Chapter 24
Coast POV
The salt-crusted concrete floor of the arena loading bay sloped down toward the subterranean service tunnel, sweating gray moisture under flickering sodium lights.
I had my black wool team jacket zipped to my chin, my duffel slung over my left shoulder, my truck keys hooked around my index finger. I was thinking about the timber house. I was thinking about the pot of chicken soup Tallulah had left simmering on the stove before her morning lab practicum.
Then the shadow stepped out from behind the yellow industrial salt bin.
"Look at you, Coast," the voice rasped, carrying the foul, familiar reek of cheap tobacco, stale menthol, and damp nylon. "Two hundred and thirty pounds of Boston Bruins prime beef."
My boots hit the concrete and stopped dead.
The air in my lungs turned into a block of black frost.
My vision snapped inward, the peripheral light of the tunnel blacking out until only an eight-foot circle of gray pavement existed.
The sound of the refrigeration chiller pipes overhead vanished, drowned out by a high, deafening screech that ripped through my eardrums—the phantom sound of Julian’s helmet striking the dasher boards four years ago in Plattsburgh.
Arthur Cross took two slow steps into the amber wash of the overhead bulb.
He was fifty-two years old, but his body looked like an engine running on bad oil.
His graying dark hair was greasy beneath a threadbare blue baseball cap; his hands were shoved deep into the pockets of a stained nylon jacket bearing the faded crest of the Northern Junior Hockey League.
A purple spider-vein mapped the bridge of his crooked nose, his watery blue eyes squinting at me with that same sick, appraising sneer he used before he shoved a kid onto the ice with a concussion.
"You're not allowed on this campus, Arthur," I rasped.
My voice didn't sound like mine. It was a flat, dead rattle dragged over broken glass.
"Public university, boy," Arthur said, pulling a crushed cigarette from his pocket, rolling the unlit tobacco between his yellowed teeth. "State funds paid for this tunnel. Thought I'd come see what kind of team six thousand dollars of my son's money bought this winter."
* * *
The white athletic tape around my wrists felt like it was cutting off my circulation as my hands curled into fists inside my pockets.
"I don't owe you a dime," I said, stepping forward, my 6'4" frame blotting out the light above his cap, casting him in a dense, heavy shadow. "I paid your loan sharks in Montreal ten grand in December. The ledger is clean. Get in your car and cross the border."
Arthur didn't flinch. He was used to violent boys; he had spent twenty years beating fear into teenagers with a cut-down hockey stick. He leaned his head back, looking up at my jaw, the sneer curling his upper lip.
"Ten grand was the interest, Coast," he said softly, his voice dropping into that wheedling, venomous cadence that made the bile rise sour in the back of my throat. "The principal on the Montreal markers is forty. And the boys up there aren't interested in waiting until August."
"That's your debt."
"It's a family debt," Arthur snapped, taking half a step toward me, his nicotine breath washing across my chin.
"I trained you. I broke your hands on the shooting tarp until you could clear a blue line.
If I hadn't pushed you to take Julian's flank four years ago, you wouldn't have half the grit Boston is buying. "
The reference to Plattsburgh detonated behind my eyes like a concussive grenade.
The blood roared in my ears, hot and deafening. My masseter muscles clamped down until my back molars groaned under the pressure, the veins along the side of my neck bulging against the collar of my jacket.
"You told him to skate on a cracked vertebra," I whispered, the words trembling with a lethal, suppressed violence that shook my sternum. "You knew his neck was unstable. You told him to clear the crease anyway."
"And you let him get hit," Arthur spat back, his eyes flashing with raw, ugly spite.
"You were late on the slide, Coast. You were dreaming on the half-wall while that forward came through the neutral zone.
You broke his neck just as much as I did.
The only difference is, I didn't get an NHL draft slot out of the deal. "
He tapped his index finger against the center of my chest, right over my collarbone, right over the jagged skate scar.
"Forty thousand, Coast," Arthur murmured, his grin widening into a jagged, yellow slit. "Boston has a ninety-five-thousand-dollar signing bonus waiting for you on August fifteenth. You wire forty to an account in Plattsburgh by Friday, or I take a drive down to Massachusetts."
"You don't have the leverage to touch my contract."
"Don't I?" Arthur chuckled, a wet, rattling sound in his lungs.
"You think Grant Wesley wants to explain to the Boston front office why their first-round pick has a father claiming the kid intentionally crippled his own brother to clear his path to the draft? You think the NCAA compliance board wants to hear about how you’ve been spending two hours every morning locked in Sub-Level Two with a senior biomechanist? "
The concrete floor beneath my boots seemed to drop away into a bottomless, frozen void.
My pulse stopped dead in my throat.
"What did you say?" I breathed.
Arthur’s eyes glittered with triumphant malice.
"I saw her, Coast. I parked by the heating plant yesterday morning.
Saw the little dark-haired girl walking out of the side exit with your gray gym bag.
Pretty little thing. Sharp walk. I wonder how fast Thorne pulls her fellowship waiver when the local papers run a story about the varsity captain buying medical clearance with his bed. "
* * *
The leash snapped.
The four years of discipline, the sixty hours of rehab, the future in Boston—all of it incinerated in a single, blind flash of crimson rage.
I moved so fast Arthur didn't even have time to pull his hands out of his pockets.
I grabbed him by the lapels of his nylon jacket, lifted his 180-pound frame clean off the pavement, and drove him backward into the rough cinderblock wall of the loading dock with a concussive thud that knocked the breath out of his lungs in a wet wheeze.
My left forearm drove into his throat, pinning his windpipe against the concrete footer, choking off his air.
My right fist drew back, my knuckles scarred, hard as granite, hovering six inches from his crooked nose.
Every muscle in my shoulder screamed to drive the punch home—to shatter his cheekbone, to crush his teeth into his jaw, to eradicate the poison that had butchered my brother and haunted every breath of my life.
Arthur’s eyes bugged, his face turning a dark, mottled purple as his feet kicked helplessly against the pavement. He couldn't speak, but his fingers clawed at my wrist, his gaze meeting mine with a sick, terrified mockery.
Hit me, his eyes said. Throw the punch and spend the night in an Essex County jail cell.
The image of Tallulah flashed through the red fog in my brain.
Tallulah sitting at my kitchen counter in my oversized sweater. Tallulah leaning her forehead against mine, whispering that I didn't deserve to bleed for Julian.
If I hit him, the police would be in Hayes's office in twenty minutes.
I would be arrested for felony assault. My NCAA clearance would be revoked before midnight; Boston would terminate my draft rights; and the university compliance board would seize every medical log in Sub-Level 2, dragging Tallulah straight into the scandal.
I couldn't kill him without killing her future.
My right arm trembled violently, the tendons straining against the skin as I forced my fist to freeze in mid-air. The effort of holding back the strike tore at my lungs, leaving me gasping for air as sweat broke cold and greasy along my hairline.
Slowly, deliberately, I leaned in until my lips were barely a millimeter from Arthur’s ear.
"Listen to me, you piece of garbage," I whispered, the gravel in my voice so low and dead it sounded like an execution sentence.
"You don't get forty thousand dollars. You don't get forty cents.
If you ever contact Julian again, if you ever look at a newspaper, if you ever set foot within ten miles of Lake Placid or Tallulah Barry, I won't call the police.
I won't report your extortion. I will drive to Montreal, I will find the hole you crawl out of, and I will put you under the ice where the thaw never reaches. "
I leaned my weight harder into his trachea for one final, suffocating second, watching the terror finally drown out the arrogance in his eyes.
"Understand me?" I rasped.
Arthur gagged, nodding his head once in frantic, spastic twitches.
I released his jacket.
Arthur collapsed onto the wet pavement, coughing violently, dragging air into his bruised throat on ragged, wet wheezes.
I didn't look at him again. I turned my back, walked to my truck, climbed into the cab, and locked the doors.
* * *
My hands were shaking so hard against the steering wheel that the key rattled against the ignition column three times before the diesel engine roared to life.
I drove through the freezing drizzle, my knuckles white where they gripped the leather, my vision tunneling through the rhythmic sweep of the windshield wipers.
The poison of my past was in my skin. The stench of Arthur’s cigarette smoke seemed to cling to the wool of my jacket, choking out the clean Adirondack air. I felt dirty, contaminated, like the violence I had buried for four years was leaking out through my pores.
I pulled into the gravel drive of the timber house, killed the engine, and practically tore the front door off its hinges as I stumbled inside.
The house was warm.
The air was sweet with cedar, the rich aroma of simmering broth, and the clean almond scent that belonged entirely to her.
Tallulah was sitting on the woven rug in front of the cast-iron stove, an open notebook resting in her lap, wearing my faded navy Garrison fleece.
At the sound of the door slamming, she turned around, her honey-dark eyes lighting up with a soft, radiant smile that cut straight through the black fog behind my ribs.
"Hey," she said softly, setting her pen down. "I finished the preliminary gait—"
She stopped.
Her smile vanished as she took in my face—the dead, dilated look in my eyes, the cold sweat at my temples, the violent tremor in my hands.
"Coast?" she breathed, scrambling to her knees.
I didn't say a word. I couldn't.
I dropped my duffel on the floorboards, crossed the room in three strides, and dropped heavily to my knees on the rug in front of her.
My arms shot out, wrapping around her slender waist, hauling her small frame hard against my chest until her ribs met mine.
I buried my face in the crook of her neck, inhaling her skin with ragged, desperate gasps, my scarred fingers clutching the fabric of her sweater as if she were the only solid thing left on a crumbling earth.
A choked, broken sound tore from my throat, vibrating against her collarbone.
Tallulah gasped at the sudden, crushing impact of my weight, but she didn't pull away. Her arms came around my neck instantly, her small hands sinking into the dark hair at the base of my skull, holding my head tight against her skin.
"Coast," she whispered, her voice fierce, steady, wrapping around me like a shield. "I'm right here. I've got you. What happened?"
"Don't let go," I rasped into her skin, my voice shattered, my body trembling against hers in the warm firelight. "Tallulah, please. Just don't let go of me."
"Never," she vowed against my ear, her hands stroking down my back as the storm raged silently beyond our door.