Chapter 32
Coast POV
The concrete footer beneath the subterranean access tunnel of The Iron Foundry vibrated with a continuous, low-frequency hum.
Six thousand two hundred people were stamping their boots on the bleachers two levels above my head, the rhythmic roar of the pep band brass bleeding through the HVAC vents in muffled, concussive waves.
I stood in the narrow corridor outside the private coaches' video room, fully suited in my blue Garrison sweater with the white captain’s patch stitched over my heart.
The carbon-fiber shin guards were strapped tight over my calves, the white adhesive tape biting into my wrists, my Bauer skates laced with that familiar, punishing precision that locked my heel into the boot.
My resting pulse was fifty beats per minute, pumping clean and steady behind my breastbone.
For the first time in my life, I wasn't skating to punish myself. I was skating to finish this game, walk into the lobby, take Tallulah Barry by the hand in front of every television camera in the ECAC, and put an end to the lies.
I took my composite stick from the drying rack, testing the flex of the shaft against the rubber matting.
The heavy metal fire door connecting the subterranean loading bay to the players' corridor groaned open with a sharp hydraulic wheeze.
I didn't turn around. I assumed it was Kip Callahan returning from the skate-sharpening bay with his spare paddle.
"Looking sharp, Captain," the voice rasped, smelling of stale menthol tobacco, damp nylon, and rotting teeth.
My muscles locked into rigid stone.
The composite stick in my left glove ceased its flex, remaining bent against the floor.
I turned my head slowly.
Arthur Cross stood four feet away, blocking the narrow concrete lane between the video annex and the locker room tunnel. He was wearing his threadbare Plattsburgh junior coaching jacket, his baseball cap pulled low, his crooked nose red from the Adirondack frost outside.
He didn't look like a deadbeat hiding from Montreal loan sharks anymore.
He had a thick manila folder clutched in his right hand, his watery gray-green eyes glittering with a triumphant, venomous malice that turned the air in my throat to sub-zero slush.
* * *
"I told you what would happen if you showed your face in this building again, Arthur," I rasped, my vocal cords grinding together like two ungreased gears.
Arthur chuckled, a wet, rattling cough that ended in a sickening smirk. "You're not putting anyone under the ice today, boy. Not unless you want to read what your little academic genius has been doing behind your back."
He took two paces forward, raising the manila folder, and slammed it flat against the padded Garrison crest on my chest.
The impact made a dull, papery slap that echoed down the empty concrete underpass.
"Take a look, Coast," Arthur whispered, his breath washing warm and rancid across my chin. "Take a good, hard look at what eighteen thousand dollars of tuition remission buys an undergraduate fellow."
My fingers twitched inside my leather gloves.
I didn't want to touch the paper. Every survival instinct I owned screamed that whatever lived inside that cardboard was poisoned.
Yet my hand moved on its own, thick fingers closing around the edge of the folder, dragging it down into the harsh glare of the overhead sodium bulb.
The top sheet was a printout of an exclusive article published forty minutes ago on The Boston Hockey Ledger, the primary scouting blog read by every front-office executive in New England.
The headline was set in bold black block type:
GARRISON CAPTAIN SKATING ON FRAUDULENT REHABILITATION CLEARANCE; PRIVATE MEDICAL TELEMETRY LEAKED BY KINESIOLOGY FELLOW.
The room seemed to drop ten degrees in a single second.
My vision narrowed, the concrete walls closing in until only the printed page existed.
Beneath the headline were high-resolution scans of my internal medical file from Sub-Level 2.
The exact joint-stress vectors. The unredacted MRI interpretations showing the medial collateral ligament tear.
And right at the bottom, printed in clear black ink, were the private notes regarding my off-the-books cortisone injections—the non-university medical data that only one person on the face of the earth had ever seen.
Tallulah.
My trachea seized. The air trapped in my lungs turned to shards of broken glass.
I flipped the page with trembling, gloved fingers.
Behind the article was a printed audit log from the university athletic compliance server. It showed an electronic file transfer from terminal ID SL2-BIO-04—the local desktop in the subterranean neuromuscular lab.
The user credentials were typed in clean administrative text:
USER: BARRY, TALLULAH – SENIOR FELLOW.
TIMESTAMP: MARCH 6, 6:14 PM.
ACTION: EXPORT LONGITUDINAL MEDICAL DATASET (UNREDACTED).
Stapled beneath the transfer log was a copy of an email sent from Tallulah’s campus account to Compliance Officer Corinne Vane, dated Monday of last week:
Officer Vane: Confirming receipt of the athletic department discretionary tuition waiver ($18,500.
00). In accordance with department service directives, I will maintain continuous risk monitoring of student-athlete Stuart, Coast (#4), and will submit all documented structural vulnerabilities directly to compliance review.
The floorboards beneath my skates seemed to dissolve into black water.
A high, deafening screech tore through my eardrums, drowning out the roar of the arena bowl, drowning out the ventilation fans, drowning out my own pulse.
"She met me in the central library yesterday morning, Coast," Arthur’s voice murmured, slithering into my ear like a snake through wet grass.
"Sitting right there in the stacks with her little notebook.
She looked me in the eye and laughed. Said you were so desperate for someone to look at you without flinching that you handed her your entire medical file on a silver platter. "
Arthur took half a step closer, tapping the paper in my hands with a dirty fingernail.
"She used you, boy," Arthur whispered, his sneer dripping with pure, surgical cruelty.
"You think a girl with a four-point-oh GPA wanted a broken thug from Plattsburgh?
You think she wanted an enforcer whose old man ran him into the dirt?
She had eighteen grand in tuition debt and a brother whose track housing was in default. She traded your ruin for her diploma."
The words struck my sternum with the force of an unyielding blindside check, tearing through the scar tissue on my collarbone, ripping the old wound wide open to the marrow.
Four years of guilt. Four years of believing that any softness in my life was a defect that destroyed the people around me.
She held my face in the dark.
She whispered that I didn't deserve to bleed.
She kissed the scars on my ribs while she was writing down the data to sell to compliance.
A foul, bitter wave of acid rushed up my throat, scalding the back of my tongue. The blood drained from my extremities, leaving my hands and feet freezing inside my gear, my heart hammering with a wild, broken cadence that felt like structural failure.
* * *
Arthur let out another short, mocking bark of laughter.
"Wesley has the file, Coast," he said, turning toward the heavy fire door. "He got the blog link twenty minutes ago. Let's see how much Boston wants a defenseman who can't even keep his own handler from selling him out."
He shoved the fire door open, slipped through the gap into the gray slush of the alley, and let the heavy steel slab slam shut behind him.
The latch clicked.
I was left alone in the concrete underpass.
My hockey gloves fell from my hands, hitting the wet rubber runner with two heavy, dead thuds.
My bare hands shook with violent, uncontrollable spastic tremors. The white athletic tape around my wrists pulled taut against the skin as my fingers clenched into the printed pages, crushing the paper, ripping the compliance emails, squeezing the dossier into a mangled, shredded ball of pulp.
The five-minute pre-game warning buzzer sounded down the corridor.
A harsh, mechanical blare that echoed off the cinderblock walls like an alarm in a sinking submarine.
From the far end of the tunnel, Coach Hayes’s voice roared through the draft: "Lineup check! Stuart, get your ass to the gate!"
I didn't move.
I stood under the yellow halogen tube, my chest heaving in short, shallow, suffocating gasps, my eyes burning with a dry, blinding fire that turned my vision to static.
Then footsteps echoed on the concrete runner behind me.
Light, hurried, frantic footsteps.
"Coast!"
The voice was breathless, trembling, clear as a bell in the drafty underpass.
I turned my head slowly.
Tallulah was rounding the corner from the public concourse stairwell, running down the rubber matting toward me. She was wearing her oversized olive-green winter coat, her cheeks flushed bright pink from the Adirondack cold, her dark curls whipping loose around her collar.
Her leather messenger bag bounced against her hip; both of her small hands were clutched tightly across the front of her coat, holding the heavy canvas closed over her stomach.
Her dark eyes were wide, bright with an urgent, desperate news that parted her lips on a ragged gasp.
"Coast," she cried out, her boots skidding to a halt three paces away, her chest heaving as she tried to catch her breath. "Thank God you're still down here. I have to tell you—"
She stopped.
The words died in her throat as she took in my face.
I stood six feet, four inches above her, my massive shoulders squared, my uniform hanging heavy over my pads.
My face was the color of gray slate. My jaw was locked so tight a thin trickle of blood was pooling where my canine had split the inside of my lip.
And my eyes were dead.
Empty, vacant chips of green ice, staring down at her with a ruined, lethal agony that made her take half a step backward into the shadows of the tunnel.
I looked at the woman who had slept against my heart twelve hours ago.
And with a slow, deliberate flick of my scarred fingers, I opened my hand, letting the shredded, mangled ball of her compliance emails drop onto the wet rubber at her boots.