Chapter 36
Ryan POV
The pitch-black silence of the loft was broken only by the freezing rain tapping against the factory glass.
It was two-thirty in the morning, seven days after the final buzzer against Boston University.
The floorboards around my unmade platform bed were a graveyard of neglected mail: unopened priority envelopes from the NHL Central Scouting Bureau, drafted rookie contract summaries from Dan Bradley, and protein bars with their wrappers half-torn.
In the dark corner by the front door, the heavy bronze regional championship trophy lay on its side against the baseboards like a discarded piece of rusted scrap metal.
I sat on the edge of the mattress, stripped to a pair of worn grey sweatpants, my bare feet planted flat on the cold pine.
My cheekbones were hollowed out beneath seven days of dark, ragged stubble.
The deep contusion along my left ribs had faded to an ugly, sickly yellow-green, and my left foot throbbed with a persistent, gnawing ache that went ignored.
I hadn't slept more than ninety consecutive minutes in a week.
Every time I closed my eyes, the service tunnel opened up behind my eyelids, and I saw her face.
I saw the light leave her amber eyes. I heard the exact second her heart broke beneath my words.
My right hand was clenched into a rigid, bloodless fist against my thigh.
Inside my grip, the jagged teeth of the small brass key to unit 3B were biting deep into the calloused meat of my palm. The metal was freezing cold, but it felt like a coal burning through my flesh.
The air in the room was starved of oxygen.
Every time I drew a breath, the faint, phantom trace of her almond shampoo and crushed winter mint lingered on the charcoal pillows beside me, scraping down into my lungs like ground glass.
You were the biggest mistake of my life.
The memory of my own voice tore through my skull with the sickening violence of a skate blade slicing tendon.
I had thought I was protecting myself. I had convinced myself that by striking first, by crushing the knife before it could slide between my ribs, I was surviving the only way an enforcer knew how.
Instead, I had turned my own home into a mausoleum.
* * *
The deadbolt on the front door clicked.
The brass mechanism gave with a sharp, violent snap that vibrated through the quiet apartment.
The heavy oak door flew open, slamming against the interior brick wall with a concussive bang that shook the transom windows.
Knox Mercer stepped into the loft.
He wore his unzipped team parka, his blonde hair plastered to his forehead with freezing rain, holding a heavy black laptop under one arm and a silver thumb drive in his fist. He didn't look like the easygoing winger who cracked jokes in the dressing room; his jaw was locked into an unyielding line of pure, white-hot fury.
Knox hit the overhead light switch.
The sudden glare of four halogen track lamps flooded the dark room in a blinding, sterile blaze.
My optic nerves screamed in pain, my vision blurring as I raised a bruised forearm against the light. "Get out of my apartment, Knox."
My voice sounded like it had been dragged through gravel, cracked and ruined from days of silence.
Knox didn't answer. He crossed the hardwood in heavy, stomping strides, kicked a cardboard box out of his path, and slammed the laptop down onto the dark granite island with enough force to crack the casing.
"Get off that damn bed, Ryan," Knox commanded, his voice shaking with a dangerous, lethal rage. "Get up and look at this screen right now."
"I told you to leave," I growled, not moving from the mattress.
Knox crossed the floor, grabbed the collar of my sweatpants with both hands, and hauled my two hundred and twenty pounds off the edge of the bed by sheer leverage, shoving me toward the kitchen island.
"Look at it, you arrogant, blind son of a bitch!" Knox snarled, pointing a shaking finger at the glowing monitor. "Look at what you did!"
My gaze dropped to the screen.
The display was split into three windows.
Window one was an official forensic report from the university’s network security division, signed by the Dean of Academic Integrity. Dr. Albright had demanded a root-level cryptographic audit of the biomechanics server on Sunday morning.
The digital trace logs were highlighted in bright crimson.
Nylah’s administrative credentials hadn't been used from her laptop.
Her session token had been cloned from an external IP address registered to an executive corporate suite in downtown Boston—the private holding company of Arthur Vance.
Julian Vance had physically copied her authentication key from an unlocked lab terminal during the Winter Gala.
Nylah hadn't leaked a single byte of my data.
Window two was a silent surveillance video feed from the third-floor reading carrel of the Science Library, timestamped eight-forty-five on Friday morning.
I watched the screen.
Arthur Vance sat across from Nylah, sliding that thick manila dossier between their hands.
I watched Nylah—pale, small, shivering inside her heavy coat—look at the blackmail file.
And then I watched her stand up. I watched her chin lift in that fierce, beautiful defiance I knew better than my own name.
She shoved the dossier straight back into the billionaire trustee's chest, pointed a finger in his face, and mouthed words that made Vance’s jaw clench in humiliated panic.
She hadn't surrendered to his threats. She had threatened to burn Vance to the ground to protect my draft.
"Now look at the last one," Knox whispered, his voice cracking on the cold air.
Window three was an official transmittal slip from the United States Olympic Committee in Colorado Springs, dated three weeks ago.
It was a formal declination letter.
Signed by Nylah Collins.
She had rejected the doctoral fellowship. She had turned down the Olympic residency, requesting that her research stipend be transferred back into the university's general fund so she could remain in Maine after graduation.
She had given up Colorado for me.
"She walked into that arena tunnel on Saturday to tell you she loved you," Knox said, every word hitting my sternum like an iron slug. "She went there to tell you that Vance was trying to blackmail her, and that she wasn't going to let him touch your career."
The room tilted.
The blood in my veins turned to liquid nitrogen, freezing the marrow in my bones.
"She withdrew from St. Jude on Monday morning, Ryan," Knox whispered, his voice thick with a disgust that made my ribs ache. "She packed her life into four boxes, wiped her student records, and left. She’s gone. And she didn't take a single damn thing with her."
* * *
The silence in the kitchen was absolute.
Knox reached down, snapped the laptop shut, and picked it up off the counter.
He looked at me one last time, his blue eyes cold, empty of the brotherhood we had shared for three seasons on the first line.
"You broke her, Cap," Knox said quietly. "She was the only person in this miserable town who was ready to bleed for you, and you treated her like trash."
He turned on his heel, walked out into the drafty stairwell, and pulled the heavy oak door shut behind him.
The latch caught with a soft, final click.
My legs gave out.
The strength drained from my quadriceps in a single, devastating fraction of a second. My massive frame collapsed, my knees slamming into the dark pine floorboards with a violent, concussive crack that rattled through the bones of my skull.
I didn't try to stand.
I fell forward, pressing my forehead flat against the freezing wood of the floor, my hands curling tightly over the small brass key clutched against my sternum.
I squeezed the metal so hard the jagged teeth cut through the skin of my palm, warm blood trickling down between my knuckles onto the floorboards.
A dry, ragged sob tore from the center of my chest.
It was a raw, animal sound of pure devastation—the first time my eyes had burned with tears since the afternoon Leo’s spine had shattered on that Michigan pond.
She had given up her fellowship for me.
She had looked Arthur Vance in the eye and dared him to ruin her to keep my name clean. She had walked through a freezing nor'easter to stand by my side in the tunnel, carrying nothing but love in her hands.
And I had looked into her face, called her a calculating parasite, and told her she was the biggest mistake of my life.
The four-year wall of defensive arrogance, the toxic conviction that I was a broken monster who had to strike first to survive—it all disintegrated into poisonous, suffocating ash.
My draft ranking. My signing bonus. The regional championship trophy sitting in the corner.
It was all garbage. It was meaningless, hollow rot that couldn't buy back a single second of the warmth I had murdered with my own teeth.
Slowly, dragging air into my burning lungs, I pushed my palms flat against the bloody floorboards.
I rose to my feet.
My limbs were shaking, but the fog in my skull was gone.
The self-pity was dead. The fear was dead.
My slate-grey eyes locked onto the dark window overlooking the harbor, cold, clear, and lethal with an unhinged, scorched-earth certainty.
I didn't care about the NCAA. I didn't care about the NHL draft. I didn't care if I had to burn my own name to the ground, break every bone in Arthur Vance’s face, and tear this country apart piece by piece until I found her.
I was going to find Nylah Collins.
And I was going to spend the rest of my life on my knees earning the right to breathe her air again.