Chapter 4
Chosen POV
The locker room was thick with heat, sulfur-bleach steam, and the low-frequency thud of the soundbar hanging over stall twenty-two.
I sat on the wooden bench of stall fourteen with a strip of foam wedged between my teeth, hauling a tight elastic bandage around the lower margin of my right patella.
Ninety-four hours remaining. That was the number stamped in red ink at the top of the compliance sheet Freeman had shoved into my chest at dawn.
Thirteen weeks until the Frozen Four in Lake Placid. Twenty-three weeks until the NHL Draft.
My knee was stiff as cured hickory, the joint capsule burning with an ache that radiated down into the marrow of my shin.
I had spent forty minutes on the upper ice running stationary wrist-shot drills while Vance ran the team through five-on-five forechecking sets, pretending my absence was a maintenance day for a bruised hip.
"Hey, Black."
Knox Davies dropped onto the bench across from mine, a white towel draped over his dripping blond hair. He popped the top on a fifty-gram protein shake, took a long pull, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
"Saw Freeman down by the sports medicine annex before skate," Knox said, his tone casual, laced with that irritating, offhand curiosity he brought to everything outside the rink.
"She was arguing with Sterling’s compliance assistant about equipment budgets.
Girl's got a mouth on her. Sharp as a skate blade. "
My hands stopped on the tape.
"She works for Thorne," I said, my voice coming out flat.
"I know who she works for," Knox countered, leaning his elbows on his knees, watching me with those light, hyper-observant eyes.
"Just saying. Never noticed her around the concourse before. She doesn't hang out around the team lounge like the other trainers. She’s built like a dancer, but walks like she’s ready to cross-check someone into the glass. "
A hot, toxic pressure surged through my chest, hitting my throat with the bitter taste of bile.
My fingers clenched around the roll of elastic bandage until the cardboard tube crushed flat between my knuckles.
The veins along my forearms corded, thick and rigid, the skin stretching tight over the bone.
"Keep your mouth shut about her, Knox," I said.
The words didn't come out as team banter. They came out low, dead, and lethal—the exact register I used when an opposing winger took a run at our goalie after the whistle.
Knox froze. The grin vanished from his face, replaced by a slow, calculating stillness. He lowered the plastic shaker, his gaze tracking from my white knuckles up to my locked jaw.
"Easy, Captain," Knox murmured, his voice dropping below the roar of the showers. "Just an observation."
"Make your observations about the power play," I told him, snapping the end of the tape with a sharp jerk of my wrists. "She’s running my clinical clearance. We don't need compliance sniffing around the roster because you decided to run your mouth in the hallway."
"Right," Knox said slowly, standing up from the bench. He gave me one more lingering, suspicious look before tossing his towel into the laundry bin. "Whatever you say, Chosen."
I sat there in the humidity until the room emptied, my molars grinding together so hard my jaw muscles ached. Knox was my linemate. He was the only guy on this roster who had stood beside me while Julian’s stretcher was wheeled out of the arena three years ago.
He had no business looking at her. He had no business noticing the way she walked.
The thought made my skin prickle with a raw, unreasonable violence that had nothing to do with hockey and everything to do with the fact that my hands still remembered the frantic, racing cadence of her pulse under my thumb.
* * *
At nine-twenty-five, I hauled open the iron fire door of The Vault.
The heavy steel plate dragged against the concrete with a low, metal screech that signaled my arrival.
The humid sixty-four-degree air of the subterranean chamber hit my face, carrying that distinct mixture of wet limestone, chlorine from the immersion tanks, and the sharp, medicinal sting of wintergreen liniment.
Marie was already there.
She was sitting at the narrow industrial utility desk beneath the buzzing halogen strips, her white lab coat draped over the back of her metal chair.
She wore a fitted black athletic long-sleeve, the ribbed cotton clinging to the line of her shoulders and the dip of her waist. Her dark hair was twisted up, pinned haphazardly with a silver clip, leaving the pale, slender line of her neck completely exposed to the room.
Her laptop was open, the blue-white glare illuminating the sharp angle of her cheekbones as she typed.
I kicked the door shut with the heel of my sneaker. The iron latch dropped home with a heavy, hollow thud that echoed off the stone walls, cutting off the rest of Carver University.
She didn't jump. She didn't look up from the screen. Only the sudden, rigid locking of her spine told me she had registered the sound.
"You're five minutes early," she said, her fingers continuing their rapid, precise dance across the keyboard. "Session four. Closed-chain kinetic stabilization and hamstring co-contraction. Take off the brace."
I didn't move toward the high examination table.
Instead, I walked straight to the utility desk, my sneakers squeaking against the damp concrete. With every step, the space inside the stone room seemed to contract, shrinking until the air felt thin, heavy, and hot.
I stopped beside her chair. The scent of her hit me—cold rain, clean laundry, and a faint trace of peppermint that made my ribs constrict.
"You like ordering me around, don't you, Freeman?" I asked, my voice low and gravelly in the quiet chamber.
"I like keeping my fellowship," she replied, her eyes staying glued to her data charts.
She reached up with her left hand, tucking a loose, dark strand of hair behind her small ear—a quick, nervous gesture that betrayed the flat neutrality of her voice.
"And your compliance depends on following the progression. "
I didn't answer. I pulled the second metal stool out from under the desk, dragged the steel legs across the floor with an intentional, grating screech, and sat down directly across from her.
The utility desk was barely twenty-four inches wide.
I leaned forward, resting my forearms on the cold laminate surface, invading her perimeter until my chest was less than eighteen inches from her shoulders. I deliberately spread my knees, planting my feet on either side of her metal chair, boxing her in beneath the desk.
Her fingers paused on the keys.
She turned her head slowly, her dark eyes meeting mine.
The defiance was there, bright and hard, but beneath it, I saw the rapid dilation of her pupils under the fluorescent tubes.
The pulse point at the base of her throat was jumping against the hollow of her collarbone, frantic as a trapped sparrow.
"You're taking up too much room, Black," she said, her voice dropping into that clipped, defensive register.
"It's a big room, Freeman," I murmured, leaning in another two inches, until I could feel the faint warmth radiating from her skin. "You're the one sitting in the corner."
"I'm sitting at the workstation," she said, closing the laptop with a deliberate, controlled click.
She didn't lean back. She held her ground, her chin tilting up to meet my gaze, refusing to give me the satisfaction of seeing her retreat.
"Roll up the pant leg. We have forty minutes of eccentric loading before I let you into the cold tank. "
"Knox saw you upstairs," I said, the words slipping out before my brain could filter them.
Her eyebrows pulled together, a tiny crease forming between them. "Who?"
"Knox Davies. My right wing." I watched her face, searching for a flicker of recognition, a flush of interest, anything that would justify the cold rage that had knotted in my gut an hour ago. "Said you had a sharp mouth."
She looked at me for three long seconds. Her lips parted slightly, a dry, incredulous breath escaping them.
"I don't care about your teammates, Chosen," she said, using my first name for the first time.
The sound of it on her tongue was rough, unfamiliar, and hit my central nervous system like an open flame against dry cedar.
"I don't care what they see, and I don't care what they talk about in the showers.
Now move your legs so I can get the electrodes. "
* * *
She reached across the narrow desk to grab the digital muscle stimulator from the metal tray beside my elbow.
Her movement was too fast, too aggressive. As she leaned forward, her bare knee shifted beneath the desk, colliding hard against the inside of my right thigh.
The impact was sharp, a direct press of bone and muscle through our athletic gear.
Neither of us moved.
The breath caught in her throat with a soft, audible hitch.
She froze, bent over the laminate surface, her face less than six inches from mine.
I could see the tiny gold flecks in her dark irises, could see the individual lashes framing her eyes, could feel the hot, ragged rhythm of her breathing against the rough skin of my chin.
I didn't pull my leg back.
Instead, I flexed my quadriceps, pressing my thigh firmly against the side of her knee, pinning her leg between mine and the steel support bar of the desk. The heat of her burned through my sweatpants, searing into my skin.
"Chosen," she whispered, her voice cracking on the syllable.
"You're touching me, Freeman," I rasped. My voice sounded thick, ruined, stripped of every ounce of detachment.
"You're blocking the drawer," she said, but she didn't try to pull her leg away. Her hand was resting on the desk, her fingers splayed against the cold surface, the antique silver signet ring on her pinky pressed flat against the wood.
I reached out with my right hand, moving with slow, deliberate intent.
I didn't grab her. I planted my heavy, calloused palm flat on the desk, an inch from hers, my taped knuckles brushing against the side of her little finger.
The contrast was absurd—my hand was twice the size of hers, scarred and thick from a decade of bare-knuckle hockey fights, while hers was pale, delicate, and trembling with a fine, uncontrollable vibration.
"You tell me to back off," I whispered, watching her mouth. Her bottom lip was dry, parted, slick where she had bitten it a moment ago. "Tell me to get out of your space."
Her dark eyes locked onto mine. She didn't flinch. She didn't drop her gaze. The flush on her cheeks deepened, spreading down the slender column of her neck, disappearing beneath the ribbed collar of her shirt.
"I'm not afraid of you," she breathed, her voice a fragile, defiant thread in the heavy silence.
"You should be," I murmured, leaning down until my mouth was an inch from hers, our breath mingling in the damp air. "Because you're ninety-two hours away from walking out of this basement, Freeman. And I don't think you're going to make it."
She swallowed hard, the movement dragging the skin of her throat tight. Instead of yielding, her hand moved across the wood, her small fingers closing around the edge of my wrist, her thumb pressing directly into the tendon.
"Test me, Black," she whispered, her eyes burning with a dark, reckless fire that made the blood roar in my ears. "See who breaks first."
A dark, savage hunger detonated behind my ribs.
I stared at her defiant, beautiful mouth, feeling the iron grip of her small fingers on my wrist, and realized with sickening, unyielding clarity that I was no longer trying to scare her away.
I was going to pull her into the dark, strip away every piece of clinical armor she owned, and see what it felt like to hear her beg for mercy.