Chapter 16
Killian POV
The air in the marble foyer was twenty degrees colder than the ballroom, but my collar still felt like a noose strangling the base of my throat.
Nadia and I had cleared the velvet alcove thirty seconds before Palmer rounded the corner, parting like strangers caught in an awkward draft. Now, near the double French doors leading to the exterior terrace, the brass chandeliers cast long, pale bars of light across the limestone floor.
I was adjusting the cuff of my dress shirt, preparing to grab my wool coat from the cloakroom and wait for her by the truck, when the voice cut through the background hum of the gala.
"Leaving so soon, Castaneda?"
Martin Cole stepped out from behind a stone pillar.
He didn't have his drink in his hand this time.
He held a leather-bound reporter's notebook, a gold pen uncapped, his rumpled brown suit hanging off his thin frame.
Behind him stood two university regents in tailored tuxedos, along with Athletic Director Derrick Palmer, who froze the second he saw the reporter corner me in the open hall.
My boots stayed planted on the marble. I didn't turn my torso. I gave him only my profile, jaw set like an anvil.
"The bar is closed, Cole," I said, my voice flat, cold gravel. "Find another story."
"Oh, I have my story," Cole said, raising his voice by half a decibel—just loud enough to make three nearby couples pause their conversation near the coat check. "I'm just giving our star enforcer a chance to comment on the record before I file with the Duluth papers on Monday."
Palmer hurried forward, his palms out, sweat shining on his forehead. "Martin, this isn't the venue—"
"I think the university boosters would love to hear this venue," Cole cut in, his eyes gleaming with malicious satisfaction as he locked onto my face.
"Tell us, Killian. Does the Montreal front office know they're looking at a first-round prospect who paralyzed his own brother during an unregulated off-season checking drill? "
The marble beneath my shoes seemed to drop two inches.
Every drop of blood in my body turned to liquid nitrogen.
A deafening, high-pitched ringing detonated in my ears, drowning out the murmurs of the crowd, drowning out the clink of crystal, drowning out the wind rattling the terrace panes. The air in my chest froze solid, locking my ribs into a cage of jagged bone.
Mateo.
The sound of his C6 vertebra snapping against the boards in that empty Minnesota rink echoed through my skull with sickening clarity.
Cole took a step closer, smelling of gin and stale tobacco, sensing the kill.
"Three years ago this October," Cole said, pitching his voice for the regents to hear.
"You pressured a nineteen-year-old kid into taking contact from minor-league defensemen so scouts would notice your name.
He left the ice in a neck brace, and you left with a scholarship to Barrow.
Does your family's medical debt explain why the athletic department had to create a fake behavioral grant to keep you eligible? "
My fingers curled into fists inside my trouser pockets. The knuckles ground together until the cartilage popped.
My back molars clamped down so hard an agonizing bolt of pain shot through my temple. Every instinct I had ever honed on the ice screamed at me to drop my shoulder, drive Cole’s teeth through the back of his throat, and shatter his skull against the limestone floor.
Don't move.
If I laid a single finger on him, the sixty-hour mandate was dead. The diversion protocol was revoked. Five games on the bench. The Montreal scouts would pack their bags, the first-round signing bonus would vanish, and Mateo’s thirty-five-thousand-dollar balloon payment in January would default.
I was the monster. I had always been the monster.
I stood there in my tailored suit, staring at Cole with dead, hollow eyes, preparing to swallow the poison. I opened my mouth to give Palmer the standard sports-information dismissal—no comment, talk to media relations—ready to let them paint me as a butcher who broke his own kin.
"That is enough."
* * *
The voice was clear, sharp, and rang with the icy precision of a dropped scalpel.
Before I could breathe, emerald silk flashed in my peripheral vision.
Nadia stepped out from the foyer archway.
She didn't glance at me. She didn't hesitate. She moved with a fluid, terrifying elegance, her leather heels clicking with sharp authority against the marble as she walked straight into the circle and planted herself directly between me and Martin Cole.
Her back was to my chest. Her bare shoulders—slender, pale, completely exposed to the cold draft—blotted out Cole’s smirking face.
I froze, the air refusing to enter my lungs.
"Excuse me, miss," Cole sneered, waving his pen toward her like she was an errant waitress. "This is an active press inquiry."
"This is criminal harassment and a textbook violation of state defamation law," Nadia said, her voice completely devoid of emotion, level, lethal, and loud enough to carry across the entire foyer.
The room went dead silent. Even the coat check attendants stopped moving.
Cole’s smirk flickered. "I have verified records—"
"You have scraps from a forum you run out of your mother's basement," Nadia interrupted, taking half a step forward, her chin lifted at that forty-five-degree angle I knew down to the bone.
"You were fired from the Minneapolis Star Tribune in twenty-twenty-two for fabricating anonymous sources during the Western Collegiate tournament.
Your press credentials for this facility were rejected by the sports information office three weeks ago, which means you are currently trespassing on university property. "
Cole’s face mottled with dark, ugly crimson. "You're the kinesiology student. You don't have a say in—"
"I am the senior biomechanics fellow overseeing the department’s neuromuscular load research," she countered, her words cutting through the air like precision tools.
"And unlike you, Mr. Cole, I have read the Minnesota State High School League safety investigation regarding Mateo Castaneda’s injury. "
My pulse hammered violently against my throat. My vision blurred around the edges.
"The accident was documented by three independent orthopedic surgeons as a catastrophic structural equipment failure," Nadia stated, her eyes boring into Cole with absolute contempt.
"The dasher-board anchor at the Duluth community rink had sheared beneath the ice line, failing to absorb forty percent of the regulated impact force.
Killian Castaneda was cleared of any mechanical misconduct by the regional governing board within forty-eight hours. "
She stepped forward again, crowding Cole’s space until the man actually took a startled, involuntary step backward toward the regents.
"You are weaponizing a nineteen-year-old man’s medical rehabilitation to manufacture clicks for an unaccredited blog because you lack the journalistic integrity to cover actual athletics," she said, her voice dropping into an icy, devastating register that left Cole looking small and pathetic under the chandeliers.
"If you publish one word regarding Mateo Castaneda’s private medical history, Dr. Morris and the university counsel will file a formal tort claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress before your server can process the page. "
She turned her head slightly, her gaze locking onto Derrick Palmer, whose mouth was hanging open.
"Director Palmer," Nadia said coolly. "Escort this man off campus before I call the campus public safety dispatch myself."
Palmer swallowed hard, his face pale. He grabbed Cole by the elbow with sudden, desperate urgency. "Let's go, Martin. Right now."
Palmer hauled the sputtering reporter toward the main glass exit, the regents trailing behind them in hurried, embarrassed silence.
The foyer remained frozen, dozens of eyes staring at the woman in the emerald dress.
I looked down at her.
My chest felt as though it had been cleaved wide open with an axe. The air rushed back into my lungs, burning hot, carrying an ache so profound, so violent, that my vision wavered.
In twenty-two years, no one had ever stood in front of me.
My father had buried his head in overtime shifts at the shipyard. My coaches had told me to use my fists to solve their problems. My teammates had waited behind my shoulders for me to take the penalties. I was the wall that absorbed the hits so everyone else could skate clean.
Nobody stepped into the fire for the enforcer.
Nobody.
Except the girl with the bronze pins in her hair, who had just burned a man to the ground to keep his hands off my name.
* * *
I didn't say a word.
My right hand shot out, broad fingers wrapping securely around her slender wrist. Her skin was hot, vibrating with residual adrenaline, her pulse hammering against my palm like a captive bird.
I pulled her past the whispering donors, pushed the heavy French door open with my shoulder, and dragged her out onto the terrace.
The sub-zero gale off Lake Superior slammed into us instantly.
The freezing wind caught the hem of her emerald silk dress, whipping the fabric around her bare legs. Snow flurries swirled in the dark, stinging our faces, but neither of us moved toward the stairs.
I backed her against the heavy stone balustrade overlooking the black, churning expanse of the lake below.
In one fluid motion, I ripped off my charcoal suit jacket and threw it around her bare shoulders. The heavy wool drowned her frame, the lapels falling past her chest, sealing her inside the heat of my body.
My hands came up, framing her face.
My palms were shaking. For the first time in my life, my hands—the hands that had broken bones, the hands that had gripped composite sticks until they shattered—were trembling with a raw, terrifying awe.
Her skin was cold from the wind, her dark chestnut curls whipping across her cheekbones. Her honey-brown eyes looked up at me, wide, fierce, and entirely unrepentant.
"Why did you do that?" I rasped.
My voice was ruined, broken gravel scraping against the howling wind.
"Killian—"
"You put yourself in his crosshairs," I choked out, my thumbs pressing into the soft skin beneath her cheekbones, tilting her face up toward mine.
"Palmer was standing right there. Cole could have turned that venom on your fellowship.
He could have destroyed your funding. Why the hell did you step in front of me? "
Nadia didn't flinch. She didn't look down at the frozen terrace floor.
She reached up, her small, cold hands closing over my wrists, her fingers digging into the cuffs of my white shirt with fierce, unyielding strength.
"Because I'm not going to let a coward treat you like a monster," she whispered, her voice steady against the roar of the gale. "I'm not going to stand in a room full of cowards and watch them act like you're disposable."
A sharp, agonizing hitch seized my windpipe.
"Nadia," I breathed, my forehead dropping to rest against hers, my breath mingling with the white mist leaving her lips.
"You're not a butcher, Killian," she said, her words a quiet, unshakeable truth that pierced straight through the three-year rot in my soul. "You protect everyone in this town. It's time someone protected you."
A tremor ran through my entire frame.
I looked into her dark, beautiful eyes, feeling the heat of her small hands holding onto my wrists, and realized the truth.
Every defense I had built since I was nineteen years old was lying in ashes at my boots.
I didn't care about the draft. I didn't care about the sixty hours. I didn't care if the entire world burned to the ground tomorrow morning.
I was hers. Irrevocably, unconditionally, and entirely at her mercy.
I pulled her flush against my chest, wrapping my arms around the heavy wool of my jacket, holding her against the howling gale as the first real storm of the winter rolled in off the lake.