Chapter 33
Nylah POV
Sixty feet above my head, the floorboards of the arena bowl vibrated with the rhythmic, concussive thunder of twelve thousand pairs of boots stomping against the bleachers.
The sound rolled through the steel support beams like artillery fire, punctuated by the brass blare of the university pep band playing the fight song.
I shoved through the heavy security crash gate, holding up my gold administrative credential badge without breaking stride.
My lungs pulled in air that tasted of freezing ammonia, damp wool, and diesel exhaust.
Beneath the heavy fabric of my dark winter coat, pressed tight against my left ribs, my gloved fingers were clenched around the linen handkerchief in my pocket.
Inside the cloth, the plastic test stick was an unyielding brand against my skin.
The digital word—PREGNANT—was burned into the back of my eyelids, repeating with every wild, erratic thud of my heart against my sternum.
A sharp, cold wave of nausea churned in the pit of my stomach, threatening to send me to my knees on the rubber runner.
Just keep moving, I told myself, my knuckles white inside my pocket. Reach the runway. Find Ryan before the team takes the ice.
I rounded the corner past the auxiliary hydrotherapy room.
He was standing forty feet away near the fire exit.
Ryan was fully suited in his game armor, towering in his navy blue and gold St. Jude varsity sweater. The white stitched 'C' sat over his left breastbone, his skates laced tight, his composite stick gripped in his right hand, his helmet tucked beneath his left arm.
"Ryan!"
The name tore from my throat in a breathless, ragged gasp of pure relief.
"Ryan, thank God. I need to tell you—"
He turned.
The relief died in my chest like a match dropped in snow.
The tender, fierce protector who had held me on his sofa hours ago, who had kissed the tears from my cheeks while promising to put my name on his future, was gone.
Standing on the rubber matting was an executioner carved out of cold, dead granite.
His face was completely drained of color, his jaw clenched so violently the corded tendons in his neck stood out like steel cables. His slate-grey eyes were dead, blackened craters of unvarnished hostility and ruined, bleeding grief that froze the air straight out of my lungs.
My boots stopped dead on the rubber runner.
* * *
The silence in the concrete corridor was deafening, suffocating the roar of the arena above.
I took a hesitant, trembling step forward, my left hand coming out on pure reflex, reaching for the thick wool of his navy sleeve. "Ryan... what's wrong? What happened?"
Ryan flinched back.
He recoiled as if my fingers were coated in arsenic, taking two sharp, backward strides on his skate blades. The carbon-steel edges shrieked against the concrete bordering the rubber runner, putting four feet of freezing air between our bodies.
"Don't touch me," he rasped.
The voice was stripped of every trace of human warmth—low, gravelly, and dripping with a venom so concentrated it hit my face like a physical blow.
His right gloved hand came up from his side.
In his fist was a mangled, crushed wad of white paper.
He threw it at my boots.
The crumpled ball hit the rubber matting, bouncing once before rolling open against the toe of my leather boot.
My gaze dropped.
Staring up from the creased cardstock was the embossed seal of the United States Olympic Committee. Beneath it, printed in bold, clinical black type, was my name, my administrative user login, and the header: ADDENDUM TO COMPLIANCE INQUIRY: TELEMETRY ANOMALY CONFIRMATION.
My breath trapped itself behind my teeth.
"How much did they pay you, Collins?" Ryan rumbled, his voice dropping into a lethal, quiet register that made the hair on the back of my arms stand up. "Did the Olympic committee write a check, or did Vance just promise to clear your doctoral fellowship if you handed over my medical files?"
The corridor tilted violently on its axis.
A high-pitched, deafening ringing screamed behind my eardrums, drowning out the chanting crowd above.
"What?" The word left my throat in a cracked, reedy wheeze. "Ryan, no—that's a forgery! Arthur Vance came to the library yesterday! He had photographs of us—he threatened to file an ethics complaint with the draft bureau if I didn't resign! I didn't submit that—"
"Stop lying!"
The roar wasn't loud, but it was saturated with a concussive, violent agony that rattled the pipes overhead.
Ryan took a single, terrifying step forward, his massive, armored chest blotting out the fluorescent lights, his pale eyes burning with a ruined fury that made my knees shake beneath my jeans.
"Your digital authentication code is on the transmittal," he snarled, every syllable a serrated blade tearing through my ribs. "Your private email was sent to Vance at four yesterday afternoon. You told the board that your evaluation of Athlete Number Four was complete."
He let out a dry, sickening laugh that scraped against his teeth.
"You played me," he whispered, leaning down until his shadow swallowed me whole.
"You used my bed to get past my armor. You needed an undocumented fracture to prove your little predictive algorithms worked, and you traded my medical records to buy your ticket to Colorado.
Your father raised an exceptional little transaction artist."
The mention of my father hit me with the force of an open-ice hit.
Cold bile surged into the back of my throat, my vision blurring with black spots as the room spun in nauseating circles.
"Ryan, look at me," I pleaded, my voice breaking into a ragged, desperate sob as my hands came up to clutch my coat. "I love you. I would never sell your career. I came here to tell you—"
"You don't love a single damn thing that doesn't come with a grade attached to it," he growled, the words dripping with a contempt so absolute it turned my blood to slush.
* * *
My right hand moved on pure, desperate autonomic instinct.
My fingers pressed hard against the lower curve of my abdomen, clutching the thick wool of my coat over the microscopic life sheltered beneath my ribs.
Tell him, my soul screamed into the dark. Unzip your pocket. Hand him the test. Tell him he's going to be a father.
My lips parted, but my windpipe seized.
The words died in my throat, choked by the sheer, terrifying void in his eyes.
He didn't just doubt me. He looked at me with pure, unvarnished revulsion. The Core Wound he carried—the unshakeable conviction that he was a broken monster who deserved to be betrayed—had consumed every memory of our time together.
If I told him now, if I pulled that plastic stick from my pocket while he was looking at me like a parasite, he wouldn't see a miracle. He would see another transaction. He would believe I was using a pregnancy to trap him, to extort his forgiveness, to save my own reputation.
The realization turned my bones to ash.
Down the runway, the arena warning horn blared—a long, brutal mechanical shriek that signaled the sixty-second countdown to puck drop.
The double doors to the ice corridor flew open with a deafening crash.
Coach Vance and Knox Mercer stepped through the threshold, their helmets on, their sticks raised.
"Owen!" Coach Vance barked, his voice echoing off the concrete. "On the ice! Right now!"
Ryan didn't turn his head.
He stepped directly into my perimeter, the heavy wool of his navy jersey brushing the front of my coat.
He leaned down. His rough, shadowed jaw was inches from mine, his breath hot, ragged, and smelling of cold copper and absolute ruin.
"We are done, Nylah," he whispered, the gravelly rasp in his voice dead, flat, and hollow as an open grave. "You were the biggest mistake of my life. Pack your things and be out of my apartment by the time this game ends. If I ever see your face in my perimeter again, I will let Vance bury you."
He didn't wait for an answer.
He pushed off his skate blades, rounding my frozen frame, and walked down the rubber runway toward the ice.
The double doors swung wide.
The thunderous, concussive roar of twenty thousand screaming fans detonated like a bomb, swallowing his broad, armored shoulders in a blinding sea of white arena light.
The doors slammed shut.
The heavy latch caught with a brutal, metallic boom.
I stood alone in the dim, freezing service corridor.
My knees gave out.
I hit the rubber matting, my hands curling tightly over the lower swell of my stomach, my forehead dropping against the cold fieldstone wall as a silent, shattering sob tore the heart straight out of my chest.