Chapter 33
Nadia POV
The air in the concrete underpass tasted of shaved ice, machine grease, and the bitter reek of exhaust fumes.
Overhead, six thousand pairs of boots stamped in relentless, thunderous unison against the bleachers, vibrating down through the steel support beams into the soles of my shoes.
The noise was a physical weight, pressing against my temples, making the high-frequency hum of the yellow halogen tubes overhead buzz in my teeth.
My left hand was shoved deep into the interior pocket of my heavy wool coat.
Beneath the cotton handkerchief, my trembling fingers were clamped around the smooth plastic casing of the test. The two pink lines felt burned into the pads of my fingers, a delicate, terrifying secret that had turned my blood into liquid fire.
My boots skidded on the wet black rubber runner as I rounded the corner past the stick-drying cage.
A sharp, sour wave of morning nausea rose in the back of my throat. I swallowed hard against the dry metallic tang on my tongue, forcing my lungs to draw in a ragged, burning draft of cold air.
Just reach him.
I had replayed the words a hundred times on the sprint through the blizzard from my apartment.
I would pull him into the equipment alcove.
I would show him Martin Cole’s blackmail dossier.
I would tell him that Cole was threatening to destroy his draft eligibility with Holt’s promissory note.
And then I would take his scarred, calloused hand, place it flat over my stomach beneath my coat, and tell him that we were going to be parents.
We would stand together. Just like he had sworn on my sofa twenty-four hours ago.
I turned the final blind corner near the Zamboni ramp.
Standing in the narrow alcove before the ice gate, his massive frame blotting out the light, was Killian.
His home black jersey was pulled taut across his shoulder pads, the number eighty-eight stark against the dark wool, the captain's C gleaming over his chest. His stick rested in his gloved hand, his jaw set in a rigid, square line as he stared at the concrete floor.
"Killian!"
The name tore from my throat in a breathless, ragged sob of pure relief.
I stumbled toward him, my boots catching on the edge of the matting, my right hand reaching out to grab the thick leather cuff of his hockey glove.
"Killian, thank God," I gasped, my chest heaving against the tight buttons of my coat, my vision blurring with hot, sudden tears. "Something happened. Martin Cole was at the library yesterday. He has Jared Holt's paper, he has—"
I reached for his arm.
Killian flinched.
He didn't just pull away. He recoiled as if my fingers were dipped in boiling acid, stepping back two paces onto the raw concrete with a violent, scraping screech of his skate guards.
* * *
My hand remained frozen in midair, my fingers curling around empty, freezing space.
"Don't touch me," he said.
The voice didn't belong to the man who had held me against his chest while the storm shook his house. It was a dead, hollow sound, stripped of every drop of warmth, rough gravel dragged over broken glass.
The breath locked in my windpipe.
I looked up at his face.
The silver scar through his left eyebrow was stark white against his dark skin. His jaw was clamped so hard a tendon in his cheek twitched in a steady, violent spasm, his mouth drawn into a thin, bloodless slit. But it was his eyes that knocked the floor out from under my boots.
His dark eyes were dead. Hollowed-out black pits of raw, bleeding ruin, staring at me with a hatred so absolute, so lethal, that my knees went slack beneath my coat.
"Killian?" I whispered, the word trembling on my lips like a dying ember.
Between our boots on the wet rubber runner lay a mangled, shredded ball of white bond paper.
Killian looked down at the pulp, then slowly, agonizingly, his gaze dragged back up to my face.
"Tell me how much they paid you, Gregory," he rasped.
A cold, sickening shockwave slammed into my sternum, driving the air from my lungs in a short, suffocating gasp.
"What?"
"How much?" he snarled, taking a single, crowding step forward, his massive frame towering over me in the narrow corridor.
The physical heat radiating off him wasn't the sanctuary of his bedroom; it was the suffocating, violent aura of an apex predator backed into a corner.
"Did Palmer offer you the eight thousand on day one?" he whispered, each word a serrated blade slicing straight through my breastbone. "Or did you negotiate the price after you watched me limp out of the scrimmage?"
My mind spun in wild, frantic circles, the concrete walls tilting around me. "I don't know what you're talking about—"
"A signature on a grant form!" he roared.
The sound shattered against the concrete walls, echoing down the empty underpass, loud enough to cut through the roar of the crowd overhead.
My vision blurred with black spots. My stomach heaved violently, a cold, clammy sweat breaking out across my hairline as the blood drained from my face in a single, crushing drop.
Session One. Lab 04.
The flippant, defensive remark I had thrown at Siobhan four weeks ago, when I was terrified of his size, when I was desperately trying to convince myself he was just a violent athlete with bad hips.
"Killian, listen to me," I pleaded, my voice breaking into a ragged sob, my hands coming up in front of my chest. "That was the first day. I didn't know you. Cole took that audio—"
"Cole gave me your requisition file, Nadia!
" he spat, his hands shaking inside his heavy leather gloves, the knuckles grinding together.
"He gave me the terms of your grant. Conditional on qualitative reporting regarding my behavioral instability.
You took an eight-thousand-dollar payoff from the athletic board to spy on my mechanics. "
"No!" I cried, tears spilling over my lashes, burning hot against my freezing cheeks. "That was Morris! That was the compliance diversion paperwork! I never reported anything to Palmer! I protected you—"
"You protected your tuition!" he rasped, his face dipping down until his breath, smelling of copper and bitter adrenaline, scorched my cheek.
His dark eyes were wild, swimming with an agony so profound, so devastating, that it made my own ribcage ache with phantom fractures.
"You sat in the Science Library yesterday morning," he whispered, the words shaking with a brutal, bleeding humiliation. "You handed him my private files. You traded my family's debt to save your fellowship before the NCAA dropped the hammer."
"I didn't give him anything!" I choked out, lunging forward, desperate to break through the wall of poison closing around his skull. "He cornered me, Killian! He threatened to destroy your draft if I didn't get on a bus to Duluth! I came here to tell you—"
"Stop lying to me!"
The fury in his voice tore the breath straight from my mouth.
"Did you laugh?" he whispered, his voice cracking on a ruined, jagged edge that sounded like weeping.
"When I was holding your feet by the stove?
When I was carrying you into my bed? Did you lay there under my hands, letting me look at you like you were sacred, while you calculated how many credits my draft stock was going to buy you? "
* * *
The cruelty of the words hit me like a physical blow to the heart.
The concrete beneath my boots seemed to dissolve into nothing. My throat closed on a dry, suffocating knot of pure agony, my fingers knotting into the wool of my coat over my stomach, holding myself together as the world I had built with this man crumbled into ash.
He didn't believe me.
He looked at my face, looked at my tears, and saw only the calculating parasite his past had convinced him he deserved.
The three years of guilt. The ghost of Mateo’s broken neck. The conviction that anyone who stood near him was doomed to bleed.
It had all rushed back into his veins, a black poison that blinded him to every touch, every kiss, and every vow we had shared in the dark.
I opened my mouth to tell him.
I'm carrying your baby, Killian. There is a child growing inside me.
The words formed on my tongue, heavy, fragile, and desperate.
The arena warning horn detonated down the runway.
A deafening, mechanical blast that shuddered through the concrete floor, drowning out the sound of my ragged breaths.
At the end of the hall, the double doors of the locker room banged open against the cinder blocks.
"Castaneda!"
Coach Donald Briggs marched down the rubber runner, his windbreaker zipped to the neck, his face mottled red with pre-game adrenaline. Behind him, twenty players in black jerseys were filing into the runway, the clatter of skates and the thud of composite sticks filling the narrow tunnel.
"Captain, move your feet!" Briggs barked. "Officials are on the ice! Northland is out of the tunnel!"
Killian didn't look at his coach.
He kept his dead, hollow eyes fixed on my face for two more agonizing seconds.
He stepped forward.
His massive shoulder brushed mine as he passed, a hard, unyielding collision of plastic pads and heavy wool that knocked me half a step sideways toward the cold concrete wall.
He paused, leaning down until his lips were level with the shell of my ear.
"We are done, Gregory," he rasped.
The gravel in his voice was cold as winter permafrost, vibrating straight through the bones of my skull.
"You are the biggest mistake of my life," he whispered, the words a final, lethal execution. "If you are still in this town when that final horn sounds, I will tear that fellowship to pieces myself. Don't you ever look at me again."
He straightened up.
He stepped onto the ice ramp, his skate guards clicking once before he kicked them off to the attendant, gliding through the heavy double doors into the blinding white halogens of the arena bowl.
The crowd erupted into a deafening, savage roar as number eighty-eight hit the ice.
The steel doors swung shut behind him with a dull, heavy thud that sealed the tunnel in shadow.
I was alone.
My back hit the damp cinder-block wall, my boots sliding on the wet rubber runner as my knees finally gave way.
I sank down onto the cold deck, my chest heaving in silent, suffocating sobs that tore my throat to ribbons.
My left hand pressed flat and hard against my lower abdomen, my fingers clutching the fabric of my coat, shielding the tiny, fragile heartbeat growing beneath my skin from the wreckage of our life.
He had walked away.
He had looked into my face, called me a parasite, and skated out to war.
And as the roar of six thousand strangers shook the concrete above my head, I buried my face in my knees, completely, utterly broken in the dark.