Chapter 7
Nadia POV
Freezing rain rattled against the high, barred ventilation panes like a handful of gravel flung against glass.
My left eyelid was twitching in a steady, maddening spasm.
NCAA Compliance Portal — Interim Audit Notice.
Status: Flagged for Expedited Review.
Deadline: Monday, 07:00 AM.
The email from Dr. Evelyn Morris had detonated in my inbox at eight tonight. An NCAA regional compliance officer had scheduled a surprise pre-dawn walkthrough, demanding all raw telemetry, load-distribution models, and angular velocity vectors for Killian’s first seven sessions.
Forty-six distinct kinematic datasets. None of them fully rendered because the department’s ancient server had crashed at nine-fifteen, corrupting the batch export files.
If the directory wasn't verified and uploaded by seven o'clock tomorrow morning, the diversion protocol was voided. Killian would be scratched from Friday’s conference rematch against Northland State, and my eight-thousand-dollar senior fellowship stipend would be frozen pending administrative inquiry.
My father’s tuition shortfall would default by noon.
"Damn it," I whispered, the words scraping against a throat parched from hours of cold instant coffee. My fingers flew across the mechanical keyboard, attempting to reconstruct the pelvic torque matrices from raw hexadecimal logs.
An error window flashed crimson across the main screen.
Array Overflow. Memory allocation failed.
A hot, suffocating knot tightened behind my sternum.
My ribs felt crushed beneath the heavy knit of my oversized emerald sweater, my breathing shallow, rapid, and thin.
The room tilted. I dug my fingernails into the fleshy part of my palms until the pain grounded me, trying to stave off the black wave of panic rising behind my eyes.
The heavy steel security door at the end of the hall swung open with a dull hydraulic wheeze.
Heavy, unhurried footsteps clicked against the black rubber matting.
Killian stopped in the doorway.
He wore dark athletic sweatpants and a black thermal shirt, the sleeves shoved up past his elbows to reveal thick, vascular forearms corded with muscle and bruised from morning stick-handling drills. His hair was damp from the sleet outside, dark strands clinging to his temples.
He didn't say a word. His dark eyes flicked across the room, taking in my rigid shoulders, the trembling cursor on the screen, the crimson error code, and the frantic flutter of the pulse beating at the base of my throat.
He crossed the room in four long strides, dropped his duffel against the concrete wall, and pulled a rolling office chair directly beside mine.
The casters shrieked against the floor, and suddenly his massive frame was right there, consuming the space. The cold air clinging to his clothes clashed with the intense, radiant heat pouring off his skin, bringing that unmistakable scent of crushed cedar, black pepper, and rain into my perimeter.
He planted a broad, calloused hand flat on the laminate desk between my mousepad and my keyboard, his knuckles inches from my fingers.
"Stop," he commanded.
The voice was low, rough gravel, vibrating with absolute authority.
"I can't stop," I choked out, not looking at him, my fingers hovering uselessly over the keys as another line of code failed.
"The server corrupted the third-period telemetry from Friday.
The audit is at seven. If I don't rebuild the torque curves manually from the sensor archives, Palmer cancels the grant. My tuition—"
"Gregory. Look at me."
I turned my head. His face was inches away, carved from hard, uncompromising angles under the harsh blue light of the monitors. The silver scar through his left eyebrow was stark against his dark skin.
"Take your hands off the keyboard," he rasped, his voice dropping into a steady, grounding cadence that cut straight through the buzzing in my ears. "Breathe through your nose. We're not losing that grant."
"You don't understand the algorithm," I argued, my voice cracking with exhaustion. "It's forty-six datasets—"
"I know how I move on the ice," he cut in, leaning closer until his shoulder pressed firmly against mine through the heavy wool of my sweater.
"And I know how to read your logs. We split the raw files.
You run the mathematical processing, I pull the manual impact timestamps from the backup drive.
No fighting. No bullshit. We don't leave this room until the green light comes on. "
He held my gaze, unblinking, until the wild hammering in my chest slowed by a single, steady fraction.
I swallowed the dry lump in my throat and nodded.
* * *
For three hours, the only sounds in the basement were the frantic clatter of keys, the rhythmic scratching of my pen against calculation sheets, and the muffled thump of freezing rain against the high concrete foundation.
The hostility that had defined every second of our previous meetings didn't disappear—it concentrated into a fierce, synchronized rhythm.
Killian worked with a sharp, lethal focus that obliterated the arrogant athlete stereotype I had used to keep him at a distance. He didn't just understand his sport; he understood the physics of impact down to the millisecond.
He sat hunched over the secondary monitor, his thick shoulder pressed against mine, scrolling through hundreds of lines of time-coded telemetry.
"Row four-eighty," he murmured, his voice a low vibration that seemed to settle directly in my collarbone. "That's not an adductor failure. Lindqvist was hooking my left hip off the faceoff. The load shifted to the right heel because I was bracing against the torque."
My fingers typed the adjustment into the script. "If you shifted to the heel, the force plate should register a three-hundred-newton spike in the posterior vector."
"Look at the curve," he said, pointing a blunt, calloused finger at the graph.
He leaned across me to reach the screen, his chest brushing the side of my arm. The heat radiating from him was a physical weight, thick and comforting in the drafty room.
"There," I whispered, watching the data points snap into a clean, parabolic arc. "It matches. The balance index is valid."
"Told you."
Without looking up from his display, his large left hand reached out and nudged a sealed plastic bottle of water across the desk, stopping it right against the base of my coffee mug.
"Drink," he ordered softly. "You're running on fumes."
I blinked at the bottle. A strange, tight warmth crept up my neck, catching me completely off guard. I twisted the cap with stiff fingers, taking two long swallows, the cool water soothing the burning dryness in my throat.
Under the desk, our legs brushed.
The heavy fabric of his sweatpants rested against the denim of my jeans, a steady, solid point of contact. Neither of us pulled away. He left his knee pressed against mine, an anchor keeping me tethered to the chair while my eyes burned from the endless lines of white text.
When my posture sagged at one in the morning, a dull ache knotting the base of my neck, Killian reached over with his right hand, gripped the plastic edge of my monitor, and tilted it down five degrees.
"Stop straining your chin," he said, his gravelly voice dropping an octave in the quiet room. "You hold your neck like you're waiting for someone to hit you."
"Force of habit," I murmured, rubbing my temple.
"Break it," he said, his knee nudging mine with gentle, deliberate pressure under the desk. "Keep working, Gregory. We're on file thirty-eight."
* * *
At two-oh-four in the morning, the mechanical keyboard gave a final, sharp click under my index finger.
I pressed enter.
A progress window bloomed across the center of both screens, a bright green bar crawling from left to right with agonizing slowness.
Uploading Batch Data to NCAA Compliance Database...
File 46 of 46: Complete.
Audit Status: Verified and Logged. Timestamp: 02:04:18 AM.
The green text glowed against the dark glass.
The breath rushed out of my lungs all at once, taking every ounce of adrenaline with it. The room seemed to blur; my spine went completely slack against the back of the chair, my head dropping back against the worn vinyl rest.
My right hand, trembling from four hours of non-stop typing, slipped off the edge of the desk. The plastic ballpoint pen I’d been holding rolled toward the floor.
Killian moved before it could drop.
His hand shot out with effortless, predatory speed, catching the pen an inch above the rubber matting.
He didn't drop it on the desk.
Instead, his large, calloused fingers closed gently around my wrist.
The contact was electric, a sudden shock of raw thermal heat that burned through the chill of the room. My breath seized in the center of my throat. My eyelids, heavy as iron a second before, flew wide open.
The room fell into absolute, deafening silence.
The only sound was the low hum of the cooling fans and the frantic, wild galloping of my own pulse.
Killian didn't release me. He slowly shifted in his chair, turning his broad frame toward mine. His fingers were wrapped securely around the delicate bones of my wrist, his thumb resting directly over the vein fluttering furiously beneath the surface of my pale skin.
He traced the beat with a tiny, circular motion of his thumb. The roughness of his calloused skin against my sensitive pulse point sent a wave of liquid heat pooling low and heavy in my belly.
He didn't let go. He leaned in, his massive chest crowding out the light from the monitors, until his face was inches from mine.
His dark eyes were dilated, the amber flecks burning with an intensity that made my chest ache. In the quiet of the basement, his breathing was slow, heavy, and hot, brushing across the sensitive curve of my jawline.
"We made the deadline," I whispered, the words coming out breathless and thin.
"I don't care about the deadline," he rasped, his voice dropping into a dark, gravelly register that seemed to vibrate straight through the floorboards.
His thumb pressed a fraction firmer against my pulse, feeling the frantic, undeniable rhythm of my body answering his.
"Why are you still looking at me like I'm the enemy, Nadia?" he murmured, his face dipping closer until his lips hovered a millimeter from the hollow beneath my ear.
The heat of his breath made every hair on my arms stand on end. The scent of him—crushed cedar, black pepper, and warm skin—was intoxicating, clouding the last remnants of my rational mind.
I swallowed, the sound loud in the quiet room. My fingers twitched, my knuckles relaxing their defensive grip for the first time in seven months.
I looked into the dark, ruined beauty of his face, at the silver scar through his eyebrow, and felt the heavy, unyielding warmth of his hand holding me still.
The hatred wasn't just cracking.
It was wholly, irreversibly gone.