Chapter 38
Marie POV
The cedar shakes of the small white cottage at eight-forty-two Shore Road creaked under the steady, forty-knot gusts rolling off Lake Champlain.
Four-thirty on Thursday afternoon.
Outside the glass-enclosed porch, the gray Vermont twilight was thick with heavy, wet flakes of snow that drifted over the hemlocks and settled into the gravel driveway.
The cast-iron woodstove in the corner of the room popped with burning split oak, throwing a steady, dry heat across the braided rag rugs, smelling of seasoned bark and the hot ceramic of the kettle.
I sat in an antique wicker rocker, an oversized cable-knit cream cardigan wrapped twice around my torso, wool socks pulled to my knees.
Cradled between my palms was a steaming mug of peppermint and sliced ginger tea.
Beneath the thick wool of the sweater, my right hand rested flat, motionless, and warm over the lower curve of my abdomen.
Seven weeks.
Inside me, sheltered beneath my pelvic bone, our child was anchoring deeper with every sunrise. The nausea still hit in sudden, greasy waves at dawn, and a bone-deep exhaustion pulled at my limbs by mid-afternoon, but in the quiet of this shoreline, my autonomic system had begun to heal.
For four days, there had been no vibrating bleachers, no ammonia-choked ice decks, and no administrative suits hunting for leverage.
There were only the winter crows in the pines, the slow ticking of the kitchen clock, and the steady, rhythmic expansion of my ribs as I learned how to breathe for two.
A sharp, violent sound shattered the peace.
The heavy, wet crunch of all-terrain tires grinding through frozen slush.
A low, deep V8 engine rumbled down the private lane, the heavy vibration rattling the storm panes of the porch enclosure.
My heart surged into my throat with a concussive, deafening thud that made my vision blur at the margins. The ceramic mug in my hands began to rattle against its saucer.
I set the tea on the wicker side table with shaking fingers, rose slowly to my feet, and walked to the frost-coated glass.
An idling black pickup truck sat at the base of the porch stairs, sixty feet from the water.
Steam boiled off the hood in thick, ghostly plumes, the engine coughing as the ignition died. Snow was melting in black, muddy rivers down the wheel wells, the front bumper caked in the gray road salt of a hundred and fourteen miles of emergency driving.
The driver's door swung wide.
* * *
Chosen Black stepped out into the freezing Vermont dusk.
The breath locked solid in my trachea. My knuckles tightened over the thick wool of my cardigan, pressing the fabric flat against my stomach as my knees locked into rigid, defensive rebar.
He didn't look like an athlete. He didn't look like the arrogant, untouchable center who ruled Sloan Arena.
He looked like a man who had crawled out of a burning building on his hands and knees.
He wore no hat, no gloves, and no winter coat.
His dark henley was torn at the collar, soaked through with freezing drizzle, clinging to the broad expanse of his chest. His black jeans were stiff with road grime, caked in frozen mud at the knees; his work boots were unlaced, dragging heavily through the slush.
His dark hair was plastered to his skull with ice.
His face was hollowed out, gaunt, the skin beneath his cheekbones gray with days of starvation and sleeplessness.
A thick, unkempt black beard covered his hard jaw, his split lower lip cracked open and bleeding fresh dark drops into his stubble.
His dark eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with deep violet bruises of pure, unadulterated ruin.
He looked up at the porch.
The moment his gaze locked onto mine through the glass, his massive frame stumbled, his boot catching on the bottom gravel riser before he steadied himself against the wooden railing.
I didn't run inside. I didn't lock the deadbolt.
I pushed the heavy storm door open, stepping out onto the covered wooden porch into the twenty-degree air.
The sub-zero wind whipped loose tendrils of dark hair across my face, but I stood tall, my chin tilted at a knife-like angle, my hands tucked into the deep pockets of my cardigan, fingers curling over my abdomen.
He climbed the three wooden steps with agonizing slowness, his boots dragging like he was hauling iron chains.
He stopped on the landing, six feet away.
His chest heaved under his wet shirt, his ribs expanding in ragged, shallow gasps that plumed white between us. His hands, thick and scarred across the knuckles, hung at his sides, trembling violently with bone-deep cold.
"Marie," he whispered.
The word was a ruined, bleeding rasp that barely carried across the porch boards.
I looked at him with an impenetrable, polite detachment that cost every remaining shred of my strength.
"You have thirty seconds to get back in that truck, Mr. Black," I said, my voice smooth, level, and colder than the ice on the lake behind him. "The Chittenden County sheriff's substation is four miles down Route Seven. If you step across that threshold, I will file a formal restraining order."
He flinched.
It was a physical reaction—his head jerking back a fraction of an inch as if my quiet, formal tone had driven a steel blade between his ribs.
* * *
He didn't argue. He didn't offer a single word of self-defense.
His knees gave out.
Two hundred and twenty-eight pounds of elite athletic mass dropped straight through the air.
His knees hit the freezing, wet wooden porch boards with a sickening, concussive thud that rattled the cedar planks beneath my boots.
He didn't catch himself with his hands. He knelt in the slush at my feet, his massive frame folding down until his broad shoulders bowed, his forehead sinking toward the wood. Wet snow drifted down, settling in the dark curls of his hair, freezing against his bare neck.
He lifted his face slowly, his dark eyes brimming with burning, unshed tears that spilled over his lower lashes, tracking hot paths through the black stubble on his cheeks.
He opened his hands, laying his large, calloused palms flat against the wet porch boards, palm-up in absolute, defenseless surrender.
"Sterling is gone, Marie," he choked out, his voice cracking, torn from a throat raw with dry sobs.
A violent, full-body shudder ripped through his broad chest, his teeth chattering with the freezing wind, but his gaze never left mine.
"Halloway is in handcuffs," he rasped, the words tumbling out in a ragged, desperate flood. "I broke Samuel O'Connor. I took his signed confession and the security hard drives and I kicked Sterling’s boardroom doors off the hinges at eight o'clock this morning."
He reached inside the torn pocket of his henley with bloodless, shaking fingers.
He pulled out a folded white document stamped with the university's red seal and laid it on the wet wood between my boots.
"Your administrative exoneration," he whispered, a broken sob catching in his chest. "Signed by Trustee Caldwell and Harrison Vance.
A full public apology on the wire by five o'clock.
An unrestricted eighteen-thousand-dollar grant check delivered to your lab on Monday.
Your fellowship recommendation is restored, Marie.
It's clean. Your name is completely clear. "
I looked down at the document, then back at the man kneeling in the mud at my feet.
My pulse was thrumming in my ears like an executioner's drum, but I kept my hands locked inside my cardigan pockets, pressing hard against the life sheltered beneath my ribs.
"Why did you do that, Chosen?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper, flat and unreadable against the gale. "You risked your draft ranking. You risked your eligibility."
"I don't give a damn about my draft ranking," he sobbed, his head dropping until his forehead touched the toe of my leather boot.
The freezing rain was soaking through his shirt, his broad back convulsing as he pressed his face into the leather, his large hands clutching at the wet floorboards on either side of my feet.
"I don't give a damn about the NHL, Marie," he wept into the wood, his voice shattered into raw, bleeding pieces.
"I don't give a damn about the championship.
I was a monster. I was a blind, cowardly animal who took three years of my own self-hatred and threw it in your face because I was too terrified to believe that someone as good as you could love someone like me. "
He lifted his head, his bloodshot eyes locking onto mine with an agony so absolute it stole the oxygen from the air between us.
"I didn't drive here to ask you to take me back," he rasped, his voice vibrating with desperate, sacred reverence.
"I drove here to crawl at your feet. I will stay on these boards, Marie.
I will stay on my knees in this snow until you tell me how to bleed for you, or until the cold takes my breath.
You are my only home. If you cast me out, I have nowhere left to go. "
The wind howled through the porch screens, swirling white powder around our bodies.
I stood above the titan of Carver Hockey, looking down at his bowed head, feeling his ragged breathing warm the leather of my boot.
My hand moved inside my pocket, my fingers curling tight over the plastic casing of the pregnancy test resting against my ribs.
The silence stretched between us, fragile and sharp as broken glass, as the truth prepared to tear the world wide open.