Chapter 8
Coast POV
The chill on the ice sheet at midnight was different from the morning skate.
In the dark, without five thousand fans packing the bleachers or the heater blowers running along the rafters, the air in The Iron Foundry turned pure, biting frost. Every breath scraped the lining of my trachea like fine steel wool, freezing the sweat along my hairline before it could drip into my eyes.
I glided backward across the blue line, my skate blades cutting deep, clean trenches into the fresh glaze.
The arena was black except for two amber security lanterns burning over the Zamboni bay doors at the south end. Long, distorted shadows stretched across the ice, following the wide, sweeping arcs of my strides.
My right ankle was taped tight—three layers of rigid zinc oxide tape wrapped directly over the skin, locked beneath a compressive neoprene sleeve.
It was an illegal setup under Thorne’s protocol.
If compliance caught me on the ice without the carbon-fiber boot, Vane would pull my medical eligibility before the sun came up.
I didn't give a damn.
I had spent four days trying to drown out the memory of Tuesday night in the computer lab. Four days of feeling the frantic, fluttering rhythm of Tallulah’s pulse beneath my thumb. Four days of tasting dark roast coffee and winter rain every time I tried to draw a full breath into my lungs.
My nervous system was wound so tight the tendons in my forearms ached.
I set my weight over my left hip, dropped low into my stance, and pushed hard into a high-speed lateral crossover toward the half-wall.
The edge caught.
A sharp, jagged line of fire tore through the syndesmosis. The joint gave way half an inch, the distal ligaments screaming as the lateral load sheared across unhealed tissue.
My right skate skidded out from under me.
I hit the ice hard on my left hip, sliding ten feet across the slick glaze before slamming shoulder-first into the dasher boards. The concussive boom of the impact echoed through the empty arena like a gunshot.
My composite stick flew out of my gloves, clattering against the scuffed kickplate.
I lay there for a second, my forehead pressed flat against the freezing plastic boards, my chest heaving in heavy, ragged expansions. The air in my throat tasted of iron shavings. A vicious throb pulsed through my ankle, matching the heavy, frantic hammer of blood behind my temples.
I dragged my left knee up, hauling my back against the boards, my jaw clenched so hard my molars groaned.
Weak.
Seventy-seven days until the Frozen Four. If my lateral stability failed on a routine edge-transition in an empty barn, I wouldn't last thirty seconds against Boston's rookie camp forecheck. Julian’s bills wouldn't wait for my ligaments to knit.
A sudden, sharp metallic buzz broke the silence.
High above the ice, the overhead halogen banks flickered once, hummed with a deep electrical drone, and snapped on with a blinding flash of white light.
* * *
I squinted against the sudden glare, raising a leather-gloved hand to shield my eyes.
At the visitor's bench gate, the steel latch clicked open.
Tallulah Barry stood in the gap.
She was wrapped in an oversized dark wool coat that fell to her knees, a thick gray scarf tucked tight around her throat.
She wasn't wearing skates. She wore heavy winter boots with aggressive rubber treads, her diagnostic tablet clutched against her ribs with both hands.
Her hair was pulled back, but several dark strands had broken free of her clips, framing a face that was pale with cold and rigid with fury.
The motion sensors in the ceiling. She had programmed an automatic alert to ping her phone whenever someone tripped the ice-level telemetry outside team hours.
She stepped out onto the ice, her boots crunching carefully against the shaved frost. She didn't have the balance of a skater, but she planted each heel with stubborn, deliberate force, walking straight toward the blue line where I sat against the boards.
"Are you trying to tear the entire joint off the bone?" she called out.
Her voice wasn't loud, but in the cavernous, empty arena, it carried with the sharp clarity of breaking glass.
I retrieved my stick, using the shaft to haul myself upright. The pain in my right leg flared white-hot when I put weight on the blade, but I locked my knee, refusing to let the limp show as I pushed off into a slow, smooth glide.
I didn't answer her. I circled out toward center ice, the steel runners of my skates carving a wide, lazy arc around her small frame.
The contrast between us was stark. She stood motionless on rubber soles in the middle of sixty yards of slick white ice, dwarfed by the massive empty stadium, while I moved around her like an unchained shadow on six-foot-four of steel and bone.
"Answer me, Coast," she demanded, turning her head to track my rotation. Her breath puffed in rapid, white clouds between us. "You took a lateral spill at forty miles an hour. Did the graft tear?"
"Graft is fine, Barry," I rasped, my voice rough from the cold.
"You're lying. You're favoring the left skate by four inches.
" She raised the tablet, her gloved fingers tapping the glass screen.
"I have the telemetry right here. You spiked your joint load to eleven hundred Newtons when you blew that edge.
You are one bad pivot away from permanent structural failure. "
I didn't stop circling. I tightened the radius, the outside edge of my left blade shaving a spray of fine ice shavings that drifted through the air.
"You drove down here at midnight to lecture me on physics?" I asked.
"I drove down here because if you cripple yourself on this ice, Compliance Officer Vane will claim my signatures were fraudulent," she snapped, her chin tilting up to meet my movement.
"My fellowship is tied to your physical integrity.
You don't have the right to throw my future away because you can't sit still for six weeks. "
I stopped my glide two feet in front of her, turning my skates sideways with a sharp, braking scrape that sent a dusting of powdered ice against the toes of her boots.
* * *
The silence in the building settled back down, heavy and suffocating.
I stood over her, the extra two inches from my skate blades making me tower nearly a foot and a half above her wool-wrapped frame. The heat rolling off my chest and neck hit the freezing air like an open furnace, sending plumes of steam rising into the halogen light.
Tallulah didn't back up. Her boots remained glued to the slick surface, her dark eyes wide and blazing with an unyielding, defiant fire.
Up close, the cold had painted her high cheekbones a delicate, wind-whipped rose. Her lower lip was slightly parted, her breath hitching in quick, shallow bursts beneath the heavy wool of her scarf.
"You think this is about your fellowship?" I murmured, stepping another half-stride closer, crowding her until my chest blocked out the glare of the overhead light bank.
The scent of her hit my nostrils—rain-damp wool, clean soap, and that sharp, familiar trace of roasted coffee. It cut straight through the smell of Zamboni exhaust and cold rubber, settling heavy in my gut.
"Everything I do in this building is about my fellowship," she whispered. Her voice carried a faint tremor, but her gaze never wavered from mine.
I leaned down, bringing my face level with hers. The cold steel of my skates held steady on the ice, but the muscles in my thighs burned with the effort of holding my weight without shifting to the injured foot.
"You're lying, Tallulah."
My voice was a low, gravelly rasp that vibrated in the narrow space between our mouths. Her pupils dilated, the amber warmth of her irises swallowed by sudden black as she took in how close we were.
"You could have called Thorne," I murmured, my breath washing warm over her frozen lips. "You could have sent an email to Vane and had my captaincy pulled by morning. You didn't do that. You put your boots on, walked through three inches of Adirondack slush, and came out onto this ice alone."
"Because I—"
"Because you wanted to see if I was still standing," I cut in softly.
I reached out with my left hand.
I stripped the heavy leather hockey glove from my fingers, letting it fall onto the ice with a soft thud. My bare hand was hot, scarred, the knuckles rough and bruised from years of violence along the boards.
Slowly, giving her every opportunity to pull away, I raised my hand.
I didn't grab her. I curved my fingers gently along the line of her jaw, my thumb coming to rest against the warm, sensitive skin just beneath her lower lip.
The contrast was absolute. My skin was burning; hers was chilled by the midnight draft.
Tallulah’s breath hitched in her throat, a sharp, ragged sound that parted her lips against my thumb. She didn't retreat. Her gloved hands tightened their grip on the tablet against her ribs, but her head tilted slightly, leaning just a fraction of an ounce into the pressure of my palm.
The pulse at the side of her neck was hammering, a frantic, wild rhythm that mirrored the pounding behind my own ribs.
"Coast," she breathed, her lips brushing the calloused edge of my thumb.
"Look at me," I commanded quietly.
She was already looking. Her dark eyes held mine with a raw, exposed hunger that stripped away every clinical term she had ever used as a shield.
The hostility that had defined us since the first day in Thorne’s office was gone, burned away by the friction of two weeks in locked rooms and late-night deadlines.
"You're skating on broken bone," she whispered, her voice cracking with an emotion she couldn't hide. "Why do you keep pushing?"
"Because if I stop moving, everything falls apart," I murmured, my thumb tracing the soft curve of her lip, feeling the heat radiating from her mouth. "And because every time I'm in that basement with you, I forget that I'm supposed to be broken."
Her eyes softened, a crack of pure, devastating empathy showing through her armor.
I leaned closer, my forehead coming to rest gently against hers, my skate blades locked solid against the ice. Our breaths mingled in the freezing air, creating a single cloud of white vapor between our lips.
"You shouldn't have come out here tonight, sweetheart," I rasped, my voice thick with a dark, heavy warning that made my own chest ache.
"Why?" she breathed, her fingers finally relaxing their death-grip on the tablet.
"Because I'm done pretending you're just an assignment," I whispered against her lips. "And you're done pretending you don't feel this."
I didn't kiss her. I held her there on the empty ice, my hand cupping her jaw, feeling the ragged hitch of her breathing, knowing with terrifying, absolute certainty that the next time we were locked in that basement together, there would be no ice between us to put out the fire.