Chapter 31
Nadia POV
The yellowing plastic exhaust fan set into the bathroom ceiling hummed at a jagged sixty cycles, rattling in its metal housing like a loose bearing.
Six-forty-eight on Saturday morning.
Outside the small frosted window, the Upper Peninsula was locked in the gray, sub-zero gloom of early dawn, the wind off Lake Superior driving fine needles of ice against the double panes.
I sat on the freezing white hexagonal floor tiles, my back pressed hard against the cold enamel of the clawfoot bathtub, my knees pulled up to the chest of my thick wool sweater.
My socks had slid off on the linoleum, my bare heels planted flat against the grout, the chill of the floorboards seeping straight through my skin into the marrow of my shins.
On the porcelain rim of the sink, resting atop a folded square of brown paper towel, lay the white plastic stick.
Beside my right thigh on the floor, the cracked glass screen of my phone counted down the remaining seconds of the three-minute timer.
00:18.
00:17.
00:16.
A slick layer of cold sweat coated my hairline, dripping past my temple to sting the corner of my eye. My throat felt parched, raw from another dry-heave over the basin ten minutes ago, the sour taste of stomach acid lingering on the back of my tongue.
Every certainty I had built across four years of academic discipline had narrowed down to the digital numbers flashing on that cracked screen.
My fellowship. The capstone defense scheduled for January. The eight-thousand-dollar grant. The promises I had made to my father while his grease-stained, scarred hands counted twenty-dollar bills on our kitchen table in Duluth.
00:05.
00:04.
00:03.
My pulse hammered behind my eardrums with a deafening, violent cadence, so loud it drowned out the rattle of the exhaust fan.
00:00.
The phone vibrated against the tile, a short, muted buzz that sounded like an execution order.
* * *
I didn't move for three seconds. The breath backed up in my windpipe, thick as stone, refusing to pass my vocal cords.
Slowly, forcing my trembling limbs to obey, I planted my hands on the porcelain rim of the bathtub and pushed myself upright. My knees shook violently beneath my jeans, my shins threatening to buckle as I took two unsteady steps toward the pedestal sink.
The chrome faucet dripped with a steady, hollow plink into the drain.
I braced both hands on the edge of the basin, my knuckles turning bloodless against the cold ceramic, and looked down.
In the small rectangular indicator window, framed by blue plastic, two dark, thick pink lines burned against the white background.
Not faint. Not questionable.
A stark, unmistakable positive.
The floor beneath my bare feet seemed to drop out into a bottomless void.
My vision tunneled instantly, the edges of the room blurring into a gray, swimming haze as the blood drained out of my face in a single, crushing drop. A sharp, strangled gasp tore from my throat, my lungs seizing in a tight, agonizing spasm that made my ribcage ache.
My hands slipped on the smooth porcelain. I caught my balance by throwing my hip against the wood of the cabinet, the breath leaving me in short, ragged rasps.
Two lines.
Thirty-five days since the night of the blizzard at his house on the bluffs. The orange glow of the woodstove in the quiet dark. The dark navy sheets of his bed.
Twenty-two days since my cycle had failed to arrive.
The nausea, the sudden aversion to the roast coffee at the quad café, the strange, heavy warmth that had settled deep beneath my pelvic bone over the last two weeks—it wasn't exhaustion. It wasn't the flu that Siobhan had warned me about.
It was a life.
His life.
An involuntary sob hitched in my chest, my left hand leaving the edge of the sink. Slowly, with a trembling reverence that made my vision blur with tears, my palm dropped to the flat expanse of my lower abdomen beneath the heavy knit of my sweater.
My fingers spread wide across my belly, pressing flat against the denim of my jeans.
The fabric was soft. My stomach was flat, utterly unchanged to the eye.
Yet beneath my palm, deep in the warm, dark bedrock of my pelvis, a sacred, undeniable pulse seemed to answer the weight of my hand.
Killian’s child.
The baby of the man who had knelt before me on the rubber mats of the arena annex, who had held my freezing hands in his massive, scarred palms, who had murmured broken vows into my throat while the snow shook the rafters of his house.
The terror that had paralyzed my throat didn't vanish, but beneath the panic, something fierce, ancient, and unshakeable took root in my chest. A savage maternal protectiveness flared in my blood like a match struck in the dark, driving the cold from my veins.
A single hot tear tracked down my cheek, splashing onto the plastic casing of the test on the counter.
I wasn't an imposter anymore. I wasn't just a student fighting to survive an administrative review.
I was a mother holding the future of the only man I had ever loved.
* * *
I turned the brass faucet on, letting the icy well water run until steam stopped rising from the pipes.
I cupped the freezing water in my palms, splashing my face three times, the shock of the cold tightening the skin over my cheekbones, chasing the gray pallor from my skin until a sharp, determined flush bloomed across my neck.
I dried my skin with a clean towel, watching the steady, focused resolve return to my honey-brown eyes in the mirror.
I reached down, took the white plastic test from the counter, and wrapped it carefully in a clean white handkerchief. I unzipped the hidden interior pocket of my heavy charcoal wool coat, sliding the small bundle deep inside, right over my ribs, directly above the pounding of my heart.
The weight of it felt like an iron breastplate against my chest.
I thought of Martin Cole standing in the library annex yesterday, his greasy smirk gleaming as he tapped the red-tabbed folder against the oak table.
Eight AM tomorrow. The bus to Duluth.
Cole thought he had me cornered. He thought I was a frightened girl who would run back to the iron range, sign away her fellowship, and disappear into the snow to keep from being dragged through the mud.
He had miscalculated.
He didn't know who I was. He didn't know the steel my father had beaten into my spine in that shipyard. And he didn't know that Killian Castaneda was no longer an athlete I was assigned to evaluate.
He was the father of my child.
I was not getting on a bus. I was not signing a withdrawal form. And I sure as hell was not going to let a pathetic, predatory blackmailer shred Killian’s life forty-eight hours before the NHL draft bureau locked his future in stone.
I would go straight to The Pit.
I would take the back stairs to the private player underpass before the team took the ice for morning line rushes.
I would show Killian the test. I would show him Cole’s blackmail.
And we would stand together—an unbreakable, unyielding wall—and burn Cole’s threats to ashes before the first puck hit the ice.
I pulled on my heavy leather boots, lacing the eyelets tight around my ankles. I dragged my thick cream scarf twice around my neck, buttoning the heavy wool of my coat securely over my stomach.
I grabbed my keys off the entryway table, pulled the door open, and stepped out onto the porch into the freezing Michigan gale.
The snow was coming down in thick, blinding sheets, the wind screaming off the lake, but as my boots hit the icy asphalt heading toward the arena, I didn't feel the cold.
I was walking into the fire.
And I was ready to tear down anyone who stood in our way.