Chapter 34
Dual POV
Fourteen seconds remained on the scoreboard clock.
The score was locked at two. My skates dug into the chewed, blood-flecked ice of the defensive zone, my quads burning with pure lactic acid as Boston University’s top line drove the puck across our blue line.
The pain in my left foot was a white-hot spike driving straight through the navicular bone with every crossover. I didn't care. I wanted the bone to shatter. I wanted the agony to rip the memory of her face out of my skull.
Their center tried to cut wide toward the circle.
I lowered my shoulder, leaning my two hundred and twenty pounds into the collision, and drove him through the dasher boards with enough violent force to crack the plexiglass stanchion. The puck squirted loose along the kick plate.
I gathered the vulcanized rubber on the forehand, accelerated through the neutral zone, and crossed their blue line alone.
Two defensemen converged, their sticks slashing across my forearms.
I didn't pass. I dragged the puck between my skates, loaded three hundred pounds of torque into the composite shaft, and unloaded a snapshot toward the top right corner.
CLANG.
The puck dented the iron crossbar, dropped straight down across the red goal line, and hit the back netting.
The arena horn shrieked.
The final buzzer blared, drowning in the sudden, concussive roar of twenty thousand fans leaping to their feet.
Gold and navy confetti exploded from the iron rafters in thick, swirling blizzards. Knox Mercer leaped onto my back, his arms locking around my neck as the entire varsity bench poured over the boards, piling onto the ice in a screaming, chaotic heap of gloves and helmets.
Coach Vance shoved the heavy bronze regional championship trophy into my hands, his face flushed red with victory, cameras flashing in blinding white bursts around my head.
I stood in the center of the ice, holding twenty pounds of sculpted metal.
The roar of the crowd was a dead, hollow vacuum of white noise. The cold bronze felt like lead weights in my gloves. The blood from a split on my lower lip trickled into my mouth, tasting of rust and bitter ash.
I had won the game.
I had locked down the Frozen Four seed, secured the top-five draft position, and guaranteed Leo’s medical trust for the next ten years.
And every single piece of my soul was dead.
I shoved the trophy into Knox’s chest, turned my back on the television cameras, and skated off the ice into the dark runway.
In the service corridor beneath the bleachers, away from the screaming fans, I ripped my helmet off and slammed my armored back against the cold fieldstone wall, gasping for air that felt like pure poison in my lungs.
* * *
The trophy presentation was a muffled, vibrating hum through the concrete ceiling of the private exit corridor.
I stood in the dim shadows beside the facilities storage bay, shivering inside my heavy wool coat.
My right hand was pressed flat and motionless over the lower curve of my abdomen, holding my coat tightly across my ribs to shield the microscopic life growing beneath my heart.
In the interior pocket over my breast, the linen-wrapped test stick felt like a branding iron burning through the wool.
A sharp, sour nausea churned in my stomach, forcing my throat to contract on a dry swallow.
The heavy fire exit door down the hall clicked open.
Ryan walked around the corner.
He had stripped off his gloves and helmet, holding them loosely in his right hand.
His navy game jersey was torn along the left shoulder seam, soaked with sweat, his hair plastered to his skull in dark, jagged strands.
A thin ribbon of crimson was drying in the stubble along his jawline from a deep split on his bottom lip.
He saw me, and his boots stopped dead on the rubber matting.
The physical impact of his stare was an executioner's blade. His face was an unyielding wall of grey granite, his slate-grey eyes dead, blackened craters of absolute contempt that made my vision blur with sudden, sharp tears.
I held my ground.
I drew a slow, agonizing breath through my nose, forcing my spine to stay straight, refusing to let him see the violent trembling in my knees.
"Congratulations on the championship, Captain," I said.
My voice came out steady, cold, and stripped of tears.
A bitter, cruel smirk twisted the corner of Ryan’s bleeding mouth.
"You're still in this building, Collins?
" he rasped, his voice dropping into a low, venomous register that scraped against the concrete walls.
"The game ended fifteen minutes ago. The bus terminal is across town.
Or did you wait around in the dark to see if you could get my signature on another medical disclosure? "
The words cut straight into my breastbone, but I didn't flinch.
"I stayed to see if you had the courage to look me in the eye when you finished burning my life to the ground," I replied, holding his gaze.
Ryan took two heavy, grounded strides toward me, towering over my frame, his body heat rolling off his damp pads in an oppressive, suffocating wave.
"Your life?" he snarled softly, his face dipping until his rough, shadowed jaw was inches from mine.
"You never had a life that wasn't calculated for leverage, Nylah. You used my bed to get past my defense. You logged my stress fracture so you could hand it to Vance’s board, and you bought yourself a fellowship in Colorado with my draft contract. "
A dry, sickening laugh scraped out of his throat.
"You played me for an idiot," he whispered, every word a serrated knife twisting in my ribs. "You looked at a damaged enforcer and saw an easy mark. You were a mistake I should have cut loose the first morning you stepped into that basement."
My heart collapsed inward on a silent, shuddering exhale.
Every nerve in my body screamed to unzip my coat, pull the positive test from my pocket, and throw it into his face. To scream that I was carrying his baby, that Arthur Vance had tried to blackmail me, that I had walked through an ice storm ready to sacrifice my fellowship to stand by his side.
I looked into his eyes.
There was nothing there. Only the unshakeable, toxic conviction of a man who believed he was born to be betrayed.
If I told him now, he would see it as another transaction. He would believe I was using a child to trap him, to secure an apology, to salvage my standing.
My child would never be an extortion chip.
My baby would never be an unwanted burden thrown at the feet of a man who looked at its mother with disgust.
* * *
I didn't answer his accusations.
I didn't plead. I didn't offer a single word of defense.
Slowly, deliberately, my left hand slid into the pocket of my wool coat.
My fingers curled around the cold, heavy brass key to unit 3B—the key he had cut for me on Tuesday morning, the key to the sanctuary where he had held me in the dark and promised to put my name on his future.
I pulled the key from my pocket.
I took half a step forward, stepping directly into his perimeter. I reached out, caught his thick, scarred right wrist, and forced his calloused fingers open.
I dropped the brass key into his palm.
The metal clinked softly against the rough calluses of his skin.
Ryan went stone-still. The breath caught in his throat, his dark eyes dropping to the small piece of brass resting on his palm as if it were a live coal burning into his flesh.
I held his gaze, my chin lifted, my hands returning to my sides, my right palm settling flat and protective over my stomach beneath my coat.
"You were terrified that someone would break you, Ryan," I whispered, my voice quiet, clear, and steady as an iron bar. "You spent four years convinced that letting people close would destroy them. But you were wrong."
A single, hot tear broke free from my lash line, tracking silent and scalding down my pale cheek.
"You were the only one who broke anything," I said, every word dropping into the silence like a stone falling into an abyss. "You destroyed the only pure thing you had left in this world."
I paused, looking at the silver scar through his eyebrow one last time.
"Goodbye, Ryan."
I turned my back on him.
I walked down the rubber runner toward the heavy steel fire exit at the end of the service tunnel. My boots made no sound on the matting, my spine held straight, my hands buried deep in my pockets to keep the violent, shuddering tremors in my ribs from showing.
I hit the crash bar with both hands.
The heavy steel door swung wide.
The freezing gale of the coastal blizzard screamed through the opening, driving blinding sheets of white snow across the concrete threshold.
I stepped through into the storm.
The heavy door swung shut behind me, the mechanical latch catching with a hollow, concussive boom that severed the past forever.
Down in the dark, empty corridor, Ryan Owen stood alone under the buzzing halogen lights, staring down at the brass key in his palm as the silence swallowed him whole.