Chapter 2 #2
Palmer cleared his throat, clearly uncomfortable with the hostility radiating between us.
"Miss Gregory is our lead senior fellow in biomechanics.
Dr. Morris vetted her credentials personally.
She will log every minute of your sixty hours in Sub-Basement Lab 04.
If she reports non-compliance, the suspension triggers immediately. No appeals. No second chances."
My teeth snapped together with an audible click. I looked at Briggs. "You're letting a student run my schedule?"
"She's not running your schedule, eighty-eight," Briggs said, his eyes hard as flint.
"She's keeping you on the ice. Tomorrow morning.
Five-thirty AM. Sub-Basement Lab 04. If she tells me you were thirty seconds late, you're running bleachers until your lungs bleed, and you won't dress for Northland on Friday. Are we clear?"
The room seemed to shrink, the walls closing in until the only two people left were me and the girl with the silver clips in her hair.
I looked back at Nadia.
Her breath was shallow, her ribs expanding beneath her dark coat. She thought she’d won. She thought holding the keys to my eligibility gave her power over me.
"Crystal clear, Coach," I said softly, my eyes never leaving her face.
* * *
The frosted glass door clicked shut behind Nadia as she stepped out into the second-floor mezzanine.
She moved fast, her rubber-soled boots squeaking against the polished linoleum, clearly trying to put distance between herself and the suite before I could exit.
I didn't rush. I pushed the heavy oak door open with one flat palm, letting it swing shut with a hollow thud, and tracked her down the dim corridor. The hallway was empty, lit only by the gray daylight filtering through the tall, arched windows overlooking the frozen parking lot.
"Gregory."
She didn't stop. Her stride lengthened, her spine rigid.
"Gregory. Stop walking."
She kept moving toward the stairwell.
Three long strides closed the distance. Before she could reach the fire door, I stepped into her peripheral vision, planted my left boot directly in front of her path, and braced my right forearm against the painted brick wall beside her head.
The sudden wall of flesh and wool forced her to an abrupt halt. Her shoulder brushed my chest as she spun, trapped in the narrow recess between the fire hose cabinet and my body.
"What is your problem?" she breathed, her face tilting upward.
Her pupils were huge, dark rims swallowing the amber. The scent of her—that crisp, winter-soap cleanliness—slammed into my senses again, cutting straight through the lingering smell of ice and liniment. My lungs seized on it, demanding more air than they needed.
I dropped my head down, bringing my face into her perimeter until she had nowhere else to look but the scar over my eyebrow.
"You're going to march back into Palmer's office," I said, my voice dropping to a low, rough rasp that vibrated against the brick behind her. "You're going to tell Dr. Morris that your schedule is full. You're going to tell her you can't run the tracking."
A sharp, incredulous breath hitched in her throat. "Excuse me?"
"You heard me," I said, leaning in another fraction of an inch, using every ounce of my weight to crowd her space.
"I don't need an academic parasite poking at my body to prove a point to the NCAA.
You hate me because of Mercer. You think I'm a butcher.
Fine. But you don't want to be locked in a dark room with me at five in the morning, Gregory.
Walk away while you still have a stipend to beg for. "
Her chest heaved against the heavy fabric of her coat. For a fraction of a second, I thought I saw her resolve waver—a microscopic flicker of apprehension in the tightening of her lips.
Then her chin came up.
She didn't step back into the brick. Instead, she took a half-step forward, planting her boots firmly, the front of her waxed jacket pressing directly against the center of my chest. The contact sent a sharp shock of heat through the heavy cotton of my hoodie.
She reached up with one gloved hand, grabbed the zipper pull of my collar, and yanked it downward two inches with sharp, fearless efficiency.
My breath caught in my throat. My heart gave a heavy, violent thud against my ribs.
"Listen to me, Castaneda," she whispered, her voice steady as a scalpel, her mouth so close I could feel the warm puff of her exhale against my jaw.
"I don't care about your bruised ego. I don't care about your pro draft.
And I certainly don't care about your pathetic intimidation tactics.
What I care about is my eight-thousand-dollar grant, which pays my tuition so my father doesn't have to break his back in a shipyard. "
She gripped the fabric of my hoodie, her knuckles brushing the bare skin of my throat.
"You will be in Sub-Basement Lab 04 tomorrow morning at five-twenty-nine AM," she commanded, her dark eyes flashing with unyielding fury.
"You will strip down to your compression shorts, you will let me attach the telemetry nodes wherever I tell you to, and you will not say a single word unless I ask you a direct diagnostic question.
If you roll your eyes, if you skip a drill, or if you lay one hand on me to scare me off, I will walk up those stairs, tell Palmer you refused protocol, and watch them strip that number eighty-eight jersey right off your back. "
She released my collar with a dismissive shove against my chest, side-stepped my arm, and hit the metal crash-bar of the stairwell door.
The heavy steel slammed shut behind her, the vibration humming through the concrete floor beneath my boots.
I stood there alone in the drafty corridor, my chest heaving, the skin of my throat burning where her gloved knuckles had brushed my collarbone. My fists were clenched so hard the raw skin on my knuckles threatened to split wide open.
Five-thirty AM.
She wasn't going to break. She was going to fight me for every inch of those sixty hours.
And as the blood pounded in my ears, hot and demanding, a dark, feral voice whispered at the back of my skull that having Nadia Gregory locked in a basement, close enough to breathe her air, was going to be the absolute ruin of me.