Chapter 36
Chosen POV
The darkness inside the carriage house was twenty degrees colder than the freezing rain ticking against the panoramic glass.
Two-thirty in the morning. Week thirteen of the master calendar. Exactly two weeks until the Frozen Four in Lake Placid. Twelve weeks until the draft in Nashville.
I sat on the edge of the platform bed, barefoot, wearing only charcoal sweatpants, my elbows resting on my knees, my head hanging low between my shoulders.
The room smelled of stagnant air, cold ash in the stone hearth, and the sour rot of untouched takeout containers sitting on the granite kitchen island.
Beside the front entryway, resting on the wide-plank pine floor like an abandoned piece of scrap iron, sat the ECAC Championship trophy. The silver handles were tarnished with dried fingerprints; the green-and-white confetti from Saturday night lay scattered across the rug like frozen trash.
On the low table beside my boots, the official medical clearance verification from the NHL Central Scouting Bureau lay unopened beneath a stack of unread scout inquiries.
I hadn't slept more than ninety consecutive minutes in seven days.
My vision was blurred with red static, my eyes burning in their sockets.
My dark stubble had grown into a thick, ragged beard that scraped against my collar, my hollow cheekbones shadowed by violet bruises of pure exhaustion.
My split lower lip had cracked open again, a bitter trace of copper drying against my teeth.
My right hand stayed clamped shut against my chest.
Inside my fist, the sharp edges of the brass carriage house key and the scratched silver links of Julian Mercer’s #14 pin bit into the calloused meat of my palm.
I squeezed the metal until my knuckles turned bloodless, until the steel dug deep enough to draw blood, chasing the physical pain to silence the deafening, hollow void in my skull.
It didn't work.
On the dark linen of the pillow beside my shoulder, the phantom trace of her scent—sweet vanilla, lavender, and cold Adirondack rain—lingered in the cotton. Every time my chest rose on a shallow, starved breath, the scent filled my lungs, suffocating me with the memory of her skin.
You were an academic study, Marie.
The words I had snarled at her in that concrete tunnel echoed off the cedar walls with the force of an executioner's ax.
You were the biggest mistake of my life.
I had struck like a cornered beast. The second Halloway handed me that folder, the three years of self-hatred I had cultivated since Julian’s neck snapped on the curved glass had detonated in my blood.
I had convinced myself that nobody could love a violent, broken enforcer—that the only reason a brilliant, pure woman would let me touch her in the dark was to dissect my trauma for an academic credential.
I had weaponized her deepest wounds. I had looked at the woman who had stood between me and Sterling, the woman who had held my trembling frame while I wept by the fire, and I had slaughtered her to protect my own cowardly pride.
I had won the banner.
And my life was a tomb.
* * *
The heavy timber front door crashed open against the entryway wall.
The sound was a violent, concussive bang that shook the cedar framing of the house. Cold, sub-zero wind swept down the hallway, carrying the smell of wet wool and melting slush.
Heavy boot steps pounded across the hardwood.
Knox Davies stepped into the bedroom threshold.
His Carver varsity jacket was soaked with freezing rain, his blond hair plastered to his forehead, his face pale and drawn into a terrifying, rigid fury that erased every trace of the easygoing winger I had shared a line with for three years.
He didn't ask if I was awake. He flipped the overhead light switch.
The sudden, brutal glare of the halogen fixtures hit my bloodshot eyes like white-hot needles. I flinched, throwing a forearm over my brow, my breathing hitching in a ragged rasp.
Knox didn't speak. He crossed the room in three strides, reached into his jacket pocket, and hurled a heavy black metal thumb drive straight at my chest.
The drive struck my bare sternum, bouncing off the tattoo of my compass rose, clattering onto the charcoal duvet between my knees.
"Put it in your laptop," Knox rasped, his voice shaking with a rage so thick it vibrated through the floorboards.
"Get out of my house, Knox," I growled, my voice a ruined, hollow rasp that barely carried across the mattress.
"Put the drive in the machine, Chosen," Knox snarled, stepping up until his wet boots were inches from my bare feet, his fists balled at his sides. "Put it in, or I will drag your broken ass down to the lake and drown you in the ice."
I stared at him through the red haze in my eyes.
My fingers, thick and clumsy from days of numbness, reached for the thumb drive. I hauled my laptop off the nightstand, my hands shaking violently as I jammed the drive into the USB port.
A single video folder opened on the desktop.
Knox leaned over my shoulder, his wet sleeve dripping cold water onto my bare back, his blunt finger stabbing the trackpad to hit play.
The video feed was black-and-white, stamped with the digital timecode of Sloan Arena’s subterranean security network: FEB 28 – 01:14:22 EST.
The camera angle looked down the narrow concrete corridor outside The Vault.
On the screen, Tate Halloway stood outside the heavy iron door, dressed in his camel overcoat. Beside him was Samuel O'Connor, the night facilities manager, holding a master brass ring of custodial keys.
O'Connor unlocked the door. Halloway walked into the dark treatment annex alone, crossed to Marie’s private metal desk, and used a crowbar to pry the lock on her lower filing drawer.
Halloway pulled out the manila folder labeled Project 14.
He laid the pages out under a portable LED light bar, pulled a high-resolution digital camera from his pocket, and methodically photographed every single page of her September clinical notes.
Marie wasn't in the building. She was in her bed on Pine Street.
"O'Connor confessed to Vance two hours ago," Knox said, his words dropping like lead weights onto my skull. "Halloway paid him five thousand dollars in cash to break that drawer open."
The blood in my veins turned to liquid nitrogen.
Knox clicked a secondary file on the drive—a scanned document bearing the official watermark of the Carver University Dean of Science.
It was Marie’s original grant proposal from September—the one analyzing my kinetic load. Stamped across the primary application page in bold, red ink was an administrative cancellation seal dated October twelfth:
APPLICATION WITHDRAWN BY RESEARCHER.
Reason: Subject evaluation compromised by conflict of athletic department resource allocation. Research will not be submitted for external grant funding or Olympic fellowship consideration.
"She killed the grant four months ago, Chosen," Knox whispered, his voice cracking on the syllables.
"Forty-eight hours after you told the board her research was garbage.
She withdrew the proposal, took graveyard shifts mopping rubber mats in the rink to pay her tuition, and never looked at that file again. "
My vision tunneled into blackness.
The air vanished from the room. My heart stopped beating, an icy, suffocating pressure caving my sternum inward as the final file opened on the screen.
An audio recording from the Carver Memorial Library, timestamped Friday morning—hours before the championship game.
Tate Halloway’s voice purred through the laptop speakers, demanding that Marie break my heart, demanding that she force me into an agency deal with Apex Sports, threatening to deliver her stolen notes to the compliance board if she refused.
Then came Marie’s voice.
Fragile. Shaking with terror. But hard as diamond.
I am not breaking anything, she said through the static. I will never stand by and watch anyone treat him like he is disposable. You can take this file to the commissioner, Mr. Halloway. Chosen and I will face you together.
* * *
The recording ended.
The silence that fell across the bedroom was absolute, deafening, and final.
My lungs collapsed on an empty, dry gasp.
The laptop slid from my knees, crashing face-down onto the pine floorboards, the screen cracking in a spiderweb of white fractures.
She had gone to the arena to save me.
She had stood in the library and defied an agency runner to protect my draft stock. She had run down that concrete tunnel with the snow melting in her hair to tell me she loved me, to tell me we were an unbroken front.
And I had thrown her research at her boots.
I had called her a parasite. I had told her she was the biggest mistake of my life.
"She left, Black," Knox said quietly.
I looked up through the dark static in my eyes. Knox was standing by the door, looking at me not with anger, but with a deep, sickening pity that made the bile rise in my throat.
"Tessa helped her pack her car at dawn on Monday," Knox said. "She withdrew from her on-campus fellowship. She blocked your number. She pulled her SIM card out of her phone. She is gone, Chosen. Nobody knows where she went."
Knox turned and walked down the hallway, the heavy timber front door clicking shut behind him.
My legs gave out.
My massive, two-hundred-and-twenty-eight-pound frame hit the hardwood floorboards with a violent, concussive crash.
I dropped to my hands and knees in the cold gloom, my forehead pressing flat against the raw pine planks, my fingers clawing at the wood until the splinters tore beneath my fingernails.
In my right hand, crushed against my sternum, the brass key to this empty house and Julian's silver pin burned into my flesh like white-hot acid.
A dry, ragged, suffocating sob tore from deep in my chest.
Then another.
I wept into the bare floorboards, my broad shoulders heaving in violent, broken convulsions that tore at my cracked ribs, my throat raw from sounds that were no longer human.
The championship banner.
The millions of dollars in rookie contracts.
The draft boards in Nashville.
It was ash. It was garbage. It was a mountain of meaningless, frozen dust that I had traded for the only soul that had ever loved me without asking for blood in return.
I was ruined. I was a monster who had torn apart his own heart.
Slowly, dragging my weight through the wreckage of my soul, I pushed my bleeding palms into the floorboards.
I rose to my feet.
The sobbing stopped. The trembling in my forearms died, replaced by an icy, lethal clarity that burned away every remaining scrap of fear in my blood.
The enforcer was dead. The martyr was dead.
I looked at the silver pin in my bloody palm, then closed my fist until the metal disappeared.
I would tear Reginald Sterling out of his office. I would break Tate Halloway’s bones on the concrete. And I would hunt this continent to the edge of the earth until I found Marie Freeman, dropped to my knees in the dirt, and spent the rest of my life begging for her mercy.