrowed down to a six-inch plastic wand sitting on the edge of a stained porcelain basin.
Five seconds.
00:04... 00:03... 00:02...
The phone didn't chime. It gave two sharp, violent vibrations that rattled against the ceramic with the finality of a gavel striking wood.
The timer was at zero.
* * *
My limbs felt heavy as waterlogged timber.
I uncoiled from the floor, my palms pressing flat against the freezing hexagonal tiles. My knees shook with an autonomic tremor as I forced myself to stand, my fingers hooking hard over the rolled rim of the sink basin to keep my balance as the horizon tilted by two inches.
I looked down into the digital window.
The display was sharp, black, and definitive:
PREGNANT.
Beneath the word, the small secondary indicator blinked: 2-3 WEEKS.
The room dropped out from beneath my boots.
The air left my lungs in a sharp, strangled wheeze that caught like glass in my throat.
My vision blurred around the perimeter, black spots swimming across my optic nerves as the blood drained from my face in a single, sickening rush.
My hands lost their grip on the porcelain; my hip banged violently against the wooden corner of the vanity as my knees gave out, barely catching my weight against the cabinet door.
Twenty days late.
My right hand moved on pure, unvarnished instinct.
My palm splayed wide, pressing flat and hard against the lower curve of my abdomen, right over the waistband of my jeans.
Beneath the denim, beneath the wool of my sweater, the truth lived in my own flesh.
A life.
The room went dead silent, the rattling exhaust fan fading into a distant, underwater hum.
The initial wave of paralyzing dread didn't vanish, but beneath the terror, something primordial and unyielding rose through my bloodstream, hot as molten iron.
It was his child.
The baby of the boy who had held me on his sofa hours ago, taping composite sticks while promising to put my name on his future.
The baby of the man who had let me wash the blood from his cheekbone, who had crossed out multi-million-dollar draft options in Canada solely to ensure my fellowship dreams remained intact.
The enforcer who had spent four years taking every brutal hit on the ice so other people wouldn't break.
A single, scalding tear broke free from my lower lashes, splashing down onto the plastic display on the counter.
My fingers tightened their grip over my stomach, curving possessively over the microscopic life nestled deep beneath my ribs.
I've got you, his voice echoed in the silence of my memory, low, gravelly, and fierce with protective certainty. I've got you, sweetheart.
The maternal instinct locked into my marrow, burning the hesitation straight out of my chest.
I wasn't just a data analyst fighting an administrative board anymore.
I was the mother of his child, and I would tear down anyone who tried to stand between him and his future.
* * *
I turned the cold tap on full blast.
I cupped the freezing water in my hands, splashing it repeatedly over my burning face, my throat, and the back of my neck until the cold sweat was washed away and my breathing settled into a steady, determined cadence.
I reached for the test stick on the counter.
With hands that were finally steady, I wrapped the white plastic wand inside a clean, folded linen handkerchief from my drawer.
I reached for my heavy dark wool winter coat hanging on the back of the bathroom door, slid the wrapped test into the zippered interior breast pocket over my left ribs, and pulled the zipper shut with a firm, decisive tug.
It rested directly over the heavy, rhythmic pounding of my heart.
I thought of Arthur Vance sitting in the library reading room yesterday, his manicured hands resting on that manila blackmail dossier.
His deadline was eight o'clock this morning.
He expected me to be at the Greyhound station with my suitcases packed, weeping into a paper ticket, scurrying out of Maine like a frightened student who had been caught in an ethics scandal.
He expected me to choose my own academic safety over Ryan's career.
He had calculated every variable—except the fact that I loved Ryan Owen enough to walk straight into the fire.
Ryan had carried the weight of his paralyzed brother for four years. He had taken every check, absorbed every insult, and carried his team to the championship on a fractured rib and a compromised foot.
He wasn't going to take this hit alone.
I pulled on my heavy coat, fastening every single horn button tightly across my lower abdomen, shielding the new life inside me from the winter chill. I wound my dark green wool scarf twice around my throat, pulled on my leather gloves, and grabbed my leather bag.
I unlocked the apartment door and stepped into the dim stairwell.
Outside on the street, the coastal Maine gale was driving thick, horizontal sheets of white snow across the shipyard, but my boots hit the concrete steps with unyielding, immovable purpose.
I was going to The Foundry.
I was going to walk through the private players' entrance, find Ryan in the tunnel before the team took the ice for warmups, hand him the test, and tell him the truth about our child.
We would take Vance's blackmail file, walk into the Athletic Director's office together, and burn the threat to the ground as an unbreakable unit.
I shoved open the heavy exterior glass doors of the building and stepped out into the freezing storm, heading toward the arena—wholly blind to the catastrophic explosion that had already been detonated inside the varsity dressing room twenty minutes before I took my first step into the snow.