Chapter 2
Coast POV
The high-ankle sprain did not burn; it ground. Every time my right heel struck the rubber flooring of the tunnel, the distal tibiofibular syndesmosis sheared against the fibula like two broken bricks rubbing together in wet sand.
I ignored it. Pain was just telemetry. It was data the nervous system fed the brain when muscle fibers frayed and ligaments stretched past their elastic limit. If you didn't acknowledge the signal, the signal had no authority over the bone.
I dropped my heavy gear bag onto the pine bench in the varsity locker room, the zipper splitting with a dull rip.
The air inside the room was stale, thick with the stench of damp shin guards, eucalyptus analgesic balm, and the metallic residue of eighteen men sweating out weekend alcohol.
Over by the drying racks, Kip Callahan was methodically scraping black friction tape off the blade of his goalie paddle with a butter knife.
"You're dragging the heel, Stuart," Kip said without looking up, the blade shaving a curl of gummy adhesive onto the floorboards.
"Coach saw it during third-period penalty-kill drills on Saturday.
Mercer saw it too. Mercer spent the whole third period staring at your right skate like a dog waiting for a steak to fall off the counter. "
"Mercer can stare all he wants," I growled, stripping the gray compression shirt off my shoulders.
The fabric peeled away from my skin with a wet snap.
The air in the locker room hit my bare chest like a slap of wet slush, cooling the sweat pooled along the scar over my left clavicle.
Three inches of jagged, raised tissue from a skate blade four years ago.
A reminder of what happened when you let your attention drift for half a second.
"Ninety-eight days," Kip muttered, turning the composite paddle over in his taped palms. "Frozen Four in St. Paul. Grant Wesley was in the mezzanine on Saturday night taking notes on an iPad. Boston isn't offering a three-year entry-level deal to a blueliner who needs a cane to clear the crease."
"Shut up, Kip."
"I'm just giving you the board count."
"I don't need the count."
I grabbed a clean gray long-sleeve shirt from my stall, hauling it over my head. My knuckles throbbed where I'd caught a shoulder pad during the scrimmage, the skin cracked and scabbed over the joints. Underneath the bruised flesh, my blood surged with a dark, restless rhythm.
I couldn't shake the sensation of the corridor five minutes ago.
My forearm still held the phantom imprint of her arm—small, lean, dense with wiry muscle beneath that ridiculous canvas coat. Tallulah Barry.
When she crashed into me, her hands had slammed flat against my chest to stop her momentum.
Even through the soaked cotton of my shirt, her palms had felt burning hot, like dry kindling catching an open flame.
And the smell of her. In a building that reeked of rot, ammonia, and wet wool, she smelled of crushed pine needles, bitter dark roast coffee, and rain-soaked wool.
Most people stepped off the rubber runners when I came down the tunnel. They gave me the boards because they knew what 228 pounds of moving mass did to human cartilage.
Not Barry.
She had stood there in the draft, her jaw set, her chin tilted at that infuriating forty-five-degree angle, telling me I was dragging my medial edge.
Her brown eyes hadn't wavered for a single fraction of a second.
She had looked right past the captain's patch, right past the size, and seen the weakness in the right joint before the team doctors had even finished reviewing the digital scans.
A muscle in my jaw jumped. I reached down, grabbed the laces of the carbon-fiber boot, and jerked the straps tight until the plastic shell bit hard into my lower shin.
The locker room door swung open with a concussive rattle.
Coach Bramwell Hayes stood in the frame, his gray hair cropped flat to his skull, a Garrison windbreaker zipped over his thick neck. He didn't look at Kip. His eyes nailed me to the bench.
"Stuart. Thorne’s office. Right now."
"Ice time is in twenty minutes, Coach."
"You're not touching the ice," Hayes barked, his voice slicing through the locker room chatter like a clean skate edge. "Get your ass up the stairs before I have the trainers carry you."
* * *
The sports medicine suite smelled of rubbing alcohol, floor wax, and administrative doom.
I pushed the door open, my rigid boot thumping against the linoleum. The room was small, heated by an ancient baseboard radiator that hissed and clanked against the wall.
Director Aris Thorne was behind the steel desk, rubbing his temples like he had a migraine drilling through his frontal lobe. Corinne Vane, the compliance officer who treated our roster like an audit sheet, stood beside the metal filing cabinets with her arms crossed over her tailored wool coat.
And standing in the center of the room, rigid as an oak plank, was Tallulah Barry.
She hadn't taken off her coat. Her equipment case rested beside her boots, her hands clamped tightly around the straps of a canvas shoulder bag. When the latch clicked behind me, she didn't jump. She just turned her head, her honey-dark eyes locking onto mine with the warmth of a frozen pond.
Her collarbones rose and fell beneath her dark sweater. She was breathing fast, but her mouth was an uncompromising, flat line.
"Sit down, Coast," Thorne said, gesturing to an empty vinyl chair.
"I'll stand," I rasped, leaning my weight onto my left leg, keeping my right boot planted flat.
"You'll sit if I tell you to sit," Hayes growled, coming in behind me and letting the heavy door slam shut. The coach stood by the frame, crossing his thick arms. "Look at the desk."
Three large MRI films were spread across the green blotter. I didn't need a medical degree to read the white gap between the bones of my lower leg. The syndesmotic ligament was stretched to the point of structural failure. The medial collateral ligament was frayed, swollen with gray edema fluid.
"Grade Two syndesmosis," Thorne said, his voice flat. "Partial MCL involvement. Standard protocol is six weeks in a non-weight-bearing cast, followed by four weeks of progressive loading. That puts your return-to-play window somewhere in late April."
"The Frozen Four is April eleventh," I said. The words tasted like iron shavings on the back of my tongue. "I'm not sitting."
"You don't have a choice, Stuart," Vane cut in, her voice dripping with bureaucratic acid. "The NCAA Division One compliance manual is unequivocal. With this diagnostic profile, you are an immediate institutional liability. You cannot skate without objective clearance."
"I played two periods on it Saturday."
"And you made it worse," Tallulah said.
Her voice wasn't loud, but it cut through the room like a cold draft under a door.
I turned my head, my eyes narrowing as I bore down on her. She didn't retreat. She stood her ground, her small frame pulled upright, her fingernails biting into the strap of her bag.
"The joint has eight millimeters of abnormal lateral translation," she said, speaking directly to Thorne, ignoring me like I was a broken mannequin in the corner.
"Every stride he took in the third period sheared the micro-scarring off the anterior ligament.
If he takes another direct lateral load on that skate without neuromuscular stabilization, the joint capsule will rupture.
You won't be managing a sprain. You'll be scheduling a reconstructive screw fixation. "
A savage, dark heat flared behind my ribs. "You talk a lot for someone who doesn't skate, Barry."
She finally looked at me, her eyes flashing with a lethal, controlled fury.
"I don't need to skate to understand basic Newtonian physics, Stuart.
You're compensating with your right hip, your glute medius is completely inhibited, and your pelvis is dropping three degrees on the drive phase.
You aren't playing hockey. You're surviving. "
"Enough," Hayes snapped. The coach stepped forward, his heavy hand coming down on the corner of Thorne's desk.
"Here is where we stand. The athletic department is not throwing away a Frozen Four bid because our captain has an ego the size of Lake Champlain.
Thorne has designed an accelerated neuromuscular protocol.
Sixty hours. Thirty sessions on the subterranean force-plate suite.
Two hours every morning, five-thirty to seven-thirty. "
"Who's running the telemetry?" I asked, though the answer was already settling like lead in my gut.
"Miss Barry," Vane said smoothly. "She is the only student fellow accredited on the multi-axis sensor array. Her fellowship requires department service hours. Your medical clearance requires her daily kinematic signature."
"Find someone else," I said.
"There is no one else," Thorne replied, his eyes tired. "The staff biomechanists are committed to the Olympic training center in Lake Placid until March. It's Tallulah, or you sit out the remainder of your junior year."
"And if either of you fails to report," Vane added, her eyes fixing first on me, then shifting with clinical cruelty to Tallulah, "the consequences are absolute.
Stuart is placed on indefinite medical disqualification.
And Miss Barry's eighteen-thousand-dollar tuition waiver is revoked for breach of fellowship contract. "
I looked at Tallulah. The color had drained from her lips, leaving her skin pale, but her jaw remained locked in stone. She wasn't looking at Vane. She was looking at the desk, her fingers trembling slightly where they gripped the nylon strap.
Eighteen grand. That was the leverage they held over her neck.
And for me, it was Julian.
If Boston walked away from my signing rights on August fifteenth, the entry-level money was gone.
The specialized spinal rehabilitation facility in Rochester—the one with the hydrotherapy rigs that could give Julian back his partial mobility—cost six thousand dollars a month out of pocket.
My father wouldn't pay a dime. Arthur had washed his hands of both of us the day Julian's wheelchair was delivered to the front porch.
The room felt entirely too small. The air thinned, the baseboard radiator hissing like a pit of snakes.
"Five-thirty," I rasped, the words tearing out of my chest like jagged tin. "Tomorrow morning."
Tallulah didn't say a word. She grabbed her equipment case by the handle, spun on her heel, and walked out the door, the metal clasps rattling with every step.
* * *
I caught her at the bottom of the concrete stairwell.
She was moving fast for someone carrying sixty pounds of hardware, her boots taking the risers two at a time, heading down toward the subterranean tunnel that led to the student lot.
"Barry."
She didn't stop.
"Tallulah."
She kept walking, her canvas coat swishing against her thighs.
I ignored the searing stab of agony in my ankle, lengthened my stride, and reached the heavy fire door before she could hit the crash bar. I slammed my left palm flat against the steel plate above her head, the impact echoing down the concrete shaft like a gunshot. The door stayed shut.
She spun around, trapped in the narrow angle between the galvanized pipe railing and my chest.
She was breathing hard, her chest heaving against the green wool of her sweater.
Up close, in the dim, yellow glare of the stairwell bulb, the exhaustion in her face was stark.
Fine, faint lines bracketed her mouth; the skin over her cheekbones looked paper-thin.
But the defiance in her eyes was blazing, bright and dangerous as an open wire.
"Get out of my way, Stuart."
I didn't move. I leaned forward, letting my height blot out the overhead light, crowding her until the scent of cold cedar and rain filled the three inches between us.
"Go back up there," I murmured, my voice dropping into that low, flat register I used when things turned violent on the ice. "Tell Vane you have an ethical conflict. Tell Thorne you can't run the protocol."
"Why?" Her voice was steady, razor-sharp, cutting straight through my intimidation. "Because you're afraid of a girl with a clipboard?"
"Because you won't survive sixty hours in a locked room with me.
" I braced my other hand against the railing, boxing her in entirely.
"I don't play well with people who try to manage me.
You think you're going to hold a stopwatch and tell me when I can push?
I will break your equipment before I let you dictate my ice time. "
She didn't back up. Her spine was flush against the steel door, but she leaned forward, her face tilting up until her mouth was inches from my throat.
I could feel the heat radiating from her skin.
The rapid, frantic flutter of her carotid artery jumped against the side of her neck, begging for mercy while her eyes promised murder.
"Let me make something clear to you, Captain," she whispered.
She reached out. With two bare, ink-stained fingers, she jabbed me hard in the center of the chest, right over my sternum, right over the scar tissue beneath my shirt. The contact was electric, a sudden shock of heat that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
"I don't care about your captaincy," she said, each word deliberate, cold as Adirondack shale.
"I don't care about your Boston contract.
I don't care about your fragile, overgrown male ego.
But I have bled for four years to earn this degree, and I am not letting an entitled brute who throws temper tantrums on the ice cost me my tuition. "
She didn't drop her hand. Her fingers stayed pressed against my chest, her knuckles steady against my heart.
"You will be on the force plates at five-thirty," she said, her breath dusting warm against my chin.
"You will put the electrodes where I tell you to put them.
You will execute every single repetition to my exact kinematic standard, or I will write a failure of compliance on your chart so fast your head will spin.
You don't own me, Stuart. In that lab, I own you. "
My heart slammed against my ribs, hard and heavy, right beneath her fingertips.
A dark, feral rhythm drummed in my temples. The fury in my gut twisted, mutating into something far more dangerous—a raw, suffocating pull that made my hands itch to grab her hips, haul her up against the steel door, and kiss that vicious defiance right out of her mouth until she couldn't breathe.
I didn't move. I kept my hands flat against the steel and the iron railing, my jaw clenched so tight my molars ached.
"Five-thirty, Barry," I rasped, my voice thick with warning. "Bring your stopwatch."
She held my stare for three long, agonizing heartbeats, her fingers finally dropping from my chest. She reached down, shoved the crash bar with her hip, and stepped through into the cold subterranean air, letting the heavy steel door swing shut between us.