Chapter 8
Killian POV
The arena was pitch-black except for four low-wattage yellow maintenance lamps hanging from the forty-foot cedar rafters, casting long, pale pools across the fresh sheet of ice.
Twenty-four degrees.
My lungs burned with every ragged inhale, the sub-zero air scraping against my bronchial tubes like steel wool. Sweat rolled down the bridge of my nose, dripping past my lips with the bitter tang of salt, only to freeze against the stubble along my jaw.
I dug my edges into the blue line, opened my hips, and drove through a backward crossover that gouged a white trench into the frozen surface.
Faster.
Steel blades struck the ice in a rhythmic, violent cadence.
Shhhk. Shhhk. Shhhk. I took the corner at full speed, my left knee dropping inches from the deck, the centrifugal force straining the ligaments in my right ankle.
I hit the far red line, planted my skates, and threw my weight into a lateral stop.
A shower of shaved ice slammed against the acrylic dasher boards with a sharp rattle that echoed through the empty arena like gunfire.
I bent over, resting my forearms against my knees, my chest heaving in heavy, broken surges.
It was twelve-forty in the morning. My legs were trembling, the lactic acid pooling hot in my quads, but the physical exhaustion did nothing to quiet the noise in my skull.
For forty-eight hours, ever since two-oh-four Monday morning when I had caught her wrist in the sub-basement annex, my blood had been running thick and hot.
I could still feel the delicate hollow between the bones of her arm.
I could still feel that wild, frantic flutter under my thumb—the unmistakable proof that beneath all her cold charts and academic frost, Nadia Gregory was burning on the exact same fuse.
A muscle in my jaw ticked. I spit a mouthful of ice onto the boards and straightened up.
Across the rink, the metallic latch on the home bench clicked.
The sound was tiny, swallowed by the cavernous steel roof, but in the dead silence, it hit my ears like a tripped wire.
I spun toward the neutral zone, my skates gliding through the center circle without a sound.
Sitting in the dim recess of the home bench, bathed in the pale blue glow of a laptop screen, was Nadia.
* * *
She had her knees pulled up, boots resting on the wooden footboard, her oversized dark coat bundled around her like a blanket.
Her chestnut hair was loose tonight, falling in thick, disordered waves past her collarbones, a few strands catching the light from her display.
She had an aluminum clipboard balanced on her thighs, a mechanical pencil moving across the paper in sharp, rapid scratches.
The cold had already gotten to her. Her small nose was pink, her lower lip tucked between her teeth as she squinted at the monitor, her breath spilling out in steady white clouds that dissolved into the freezing air.
I coasted across the blue line, letting my momentum carry me straight to the boards in front of the bench.
The blades shaved to a gentle stop against the kick-plate. I rested my forearms on the heavy polyethylene dasher, looking down at her.
"The building is locked at eleven, Gregory," I said.
My voice was thick with gravel, scraping low in the empty arena, rough from twenty minutes of hard skating in the freezing mist.
Her pencil stopped moving.
She didn't startle. Slowly, deliberately, she lifted her head. Her honey-brown eyes were shadowed with purple bruises of fatigue, but the defiance in them was awake, sharp as a fresh edge on carbon steel.
"I have master lab clearance," she said, her voice thin in the cold, though she kept the cadence level. "Dr. Morris gave me an all-access security fob for the telemetry archives. What's your excuse?"
"I don't need an excuse to be on my own sheet," I rasped, watching the vapor swirl between our faces. "What are you doing out here? It's twenty-four degrees."
"Working." She tilted the screen toward me, displaying the high-speed motion-capture curves from Session Seven. "Your recovery vector off the left crossover is drifting three degrees wider than it was last week. You're favoring the right edge again."
A sour, dark heat flared behind my breastbone. "You came down to a freezing rink in the middle of the night to tell me my edges are crooked?"
"I came down to review the raw video before Palmer's seven AM walkthrough," she replied, her chin lifting as she clicked the pencil against the clipboard.
"You're compensating for that bruised rib.
If the compliance observer sees that asymmetry during the live drills tomorrow, he'll flag your load distribution.
I'm trying to protect your eligibility, Castaneda. "
"I don't need your protection," I said, my voice dropping an octave, heavy with a dark irritation that had nothing to do with hockey.
"Your data says otherwise," she fired back, not shrinking an inch. "You play like a blunt instrument. You think if you just skate harder, the pain stops existing. That's not discipline. That's negligence."
I stared at her through the dim light.
Her fingers were stiff from the cold, the skin around her knuckles pale and red. A microscopic shiver ran through her shoulders, a tremor she tried to suppress by pulling her arms tighter across her chest.
She was freezing. Sitting out here in an empty barn at midnight because she was too stubborn to leave a flaw in her numbers.
The anger in my chest curdled into something thick, protective, and heavy.
* * *
I unlatched the bench door with my gloved hand, the heavy gate swinging inward with a dull groan.
I stepped off the ice, my skate guards biting into the black rubber flooring as I walked into the narrow bench box. At six-foot-four, standing on two inches of steel, I blotted out the light from the rafters, casting a wide shadow across her lap.
Nadia went completely still. Her throat bobbed on a dry swallow, the tip of her tongue darting out to wet her lower lip.
I didn't say a word.
I reached up, unzipped my heavy black Barrow varsity coat—the thick wool jacket lined with insulated fleece—and pulled it off my shoulders. Steam rolled off my damp compression shirt the moment the cold air hit my chest, but I ignored the bite.
I leaned down and draped the heavy coat around her shoulders.
The wool swallowed her whole, falling past her knees, the wide shoulders drooping halfway down her arms. The heat trapped inside the fabric—thick with the scent of crushed cedar, black pepper, and the cold iron of my skin—washed over her face in a warm wave.
Nadia froze, her hands gripping the lapels instinctively. Her eyes widened, looking up at me through the shadows, startled by the sudden, overwhelming warmth.
"I'm not cold," she murmured, but her fingers sank deeper into the heavy wool, pulling it tight across her chest.
"You're shivering so hard you can't hold your pencil straight," I said, my voice a low, rough rumble that settled in the space between our chests.
I stepped closer, planting my right hand on the back of the wooden bench behind her head, boxing her in against the plexiglass partition. I leaned down until my face was six inches from hers, my breath mingling with the white clouds leaving her lips.
Her pulse point at the base of her throat was fluttering again, frantic and visible above the dark wool of my coat.
"Put the notebook away, Nadia," I commanded quietly.
She blinked, her breath catching at the sound of her name on my tongue. "The audit—"
"The audit is done," I cut in, leaning another fraction of an inch closer, until the scent of her winter-cold skin filled my senses, driving out the chill of the arena.
"The batch uploaded at two this morning.
We're clear. You're sitting out here torturing yourself because you can't stand the thought of losing control. "
Her dark eyes flashed, a spark of pride flaring beneath the exhaustion. "And you're out here skating until your lungs bleed because you're doing the exact same thing."
A faint, bitter smirk touched the corner of my mouth. "Maybe."
I raised my left hand, shedding the thick leather glove. My bare fingers were hot, calloused, and rough as I reached out and gently took the clipboard from her lap, sliding it onto the bench behind me.
She didn't stop me. Her eyes followed the movement of my hand, her lips parting on a shallow, ragged inhale.
"Look at me," I murmured, the command rough and quiet.
She lifted her chin, her gaze locking onto mine. There was no hatred left in her face. The hostility had burned away, leaving behind a raw, dizzying tension that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.
"You can analyze my stride all night, Gregory," I rasped, my thumb gently grazing the heavy wool collar right beneath her jawline, feeling the radiant heat of her skin. "You can write down every vector, every angle, and every hit. But you're not out here for the data."
"Killian," she whispered, her voice trembling, not from the cold, but from the proximity of my mouth.
"You're out here because you can't sleep either," I said, the words low and steady, a blunt statement of fact. "You're out here because every time you close your eyes, you're back in that basement with my hand on your wrist."
Her pupils dilated, swallowing the amber in her eyes until they were dark pools of moonlight. She didn't deny it. She couldn't. Her chest rose and fell in rapid, shallow breaths beneath my coat, her hands clutching the lapels like they were the only things keeping her grounded.
The silence between us stretched, thick and fragile, suspended over the frozen sheet of ice.
I stayed there, hovering over her in the dark, my hand resting on the wool by her throat, watching the realization settle deep into her bones.
She was in my space now. In my arena. Under my coat.
And neither of us had any intention of walking away.