Chapter 37
Chosen POV
The heavy double doors of the Carver University Executive Boardroom gave way beneath my boot with a concussive, splintering crack that echoed off the mahogany paneling.
Eight-fifteen on Thursday morning. Week thirteen of the master calendar. Exactly fourteen days until the Frozen Four in Lake Placid. Twelve weeks until the draft in Nashville.
Outside the floor-to-ceiling glass of the administrative tower, freezing rain lashed against the leaded panes, washing the Adirondack ridges in dirty gray slush.
Inside, twelve men and women in dark tailored suits sat around a twenty-foot polished cherrywood table, their crystal glasses clinking, reviewing the final release forms for the one-point-two-million-dollar alumni trust endowment.
At the head of the table sat Reginald Sterling.
To his left was Carver President Harrison Vance and Trustee Caldwell. Sitting in the guest chair beside Sterling was Tate Halloway, dressed in a charcoal bespoke suit, a gold fountain pen balanced between his manicured fingers.
The brass door latch swung back, denting the drywall.
Every head snapped toward the threshold.
I didn't pause. I walked into the room, my unlaced winter boots leaving wet, salt-crusted tracks across the navy wool carpet.
I hadn't showered in forty-eight hours. I wore black denim, a torn thermal shirt, and my heavy black wool coat hanging unbuttoned off my broad shoulders.
My dark hair was wild, plastered to my forehead with freezing rain, my jaw darkened by a week of rough black stubble, my split bottom lip raw and cracked.
I looked like an enforcer who had just walked off an open-ice brawl, two hundred and twenty-eight pounds of cold, unblinking violence.
"Black?" President Vance pushed his chair back, his face tightening with shock. "What is the meaning of this? This is an executive board session."
"Sit down, Harrison," I rasped.
My voice was a low, gravelly vibration that rattled the crystal water carafe in the center of the table.
I reached the center of the mahogany table, swung my right arm, and slammed three items down onto the papers Sterling was about to sign.
The heavy metal thumb drive, an external solid-state hard drive, and a three-page notarized legal affidavit hit the wood with a sharp, heavy slap that made Caldwell jump.
"Read the affidavit, Trustee Caldwell," I commanded, my dark, bloodshot eyes locking onto Sterling.
My pulse sat dead and heavy at forty-nine beats a minute. The panic that had choked my throat for three years was gone. There was only a cold, predatory clarity that carved every breath into iron.
"That is a sworn confession from Samuel O'Connor, your night facilities manager at Sloan Arena," I said, every word dropping like lead onto the mahogany.
"Timestamped by the county sheriff forty minutes ago. It details the five-thousand-dollar cash bribe Tate Halloway paid him on February twenty-eighth to pick the lock on Marie Freeman’s private desk in The Vault. "
Halloway went rigid in his chair, the gold pen freezing mid-air.
"The hard drive contains the raw digital surveillance footage from sub-level two," I continued, stepping toward the head of the table, my shadow swallowing Sterling against the high-backed leather.
"It shows Halloway photographing her September research notes.
It shows how Halloway and Sterling fabricated an anonymous ECAC compliance complaint to extort an exclusive representation contract out of me before the combine. "
* * *
Sterling turned the color of damp parchment.
He scrambled backward in his chair, his hands coming down flat against the blotter, his voice rising in a frantic, defensive shriek.
"This is an unsubstantiated accusation from a volatile player managing a severe disciplinary record!" Sterling snapped, looking at President Vance. "Black is attempting to deflect from the fact that his student trainer compromised medical governance!"
"Her grant proposal was stamped withdrawn on October twelfth, Sterling," I growled, taking another step until the toes of my boots touched the edge of the mahogany.
I dropped the second document—the official withdrawal confirmation signed by the Dean of Science—right over his pen.
"She withdrew the study forty-eight hours after I insulted her in front of the board," I said, leaning forward, resting my large, calloused palms on the cherrywood, my face six inches from Sterling’s.
Up close, the athletic director could smell the cold rain, the copper, and the raw exhaustion radiating off my skin.
"She never submitted my data to the Olympic committee.
She cleaned blood off your arena rubber mats at two in the morning to pay her tuition so she wouldn't have to use my name. "
President Vance reached for O'Connor’s affidavit, his reading glasses slipping down his nose as his eyes scanned the sheriff’s seal. His face darkened into a deep, thunderous crimson.
"Harrison, listen to me," Sterling stammered, sweating through his silk collar.
"If this leaks to the press before the Frozen Four, the NCAA will open an immediate institutional audit.
They will vacate our ECAC title. The NHL Central Scouting Bureau will drop Chosen out of the first round.
We lose the tournament, we lose the draft prestige, and the university loses millions in alumni donations. "
Sterling looked up at me, his small eyes wild with desperate calculation.
"You do this, Black, and you burn your own career to the ground," Sterling hissed. "No franchise touches an amateur center who brings federal fraud investigations to his own athletic department. You’ll be lucky to play in the minor leagues for sixty grand a year."
A low, dry sound scraped past my throat.
It wasn't a laugh. It was the sound of a man who had already stood in the ashes of his own soul and found nothing left to lose.
"I don't give a damn about my draft ranking, Sterling," I whispered, every syllable coated in lethal, unshakeable venom. "I don't give a damn about your championship banner, and I don't give a damn about your one-point-two-million-dollar endowment."
I reached out, caught the lapel of Sterling’s tailored suit jacket in my fist, and hauled him forward until his chest hit the edge of the desk.
"You take my name off the draft board," I rasped, my breath hot and ragged against his cheek.
"You strip my captaincy. You vacate the win against Northbrook.
But by five o'clock today, Carver University will issue a full, public administrative exoneration clearing Marie Freeman of all misconduct.
You will restore her fellowship recommendation.
You will issue a public apology on the athletic department wire.
And you will write an unrestricted eighteen-thousand-dollar grant check to her biomechanics lab. "
I tightened my grip, feeling the fabric tear at the seam.
"You fail to do that," I promised, my voice vibrating through his skull, "and I walk out of this building, sit in front of an ESPN camera, and give them every banking record, every email, and every minute of that security tape.
You will spend the next ten years in a federal penitentiary, Sterling.
Sign the exoneration, or I burn this entire university to the ground. "
President Vance stood up, his jaw set like granite.
He didn't look at Sterling. He looked at the two armed campus police officers standing in the corridor.
"Remove Mr. Sterling from this office," President Vance commanded, his voice cold and absolute. "Secure his hard drives. And escort Mr. Halloway off this campus under criminal trespass warning. The university legal counsel will contact the district attorney before noon."
The officers stepped forward.
Halloway stood slowly, his face gray as zinc, his hands shaking as the handcuffs clicked around his wrists.
Trustee Caldwell pulled the administrative directive forward, uncapped his pen, and signed the formal exoneration of Marie Freeman with a hard, scratching stroke. He slid the stamped document across the wood into my waiting hand.
I took the paper, folded it with bloodless fingers, and tucked it into the inner pocket of my coat.
My career was hanging by a thread. My draft status was in the dirt.
And for the first time in twenty-two years, I didn't care at all.
* * *
I pushed through the glass exterior doors of the administrative complex into the freezing Adirondack squall.
The cold rain stung my raw cheekbones, melting against the stubble on my jaw, but my vision remained locked on the concrete steps thirty yards ahead.
Tessa Rhodes stood beside the granite balustrade, holding a black umbrella, her briefcase resting on the top step. She was watching me, her sharp dark eyes assessing my torn clothes, my bloodshot gaze, and the predatory desperation that drove my stride through the slush.
I didn't stop until my boots hit the step below hers.
I didn't posture. I didn't square my shoulders.
I stopped in front of the woman who had watched Marie pack her life into cardboard boxes, and the last shred of my pride turned to water.
I dropped to both knees in the freezing slush.
The wet ice soaked straight through the denim of my jeans, biting into my damaged right knee, but I didn't feel the cold. I bowed my head, my massive hands opening flat against my thighs, my broad shoulders trembling with a violent, bone-deep agony that tore through my chest.
"Chosen," Tessa whispered, taking half a step back, her voice cracking with pure shock at the sight of Carver’s captain on his knees in the dirt.
"I was a monster, Tessa," I rasped, the words broken, ruined, torn from a throat raw with suppressed sobs.
I looked up at her through the rain, my vision blurring with burning tears that I didn't bother to wipe away.
"I was blind. I was a coward. I took three years of my own self-hatred and I threw it in her face in that tunnel," I choked out, my hands trembling as I reached into my coat and pulled out the signed exoneration document, holding it up like a dying man offering his last breath.
"I cleared her name. Sterling is gone. Her fellowship is safe.
I don't care about my draft. I don't care about hockey. Just tell me where she is."
A ragged gasp tore from my lungs, my forehead sinking toward the wet stone.
"I'm not going there to make an excuse," I begged, my voice shattered into a ragged whisper. "I’m going there to crawl at her feet. I will stay on my knees on her porch until she tells me how to earn my breath back. Please, Tessa. Tell me where she is."
Tessa stared down at me.
She looked at the six-foot-four enforcer kneeling in four inches of freezing mud, looked at the absolute, irreversible ruin carved into my face, and saw that the man who had hurt her best friend was dead.
She reached into the pocket of her tailored overcoat, pulled out a white index card, and knelt down in the slush before me.
She pressed the card firmly into my scarred palm, her fingers closing mine around the paper.
"Eight-forty-two Shore Road, Burlington, Vermont," Tessa said, her voice steady, carrying an iron warning. "One hundred and fourteen miles north across Route Seven. Her grandmother’s cottage."
She looked straight into my bloodshot eyes.
"She is carrying everything, Chosen," Tessa whispered, the words heavy with a double meaning that I was too broken to understand. "If you break her again, I will kill you myself."
"I know," I rasped.
I scrambled to my feet, the slush flying from my boots as I broke into a dead sprint across the asphalt toward my black pickup truck.
I threw myself into the driver's seat, slammed the door, and fired the engine.
The heavy V8 roared to life, exhaust billowing white into the freezing squall. I threw the transmission into gear, spun the wheel hard, and hit the access road with tires throwing rooster tails of gray slush.
I cleared the campus gates, swung the nose of the truck north onto Route 7, and buried the accelerator against the floorboards.
The speedometer climbed—sixty, seventy, eighty-five miles an hour through the blinding Adirondack rain.
The windshield wipers beat a furious, rhythmic scream against the ice, but my hands remained locked to the leather wheel, my knuckles white as bone, my lungs expanding on ragged, desperate drags of air.
One hundred and fourteen miles.
My entire soul was screaming her name into the storm.
And as the green signs for the Vermont state border flashed past in the gray mist, I knew that nothing on this earth—not the ice, not the miles, not God himself—would stop me from reaching her door.