Chapter 36
Killian POV
The freezing rain clicked against the drawn bedroom blinds like a handful of birdshot thrown against the glass.
Two-forty in the morning.
I sat on the bare edge of the mattress in the dark, my elbows planted on my knees, staring at the patch of yellow streetlamp light spilling across the pine floorboards.
The house was dead.
Downstairs on the kitchen counter, three unopened priority envelopes from the Montreal Canadiens player personnel department sat buried beneath a stack of draft representation contracts.
On the floor by the cold woodstove, the regional championship trophy leaned against the brickwork, the silver plaque smudged with dust and dried beer, unpolished, unlooked-at, abandoned like scrap iron.
I hadn't eaten since Saturday night. I hadn't slept more than forty broken minutes at a stretch since the arena underpass.
My jaw was raw with three days of thick, dark stubble.
The split on my lower lip had cracked open again, tasting of stale salt, while the deep bone-bruises from Northland State throbbed along my ribs with a dull, sickening persistence.
In the center of my right palm, clamped so tight the metal had bitten a permanent purple crescent into the flesh, was her brass house key.
The phantom scent of her—peppermint soap, winter air, and the clean vanilla warmth of her skin—clung to the dark navy cotton of the sheets beside my hip. Every inhale was an exercise in pure, suffocating agony, dragging air through lungs that felt lined with powdered glass.
You are the biggest mistake of my life.
The words I had thrown into her face in that concrete tunnel echoed in the darkness of the room, vibrating against my skull with the mechanical repetition of an execution blade.
I had thought I was protecting myself. I had spent three years convinced that love was a trap designed to break bones, that anyone who got close to eighty-eight was doomed to bleed.
So I had taken the poison Martin Cole handed me, wrapped it in my own self-loathing, and used it to butcher the only woman who had ever looked at my ruined soul without flinching.
The heavy front door downstairs crashed open against the entryway baseboard with a violent, splintering bang.
* * *
Heavy, hurried bootsteps pounded up the wooden stairs, taking the risers two at a time.
I didn't reach for a weapon. I didn't move off the edge of the mattress. I sat in the dark, my knuckles bloodless around the key, waiting for whatever ghost had finally come to put a bullet through my chest.
The bedroom door was kicked inward, slamming back against the drywall.
The overhead ceiling light snapped on.
The sudden, harsh yellow glare burned into my retinas, making my vision swim with blinding white spots.
Hayes Bennett stood in the doorway.
He was breathing hard, his blond hair soaked with freezing rain, wearing his black Barrow hockey parka unzipped over a gray hoodie. His face was mottled with a wild, furious crimson, his blue eyes wide, burning with an intensity that I had never seen on him in four years of sharing a locker room.
He didn't ask if I was alive. He crossed the room in three violent strides, reached down, and grabbed the neckline of my gray shirt, hauling me off the edge of the mattress with enough force to strain the seams.
"Get up, Castaneda," Hayes snarled, his voice shaking with a savage, furious disgust. "Get on your feet and look at what you did."
I didn't fight him. My arms hung heavy at my sides, my two hundred and twenty-eight pounds swaying on socks that felt anchored in cement.
Hayes shoved me back against the dresser, reached into the pocket of his parka, and slammed an iPad and a thick stack of printed documents onto the wood between my elbows.
"Look at it!" he roared, pointing a trembling finger at the glowing screen. "Look at the time stamps, you arrogant son of a bitch!"
My vision blurred, the room tilting on its axis as the blood rushed cold and deafening behind my ears.
On the screen was an unedited audio file extracted from an encrypted cloud drive, accompanied by an email chain dated Friday, December nineteenth.
From: Cole, M. (Investigative Media)
To: Lindqvist, R. (Northland Athletics)
Attachment: Holt_Promissory_Note_Copy.pdf
Subject: Barrow Disqualification Package.
Beneath the email was the raw, unedited audio recording taken from the Science Library archives thirty-six hours before the championship game.
I tapped the glass with a numb thumb.
Cole’s greasy, purring voice filled the quiet bedroom:
"Sign the withdrawal, Gregory. Walk away from the fellowship, or I drop this file on the scouts tomorrow morning and end his draft."
Then came Nadia’s voice.
Clear. Cold. Hard as forged steel, ringing with that razor-sharp defiance I knew down to the marrow of my bones:
"You listen to me, Cole. You take your stolen papers and you get out of my sight.
Killian Castaneda carried his brother's hospital bills for three years while your friends ran an illegal checking camp in Duluth.
If you put one finger on his eligibility, I will take the raw dasher-board impact data to the state attorney general and have you indicted for extortion before you clear the county line. I will protect his name with my life."
The room seemed to drop out beneath my feet.
The air in my chest froze solid, locking my bronchial tubes in a vice of pure, suffocating horror.
Hayes threw the paper documents against my chest, the sheets scattering across the dresser like dead leaves.
"Morris signed an affidavit two hours ago," Hayes rasped, his voice cracking with raw fury.
"The eight-thousand-dollar grant was an internal faculty stipend created by the university counsel to bypass NCAA compliance!
Nadia didn't apply for it. She didn't even know the funding source was linked to booster escrow until Cole shoved it in her face! "
He took a step closer, his face inches from mine, his fingers digging into my collar.
"She went to the arena on Saturday to save your career, Killian," Hayes whispered, each word a sledgehammer pulverizing my ribs.
"She had the police report on Holt. She came to the tunnel to warn you that Cole was waiting with the spliced tape.
And you stood there in your jersey and called her a whore. "
* * *
The floorboards didn't hold me.
My knees gave out with a sudden, violent finality, two hundred and twenty-eight pounds of dense athletic muscle crashing straight down onto the bare pine with a bone-jarring thud that rattled the baseboards.
Hayes stepped back, looking down at me with cold, unforgiving eyes.
"She packed her apartment on Monday morning," Hayes said, his voice flat as a tombstone. "Siobhan helped her load the car. She withdrew from campus residency, severed her fellowship, and vanished into northern Minnesota. She's gone, Castaneda. And you're the one who pulled the trigger."
Hayes turned on his heel.
His boots sounded down the hallway, down the wooden stairs, the front door closing with a dull, final click that left the house in absolute, suffocating silence.
I stayed on the floor.
My forehead struck the cold pine boards with a dull, heavy thud.
A sound tore from the base of my lungs—a dry, ragged sob that sounded like an animal dying in a trap, violent and broken, rattling my ribcage until the unhealed bruises along my side screamed with agony.
She had defended me.
She had stood in that freezing library and stared down a blackmailer to keep my dream alive. She had run through the blizzard to the arena tunnel, breathless, terrified, holding her coat closed against the wind, coming to stand beside me in the fire.
And I had looked into her honey-brown eyes, called her a parasite, and kicked her heart into the dirt.
My fingers clenched around the brass key until the notched teeth sliced clean through the skin of my palm.
Warm, sticky blood welled up between my fingers, dripping slow and steady onto the pine floorboards beneath my face.
A butcher.
I had spent my entire life terrified of becoming the monster that broke people.
And in the end, I had destroyed the only sacred thing that had ever belonged to me.
I lay there in the pool of my own blood for ten minutes, listening to the freezing rain lash the glass, feeling the last scrap of my pride, my draft prestige, and my athletic arrogance turn to black ash in my throat.
The pain didn't kill me. It stripped me down to the bare, bleeding bone.
Slowly, dragging air through a windpipe that felt scorched, I pushed my palms flat against the wood.
I rose to my feet.
The weakness in my knees was gone, replaced by a cold, feral, terrifying clarity that locked into my marrow like carbon steel.
The draft was meaningless. The Montreal contract was garbage. The university, Palmer, the scouts—they didn't matter. None of it mattered.
I looked at the blood smeared across the brass key in my hand, then looked at the reflection of my hollow, ruined face in the dark window glass.
The enforcer was dead.
The scared kid from the iron range who hid behind a jersey was dead.
I wiped the blood from my hand onto the thigh of my sweatpants, picked up my keys from the dresser, and grabbed my heavy black coat.
I was going to find Martin Cole.
I was going to tear Derrick Palmer's office down to the concrete footings.
And then I was going to tear apart every mile of frozen road between here and the Canadian border until I found Nadia Gregory, dropped to my knees in the snow, and crawled through broken glass until she let me bleed for her.
Act Four had begun.
And I was going to burn the world to the ground to bring my girl home.