Chapter 27
Nadia POV
The brass bell above the door of the North Quad Café gave a cheerful chime that made a sharp spike of pain shoot straight behind my right temple.
Wednesday morning, eight-fifteen. Outside, a bitter frost glazed the red brick pathways of the quad, turning the fallen pine needles into brittle needles of ice.
Inside, the café was a humid soup of wet wool parkas, steaming espresso wands, and the heavy, sweet scent of cinnamon rolls baking in the kitchen ovens.
I reached the front of the line, handing the barista a crumpled five-dollar bill.
"Dark roast drip, large," I said, my voice sounding thin to my own ears.
The cardboard cup was scalding against my cold fingers as she passed it across the laminate counter. I took the plastic lid, snapped it into place, and raised the cup to my mouth, blowing softly across the sipping hole to cool the liquid.
The heavy, oily vapor of the roasted dark beans hit my nostrils.
My stomach didn't just turn. It revolted.
A violent, sickening heave gripped the base of my esophagus, so sudden and savage that the air rushed out of my lungs in a strangled gasp.
A bitter, metallic wash of sour bile coated the back of my tongue, and a sheet of cold, clammy sweat broke out across my hairline and the back of my neck in a single second.
The wood-paneled walls of the café seemed to tilt at a forty-five-degree angle.
I shoved the steaming cup into the nearest plastic trash bin, clamped my hand firmly over my mouth, and lunged toward the narrow hallway leading to the single-occupancy restrooms.
I shoved the deadbolt on the restroom door, dropping my leather satchel onto the linoleum with a heavy thud, and hit my knees in front of the porcelain basin.
My body convulsed in two dry, agonizing heaves that rattled my ribs and left my throat burning with acid. Nothing came up—there was nothing in my stomach except the half-glass of tap water I had forced down at dawn.
I rested my forehead against the cold porcelain edge of the sink, dragging in ragged, shuddering breaths through my nose, waiting for the room to stop spinning.
Food poisoning, I thought, my fingernails digging into the seams of my denim jeans until the denim bit into the flesh of my palms. The cafeteria chicken from Monday night. Or the flu that Siobhan said was going through the athletic dorms.
I pushed myself upright, grabbing the edge of the sink with trembling hands.
The face staring back at me in the scratched mirror looked hollow, bleached of color. The skin beneath my dark honey eyes was bruised with gray shadows, my cheekbones sharp, my lower lip pale and bitten raw.
I turned the brass faucet handle, letting the freezing Michigan well water run over my wrists until the cold shocked my nervous system back into alignment.
I cupped the water in my hands, rinsing the sour taste from my mouth, splashing the freezing liquid over my cheeks and forehead until the redness returned to my skin.
I smoothed my hair, pinned the unruly chestnut curls back with my silver clips, and forced my shoulders to drop.
I was a biomechanics researcher. I understood physiology.
This was mid-semester exhaustion. Four straight weeks of running sixty hours of motion-capture tracking, writing twenty pages of capstone methodology, and spending my nights awake in Killian’s bed, listening to his heartbeat while my own body tried to process the physical shock of loving a man who consumed every breath in my lungs.
I grabbed my satchel, pushed open the restroom door, and walked out into the freezing air toward the athletic complex.
* * *
The private video annex adjoining Sub-Basement Lab 04 smelled of chilled concrete, dry radiator heat, and the sharp menthol of liniment.
I pushed the heavy door open, stepping over the threshold, pulling my thick woolen scarf from my throat. My knees still felt slightly loose, like rubber bands stretched a fraction too tight, but I held my chin up, determined not to let a lingering stomach bug derail my morning data check.
Killian was sitting at the long oak review table beneath the wall monitors.
He was wearing his dark gray team fleece, the sleeves shoved up to his elbows, his black hockey shorts exposing thick, scarred thighs.
A black binder of Northland State defensive schemes lay open before him, his fingers holding an aluminum stylus.
His dark hair was damp at the nape from his morning skate, curling slightly against the band of his collar.
The moment the door latch clicked, his head snapped up.
His dark eyes found my face, and the lazy, relaxed line of his jaw died in half a heartbeat.
He didn't say good morning. He didn't ask about the data.
He dropped the stylus onto the table with a sharp clatter, kicked his heavy wooden chair back, and crossed the room in three long, predatory strides.
Before I could set my bag down, his broad hands reached out, sliding the thirty-pound leather strap off my shoulder and setting the bag on the floor with a dull thud.
His palms came up, framing the sides of my face.
His hands were enormous, rough with callouses, and burning with that unshakeable, furnace-like heat that always made the chill in my bones dissolve. His thumbs stroked across my cheekbones, testing the waxy pale skin beneath my eyes.
"You're white as chalk, Nadia," he rasped, his voice thick with gravel, sharp with immediate, protective alarm.
"I'm fine," I whispered, though my voice cracked on the syllables. "Just a bad cup of coffee on the way over."
"You're shaking," he rumbled, his brow furrowing, the silver scar through his left eyebrow pulling taut against his temple.
He didn't wait for an explanation. He slipped an arm around my waist, his other hand taking my wrist, and guided me toward the deep leather sofa against the interior wall. He sat me down on the cushions, then dropped straight to one knee on the black rubber runner in front of me.
At six-foot-four and two hundred and twenty-eight pounds, seeing him kneel on the floor was a sight that knocked the breath clean out of my lungs.
He took both of my freezing hands into his large, hot palms, wrapping his fingers around mine, rubbing firm, rhythmic friction back into my knuckles.
"Your skin feels like ice, sweetheart," he murmured, his dark eyes searching mine with an intensity that made my throat ache with sudden emotion. "Sit back. Put your head against the wall."
"Killian, you have team film in ten minutes—"
"Briggs can wait," he ordered softly, his voice dropping into that dark, low command register that brooked zero argument. "Breathe for me. Good girl. Just sit still."
He rose for two seconds, crossed to his locker, and returned with an unopened bottle of spring water and a fresh paper sleeve of saltine crackers.
He unscrewed the cap, held the bottle to my lips until I took three slow, careful swallows, and then peeled the wax paper back on the crackers, breaking off a small square and pressing it into my fingers.
"Eat," he commanded gently, his palm returning to my knee, his thumb stroking steady, grounding circles over the denim of my jeans. "You didn't eat dinner last night, and you skipped breakfast. You're running your body into the dirt, Nadia."
The saltine tasted dry, but the bland cracker settled the lingering nausea in my stomach.
I chewed slowly, swallowing the small bite, looking down at his scarred face in the dim light of the annex.
The campus saw an executioner. They saw eighty-eight, the brute who had broken bones in the regional tournament. But down here, kneeling on a cold basement floor with my cold hands wrapped in his, he was the only sanctuary I had ever known.
A sharp knock sounded on the frosted glass of the annex door.
The handle rattled, and Coach Briggs stuck his gray head into the room, his windbreaker zipped to his neck. "Castaneda. Film room. Now. The power-play tape from the Minnesota series just loaded."
Killian’s jaw tightened. He didn't rise immediately; he kept his eyes on my face for two more seconds, his thumb giving one final, firm squeeze to my knee.
"I'll be back in fifteen minutes," he whispered, rising to his full height, towering over the sofa. "Don't touch that bag. Don't leave this couch. Finish the crackers, or I'm carrying you up to the car myself."
"Yes, Captain," I murmured, a faint, tired smile touching my lips.
He leaned down, pressed a slow, firm kiss to the crown of my head, and stepped out into the hallway, pulling the heavy door shut behind him.
* * *
The annex fell into absolute, heavy silence.
The only sound was the distant hum of the ice plant through the concrete footings and the rhythmic hiss of the radiator valve in the corner.
I leaned my head back against the leather sofa, closing my eyes. The nausea had finally retreated to a dull, manageable ache, replaced by an overwhelming, leaden exhaustion that seemed to weigh down every bone in my limbs.
My breasts felt oddly tender, a dull soreness aching along the sides where the fabric of my bra pressed against my ribs.
I reached into my coat pocket, pulling out my phone to check the time.
I unlocked the screen, tapping the calendar icon to review my capstone submission deadlines for Dr. Morris.
The digital grid bloomed across the glass.
Wednesday, December 10.
My thumb hovered over the screen, scrolling backward through the dates.
A tiny, cold prickle began at the base of my skull, creeping slowly down my neck like melting snow.
I looked at the color-coded dots marking my menstrual cycle.
My period had been due on Friday, November 28.
Twelve days ago.
My breath caught in my windpipe. The air inside the small room suddenly felt thin, freezing, devoid of oxygen.
No.
I blinked hard, staring at the screen, forcing my analytical mind to run the numbers again.
I was regular. In four years of high-stress exams, nineteen-credit semesters, and twelve-hour laboratory shifts, my cycle had never varied by more than forty-eight hours.
Twelve days late.
My thumb tapped the screen, scrolling back to the second weekend of November.
Saturday, November 15. The night of the historic blizzard.
His saltbox house on the bluffs. The orange glow of the woodstove humming in the corner.
The heavy navy sheets of his bed. His massive body pinned over mine in the dark, his voice ruined and raw as he murmured broken praise into my neck, losing every shred of his control as the storm screamed against the cedar walls outside.
Twenty-five days ago.
The coffee repulsion.
The sudden, violent wave of nausea that had brought me to my knees in the quad café twenty minutes ago.
The metallic tang lingering on the back of my tongue.
The strange, feverish warmth that had lived in my skin for two straight weeks.
The room went dead, terrifyingly still.
A high-pitched ringing filled my ears, drowning out the hum of the radiator, drowning out the distant thud of pucks against the boards on the ice above. My vision tunneled down to the bright glass of my phone screen, the dates blurring into meaningless black digits.
My hand moved.
Slowly, involuntarily, my left palm left my lap.
I pressed my trembling fingers flat against my lower abdomen, right over the center of my pelvis beneath the heavy knit of my sweater.
The fabric was soft. My stomach was flat, utterly unchanged to the eye.
Yet beneath the denim, beneath the skin, a terrifying, sacred truth seemed to pulse against the pads of my fingers—an impossible, delicate life that had taken root in the dark while we were building our little empire out of the cold.
Killian’s baby.
A single, silent tear slipped over my lower lashes, burning hot as it tracked down my pale cheek, dripping onto the screen of my phone.
I sat alone on the leather couch in the gut of the arena, my hand pressed to my belly, my heart hammering against my ribs in a wild, dizzying rhythm of sheer terror and breathless, profound awe.
The storm hadn't passed.
It was living inside of me.