Chapter 5
Nadia POV
Sleet lashed the high, narrow ventilation grates at ground level, rattling the corrugated iron like buckshot.
Outside, a black October gale was stripping the last frozen leaves from the oaks along the granite bluffs of Lake Superior, but twenty-eight feet down in the gut of the arena, the air was dead and stale.
I hurried down the final flight of concrete stairs, clutching my diagnostic notebook to my chest like a shield. My lower back ached from six hours in the biomechanics lecture hall, and the skin beneath my eyes felt tight and dry from too many pots of diner coffee.
Session Five. Fifty hours remaining after tonight.
I turned the corner into the sub-basement corridor, my sneakers silent on the black rubber runner. The heavy fire door of Lab 04 stood ajar by three inches, spilling a slice of cold, blue-white fluorescent light across the gray deck.
I reached out to push the door open, but my hand froze on the brass handle.
Inside, the low drone of the camera arrays was drowned out by a voice—harsh, scraped raw, vibrating with a desperate, ragged fury.
"I wired the four thousand two hundred this morning, Ross."
Through the gap, Killian sat on the edge of the examination table, his back to the door.
His long-sleeve shirt was discarded on the rubber floor.
An elastic wrap bound his lower ribs on the right side, the pale bandage stark against his tanned skin, and a heavy plastic bag of crushed ice was secured to his right shoulder with clear hockey tape.
He had his phone pressed hard to his ear with his left hand, his knuckles white, the tendons in his forearm standing out like thick cables. His head hung between his shoulders, his dark hair soaked with sweat, dripping onto the concrete between his bare feet.
"Look at the ledger again," he rasped, his voice dropping into a suffocating register that sounded like grinding stones.
"The transfer cleared Duluth National at eight AM...
I don't care about the accounting lag. Just keep him on the robotic gait harness.
Don't touch his schedule. If he misses a week of neural stimulation, the nerve pathways atrophy. "
A pause. A metallic voice buzzed faintly through the receiver, clipped and bureaucratic.
Killian’s free hand clenched into a fist so hard the knuckles clicked. The broad muscles of his back bunched into rigid, agonizing knots.
"I know what the balloon payment is," he said, the words barely louder than a whisper, yet loaded with enough violence to shake his ribs.
"Thirty-five thousand. January fifteenth.
I'll have the cashier's check in your hands before the deadline...
I'll find it. Just do not tell him I had to call.
You tell Mateo the foundation extended his grant. You let him think he earned it."
He didn't wait for a response. He ended the call with a vicious jab of his thumb and hurled the phone onto the rubber floor mats.
The device skittered across the floor, stopping inches from the diagnostic cart.
Killian didn't pick it up. He dropped his face into his calloused hands, his broad chest heaving in three ragged, shuddering breaths.
The air left him in a broken whistle, his wide shoulders collapsing forward under an invisible, crushing weight.
For five seconds, the terrifying, untouchable enforcer was gone.
In his place was a twenty-two-year-old man crumbling beneath a burden that was grinding his bones to dust.
A knot of hot, sharp ache twisted behind my sternum. The contempt I had carried like armor for seven months suddenly felt hollow, brittle as thin ice.
My boot shifted on the threshold. The rubber sole caught the metal door frame with a sharp squeak.
The transformation was instantaneous.
Killian’s head snapped up. The vulnerability vanished as if doused in freezing water, his jaw setting into a square block of granite. His eyes, rimmed with dark, bruised shadows of sleeplessness, locked onto mine through the gap in the door.
* * *
The silence in the lab was suffocating.
I pushed the door open the rest of the way, keeping my eyes fixed on the metal diagnostic cart as I stepped inside. The air was thick with the scent of melted ice, menthol salve, and the sharp, sour tang of adrenaline.
Killian was already on his feet. He bent down, retrieved his phone from the floor with slow deliberation, and shoved it into the pocket of his shorts.
He didn't look at his bruised ribs as he grabbed a clean black compression shirt off the table and yanked it down over his head, though the movement made his left eye twitch with suppressed agony.
"You're seven minutes early, Gregory," he said. The gravel in his throat was cold and flat, a fortress of ice thrown up in three seconds flat.
"I had an early lab release," I said, setting my notebook down. My voice sounded thin to my own ears. My throat felt parched, constricted by the memory of his bowed head and the thirty-five-thousand-dollar figure ringing in my skull.
He dragged the stool back with his boot, the metal legs shrieking against the floor, and sat down. He crossed his arms over his chest, his posture rigid, daring me to speak.
"Session Five," he said. "Get your tape."
I opened the cabinet and pulled out the circular telemetry sensors, peeling the adhesive backings with fingers that felt unusually cold.
I approached the stool, stopping two feet away.
His gaze tracked my hands, dark and hostile, warning me not to step across the invisible line he had redrawn around himself.
"Your thoracic rotation was down eight percent on Friday," I said, forcing my clinical tone to take the wheel. "And you’re guarding your right side. Let me see the ribs."
"The ribs are fine."
"They're bruised deep enough to restrict your tidal volume," I countered, pointing a sensor toward the wrap beneath his shirt. "You're taking shallow breaths to avoid stretching the intercostal muscles. That limits oxygen delivery to your legs by the third period. Lift the shirt."
"I said they're fine," he growled, leaning forward, his large frame crowding my vision. "Stick the nodes on my neck and run the tracking. I don't need a medical lecture from a student."
A spike of heat flared in my veins, burning through the awkward pity that had paralyzed me moments before. I slapped the sensor sheet onto the stainless-steel tray with a sharp crack.
"Who was that on the phone, Castaneda?"
Killian went utterly still.
The buzzing of the fluorescent lights seemed to swell, filling the silence between us. A dark, dangerous shadow passed over his features, his pupils contracting into pinpricks of black flint.
"What did you say?" he asked, his voice dropping so low it was barely a vibration in the concrete.
"I heard you," I said, refusing to back down, my chin tilting up to meet his glare.
"Four thousand two hundred dollars. A clinic in Duluth.
A balloon payment due in January that you don't have.
Is that why you play like a lunatic? Is that why you broke Gavin's shoulder—because you're so frantic for an NHL signing bonus that you'll kill anyone who gets between you and the draft? "
His jaw clenched until the muscle along his mandible twitched like a plucked wire. The air in his chest pushed out in a slow, toxic hiss.
"You don't know what you're talking about," he grated.
"Then tell me," I pushed, taking half a step closer, my fingernails biting into the palms of my hands.
"Tell me why you're nursing cracked ribs at five in the morning and wiring thousands of dollars to a clinic under the table.
Tell me why you're carrying the weight of the entire world on your back while pretending you're too tough to feel anything. "
"Shut your mouth, Gregory," he snarled, rising from the stool.
"No," I fired back, my heart pounding against my ribs, adrenaline making my vision sharp.
"You think you're the only one in this town drowning in debt?
You think because you can hit people through the glass, you're the only one fighting to survive?
You're killing yourself, Castaneda. And if you tear your shoulder out before January, you won't have an NHL contract to pay for anything. "
* * *
The metal stool went flying backward, crashing into the concrete wall with a deafening bang.
In two violent, lunging strides, Killian closed the distance between us.
Before I could draw breath to scream, his hands slammed flat against the stainless-steel diagnostic table on either side of my hips, trapping me against the edge of the metal counter.
The breath was knocked from my throat.
He didn't touch my skin, but his sheer, suffocating mass boxed me in completely.
Six-foot-four of corded athletic muscle, bruised bone, and radiating fever towered over me, blotting out the harsh fluorescent light until I was standing entirely in his shadow.
The scent of him—crushed pine needles, cold iron, sweat, and black pepper—slammed into my senses with the force of an open-ice hit.
His face was three inches from mine.
I could see the individual silver fibers of the scar cutting through his left eyebrow, could see the tiny flecks of amber burning in the black depths of his irises.
His chest rose and fell in heavy, violent surges, the fabric of his black shirt brushing the front of my scrub top with every shallow exhale.
"You think you're smart, don't you?" he rasped, his voice dropping into a dark, gravelly register that scraped along my exposed collarbone. "You stand there with your little clipboard and your university grant, thinking you can psychoanalyze me because you heard thirty seconds of a private call."
My hands gripped the cold lip of the steel counter behind my back, my knuckles turning white. The proximity was overwhelming, a tidal wave of physical heat that made the skin along my throat burn.
"I heard a man drowning," I whispered, my voice trembling despite my desperate effort to keep it steady.
Killian leaned in another fraction of an inch. His breath, hot and mint-sharp, washed across my parted lips. His jaw was so close to mine I could feel the microscopic prickle of his dark stubble.
"You don't know what drowning is, Gregory," he growled, his gaze dropping from my eyes to fixate entirely on my mouth.
His eyes dilated, the black swallowing the amber until his pupils were bottomless pits of raw, unchecked hunger. The muscle in his throat worked as he swallowed heavily. For a second, the lethal anger in his posture fractured into something wild, thick, and untamed.
His right hand shifted on the metal counter, his calloused thumb brushing the outer seam of my scrub pants, just above my hip.
A violent jolt of heat shot through the fabric, pooling low and heavy in my lower belly.
My lips parted on a shallow, ragged gasp. My chest expanded, pressing directly against the hard shelf of his pectorals. He didn't pull back. He leaned into the contact, his forehead lowering until it was a hair's breadth from mine, his breathing as ragged and broken as my own.
"You want to keep that eight-thousand-dollar grant?" he whispered, the command rough and dark, vibrating against my lips. "Then you keep your eyes on your monitors. You stay out of my head. And you never, ever speak about Duluth again. Do you understand me?"
I couldn't speak. The air had turned to liquid fire in my lungs. My pulse was hammering like a trapped bird against the hollow of my throat, so loud, so frantic, he had to feel the vibration of it against his chest.
I looked into his ruined, beautiful, violent face, and the lie of my hatred collapsed into ash.
I didn't despise him. I was terrified of him—terrified because every nerve ending in my body was screaming at me to reach up, wrap my fingers into the damp hair at his nape, and pull his bruised mouth down onto mine.
"Do you understand me, Nadia?" he rasped, his voice breaking on my first name, rough with a desperate restraint that was splintering right before my eyes.
I swallowed the fire in my throat, my fingers digging into the steel behind me until the metal bit into bone.
"I understand," I breathed.
He didn't move. He stayed there, his mouth hovering an inch from mine, his hand trembling against the metal counter beside my hip, suspended on the razor edge of completely losing control.