Chapter 22
Chosen POV
The fluorescent light in Garrison Vance’s fourth-floor office hummed at sixty cycles, casting a pale, sterile wash over the three thick scouting dossiers spread across his desk blotter.
Outside the panoramic glass overlooking Sloan Arena, the Adirondack dusk was settling fast, turning the pine ridges above Lake Mistassini into jagged black teeth against a bruised violet sky.
Week eight of the master calendar. Exactly thirty hours of clinical observation left on the compliance sheet in my locker. Seven weeks until the Frozen Four in Lake Placid. Seventeen weeks until the NHL Entry Draft in Nashville.
Vance leaned back in his leather executive chair, tapping a gold-capped pen against the corner of a navy folder bearing the embossed crest of the Vancouver Canucks.
"Vancouver holds the fifth overall pick," Vance said, his voice level, carrying thirty years of collegiate coaching authority.
"Calgary sits at eight. Both general managers called my direct line after your shift telemetry cleared the ECAC compliance audit on Monday. They want private medical screenings during the combine in Buffalo, and Vancouver’s director of player personnel is asking for exclusive pre-draft interview windows. "
He flipped the folder open, revealing my projected rookie cap numbers under Article Nine of the NHL Collective Bargaining Agreement: three-year entry-level contract, maximum base salary of nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars per year, plus three point five million in potential performance bonuses.
Enough money to endow Julian Mercer’s specialized spinal rehabilitation trust for the rest of his natural life. Enough to clear my debt to the Mercer family once and for all.
Two months ago, I would have signed an agreement to play in Siberia if it meant cutting that check. I measured my life by ice time, penalty minutes, and the relentless, mechanical math of restitution.
I looked at the Vancouver dossier. Then I looked at Calgary.
Three thousand miles away. Across an international border. A time zone gap that would put two mountain ranges and four flights between Lake Mistassini and wherever Marie Freeman landed her post-graduate fellowship.
"Tell them no," I said.
Vance’s pen stopped mid-tap.
He didn't move for three seconds. The skin around his eyes pulled tight, his brow furrowing as he stared at me across the desk as if I had just spoken to him in a foreign language.
"Excuse me?" Vance said, his voice dropping an octave.
"Take Vancouver and Calgary off my interview board," I said, my baritone flat, quiet, and steady as an anchor chain. "I am not crossing the border, and I am not playing in Western Canada."
"Are you out of your mind, Chosen?" Vance leaned forward, planting his elbows on the mahogany desk, his face flushing red.
"You are an amateur center with an unhealed grade-two partial MCL tear on your chart.
You don't have the leverage to tell two Canadian original-franchise front offices that you won't take their calls.
If you drop out of the top ten, your guaranteed signing bonus gets cut in half. "
"Then it gets cut in half," I said.
My jaw didn't lock. My pulse didn't spike. My resting heart rate sat at forty-nine beats a minute, an unshakeable, heavy rhythm in my chest.
"Tell Colorado and Boston I’ll do private skates," I continued, holding Vance’s furious gaze without blinking.
"Tell Denver’s scout he can have my full MRI logs from Thorne.
But tell the Canadian clubs my family situation keeps me in the States.
If they draft me anyway, I’ll play out my senior option and walk as an unrestricted free agent. "
Vance stared at me, his mouth parting slightly, the pen slipping between his fingers to rattle against the desk blotter.
"Since when do you care about where you live?" he muttered, his voice hoarse with disbelief. "You lived on an iron cot in the arena basement for two years, Black. You haven't taken a vacation since you stepped on this campus."
I didn't answer him.
Marie’s application for the United States Olympic Training Center fellowship was sitting on the national selection committee’s desk in Colorado Springs. If she won it, she went to the Rockies. If Carver’s regional sports medicine consortium kept her, she stayed in the Northeast corridor.
I was not letting sixteen hundred miles of frozen asphalt dictate whether I could put my hands on her waist at night.
I stood up from the leather chair, zipped my heavy black wool coat to my collar, and pulled my cap down over my brow.
"Give them the medical logs, Coach," I said quietly, turning toward the heavy oak door. "Let them make their bids. But I decide where I go."
* * *
The drive north along the lake took eighteen minutes through fresh gravel and plowed slush.
When I pulled my truck into the private drive of the carriage house, the golden light glowing behind the frosted corner windows took the remaining edge off the day’s practice.
The front porch lights were on. In the gravel beside my garage sat her beat-up silver Honda Civic, the snow brushed cleanly off the rear glass.
I unlocked the heavy timber front door, stepped into the foyer, and kicked the frozen slush from my boots onto the rubber runner.
The scent hit my senses the second the latch engaged—warm peppermint, dried chamomile, citrus shampoo, and the clean, distinct heat of her skin cutting through the cedarwood of the walls.
I had programmed the smart thermostat from my phone in the locker room three hours ago, setting the baseboards to seventy-two degrees so she wouldn't have to pull three blankets over her shoulders while she worked.
I dropped my duffel bag on the bench, stripped off my coat, and walked down the wide-plank pine hallway toward the kitchen.
Marie was sitting on a wooden stool at the granite island.
She wore my heavy dark-green Carver Hockey traveling sweater—the #14 embroidered in black on the left sleeve swallowing her slender frame, the ribbed collar hanging loose enough to expose the pale curve of her right collarbone.
Her reading glasses were pushed up on her nose, her dark hair pinned in a loose, messy knot held by a wooden pencil, three thick biomechanics volumes and a stack of printed force-plate graphs fanned out around her laptop.
A steaming white ceramic mug of black tea sat beside her elbow.
She was so absorbed in her kinematics equations that she didn't hear my bare feet on the hardwood until I reached the back of her stool.
I didn't say a word.
I leaned down, placing my large, warm palms flat against the tops of her shoulders, pressing gently through the thick knit of the sweater.
Her breath hitched in a soft, sudden gasp, but she didn't jump.
The instant her senses registered the heat of my hands, her rigid, scholarly posture gave way.
Her spine curved backward, her head falling back against my chest, her dark eyes looking up at me upside down through the lenses of her glasses.
"You're late," she whispered, a soft, sleepy smile pulling at the corner of her mouth.
"Vance wanted to review film," I lied smoothly, my thumbs finding the tight knots of muscle along the base of her neck, kneading the strain out of her tissue with slow, rhythmic pressure.
A quiet sigh broke from her throat, her eyelids fluttering shut as her head rested heavily against my ribs, right over my heart.
I pulled the second wooden stool around the corner of the island, dragging it close until my knees bracketed hers.
She had her bare feet tucked up under her thighs on the rung of the stool, her toes pale and chilled from the walk from her car. Without asking, I reached down, caught her ankles in my hands, and pulled her feet into my lap.
"Chosen, what are you doing?" she asked, her cheeks flushing pink as she reached for her glasses, pulling them off her face. "I have two chapters of spinal kinematics to summarize before midnight."
"Quiet," I rumbled, my voice thick with gravel.
My large, calloused palms wrapped around the arches of her feet.
My hands were rough, scarred across the knuckles from ten years of bare-knuckle hockey fights, but my touch was unhurried and steady as I began working the chill out of her skin, my thumbs pressing deep into the tight fascia of her soles.
Her breath shuddered on a long, luxurious exhale. Her fingers loosened their grip on her highlighter, the yellow marker rolling across the granite to bump against her laptop.
"You're ruining my focus," she murmured, her eyes drifting shut as her head tilted to the side.
"Good," I said, my thumb tracing the delicate curve of her ankle bone, feeling the steady, calm pulse beneath the skin. "You've been staring at force vectors for nine hours, Marie. Your eyes are bloodshot."
"I have to keep the fellowship metrics clean," she said softly, her voice carrying that quiet, fragile note of exhaustion she only showed when we were behind this locked door.
"If Sterling tries to challenge my academic standing after what happened at the gala, I need my publication drafts to be bulletproof. "
My jaw loosened, the urge to crush Sterling’s throat under my skate blade passing through my blood like a cold current before settling into ice.
"Sterling won't touch you," I said, my voice dropping into that dark, low register that left no room for doubt.
I leaned forward, resting my forearms on the granite, my face inches from hers.
"You think I let just anyone come into my house, put their books on my counter, and wear my jersey?" I murmured, my thumb moving up to stroke the tender line of her jaw, feeling the sudden, breathless hitch in her breathing. "Good girl. Keep talking to me."
Her dark eyes opened, wide and dilated, looking into mine with that raw, defenseless trust that stripped every remaining defense out of my chest.
She leaned across the island, her lips brushing mine in a soft, lingering kiss that tasted of peppermint and warm tea, before resting her forehead against my temple.
* * *
By eight-forty-five, the soft scratch of her pen had stopped entirely.
I sat on the wide leather sofa before the stone fireplace, my right leg stretched out straight to keep the MCL loose, an ice pack resting over the lateral margin.
Marie sat curled against my left side, her head tucked into the hollow between my chest and shoulder, her breathing slow, deep, and rhythmic against the fabric of my thermal shirt.
Her open textbook lay abandoned across her lap, her small hand resting limp against my knee, the antique silver signet ring reflecting the amber embers of the birch logs.
She was out cold.
I didn't move for ten minutes, watching the steady, peaceful rise and fall of her ribs beneath the oversized green wool of my sweater.
The storm from the weekend had passed, but the Adirondack night was dead and bitter outside the panoramic glass, twenty below zero over the frozen expanse of the lake. Inside, the fire threw long, warm shadows across the cedar planks.
Slowly, carefully, I set my tablet on the side table.
I slid my left arm beneath her knees and my right arm around her back, bracing her against my chest as I stood up from the sofa.
Her head rolled into the crook of my neck, a soft, sleepy murmur breaking against my skin, her small fingers clutching blindly at the collar of my shirt before relaxing back into sleep.
She didn't weigh more than a feather against my frame.
I carried her down the dark timber hallway into the master bedroom.
The silver snowlight bathed the platform bed in quiet, muted gray. I lowered her onto the charcoal linen, sliding my arms out from beneath her with deliberate, agonizing gentleness so as not to wake her.
I reached down, pulled the heavy down duvet up to her chin, and tucked the edges around her shoulders to keep the lake draft away from her skin.
A stray dark curl had fallen across her cheekbone.
I reached out, my blunt, scarred thumb brushing the hair back behind her ear, my knuckles lingering against the warm, soft silk of her cheek.
I stood over the bed in the silence of the room, my chest expanding on a slow, heavy breath that tasted of pine and clean winter air.
My entire life had been defined by what I could break, what I could endure, and what I had destroyed on the ice. I had accepted the role of the enforcer because it was the only thing I was good for.
Looking down at her sleeping peacefully in my bed, wearing my name on her sleeve, the truth carved itself permanently into my marrow.
I didn't care about the draft boards. I didn't care about the money, or the banners, or the roar of eight thousand fans in Sloan Arena.
If anyone—Sterling, Halloway, or the entire National Hockey League—tried to stand between me and this woman, I would tear this town down to the foundation stones before I let them touch a single hair on her head.
I leaned down, pressed my lips softly to her temple, and stepped back into the shadows to watch her breathe.