Chapter 33
Tallulah POV
The emergency stairwell concrete rattled beneath the soles of my winter boots, each step sending a dull vibration up my shins.
Above my head, the foundation rafters of The Iron Foundry groaned under the synchronized stamping of six thousand pairs of boots. The brass section of the pep band was blaring a fight song that rattled through the ventilation grates, the sound muffled and distorted by four feet of solid stone.
My right hand stayed clutched inside the zippered breast pocket of my heavy olive coat, my fingers curled around the soft blue flannel handkerchief. Inside the cloth, the two plastic wands were hard and unyielding against my ribs, resting directly over my racing heart.
Beneath the canvas of my messenger bag, Arthur Cross’s blackmail envelope rubbed against my hipbone like a concealed blade.
My throat was parched, constricted around a knot of cold, persistent nausea that had followed me all the way from my apartment flat. Every time I drew air into my lungs, my diaphragm twitched, fighting the urge to heave.
Coast, my mind repeated like an SOS pulse. Find Coast.
I hit the subterranean runner at the base of the stairs, rounding the corner into the private players' underpass. The air down here smelled of shaved ice, vulcanized rubber, and the sharp, chemical tang of fresh stick wax.
Thirty paces ahead, standing beneath the buzzing sodium vapor bulb outside the coaches' video annex, was the broad, armored frame of number four.
He had his skates on, the blue Garrison sweater pulled tight over his shoulder pads, his composite stick balanced against the rubber flooring.
A breathless, ragged sob of pure relief tore from my chest.
"Coast!"
I broke into a run, my boots squeaking against the wet matting, my left hand coming up to hold my coat closed over the trembling warmth in my lower abdomen.
"Coast, thank God you're still down here. I have to tell you—"
I stopped dead.
The words died on my tongue, turning to dry ash behind my teeth.
Coast turned his head.
The man who had held me on the leather sofa twelve hours ago—the man who had wiped the tears from my cheekbones and promised that we were not negotiable—had ceased to exist.
He stood six feet, four inches above me, his jaw clamped shut so hard the skin over his jawbone was white as bone. A thin smear of red stained his lower lip where his teeth had split the flesh.
His eyes were dead.
They were vacant, flat, stripped of every trace of green, staring down at me with a lethal, ruined hatred that made the blood drain from my face in a single, devastating rush.
With a slow, deliberate motion of his scarred fingers, he opened his bare hand.
A crumpled, torn ball of paper dropped from his palm, hitting the wet rubber runner between our boots with a dull, wet slap.
* * *
"Coast?" I whispered, my voice cracking on the syllable.
I took half a step forward, my hand extending toward the blue wool covering his massive forearm.
He recoiled.
He jerked his arm back as if my fingers were coated in arsenic, stepping half a pace backward into the shadows of the concrete wall.
"Don't touch me," he rasped.
The words weren't shouted. They were delivered in a flat, gravelly whisper that cut deeper than any blade, vibrating with a cold, absolute disgust that knocked the wind clean out of my lungs.
My hand hovered in the freezing air between us, trembling violently, before falling back against my coat.
"Look at your boots, Barry," he whispered, his voice shaking with a suppressed, violent tremor that made the muscles in his neck stand out like cables. "Pick it up. Read what you sold."
My vision blurred around the edges, dark static swarming across my field of sight.
I sank to my knees on the wet rubber runner, my fingers clumsy, numb with cold as I smoothed out the mangled pages.
The headline stared up at me in bold, black ink from The Boston Hockey Ledger:
GARRISON CAPTAIN SKATING ON FRAUDULENT REHABILITATION CLEARANCE; PRIVATE MEDICAL TELEMETRY LEAKED BY KINESIOLOGY FELLOW.
Beneath the headline were the raw, high-resolution scans of Coast's syndesmotic stress tests from Sub-Level 2—including my private, handwritten clinical notes detailing the non-university cortisone injections he had taken to numb his joint.
Stapled to the back was an IT server audit from 6:14 PM yesterday evening: an unredacted data export logged under my student ID and password, paired with my official university email confirming receipt of my $18,500 fellowship tuition waiver.
My breath locked in my trachea.
A violent, icy spasm seized my stomach, the nausea rushing up my throat so fast I had to clamp my jaw shut to keep from vomiting onto the concrete.
"Coast, no," I choked out, looking up at him from the floor, my hands clutching the crumpled papers against my chest. "This isn't what happened. I didn't leak this. Someone cloned my keycard—Derek Mercer was in the lab on Monday—"
"Shut up," he growled.
The command hit my sternum like an iron mallet.
He stepped toward me, towering over my kneeling frame, his shadow swallowing the light from the ceiling bulb. His hockey gloves were clutched in his left fist, his knuckles bloodless, his chest heaving beneath his pads in short, suffocating expansions.
"Arthur met you in the library yesterday morning," Coast said, each word dropping onto my head like a stone from an executioner’s hand. "He told me you sat in the stacks and laughed about how easy I was."
"He was blackmailing us!" I cried out, tears burning hot and blinding behind my eyelids as I scrambled to my feet, my boots slipping on the wet runner.
I reached into my messenger bag, my trembling hands clawing for the manila envelope.
"He ambushed me in the North Reading Room, Coast!
He had photographs of us—he threatened to send them to the Boston Globe if we didn't pay him forty thousand dollars! I have the file right here—"
"Stop lying to me!"
His roar tore through the concrete corridor, loud enough to rattle the pipes overhead, vibrating with an agony so profound it shook the floorboards beneath our feet.
He slapped the messenger bag away from my fingers.
The leather strap snapped off my shoulder; the bag hit the concrete wall with a heavy thud, sliding into the puddle near the drain.
"You think I'm an idiot, Tallulah?" he rasped, his voice breaking into raw, ruined pieces as he loomed over me, his face twisted in blinding humiliation.
"You think because I didn't finish high school in Plattsburgh, I don't know how compliance works?
You needed eighteen thousand dollars to keep your fellowship.
You needed housing money for your brother.
You spent six weeks letting me put my hands on your skin so you could document every weak ligament in my ankle. "
"That is not true!" I screamed, my hands flying up to press against the hard plates of his chest, begging him to feel the truth in my palms. "I love you! Coast, listen to me—"
"Don't say that word to me," he whispered.
He grabbed both of my wrists in an iron grip, ripping my hands off his chest as if the contact burned his flesh. He held my arms pinned between us, his grip bruising through my coat sleeves, his pale green eyes burning down into mine with an unyielding, murderous grief.
"You made me believe I wasn't a monster," he rasped, his voice dropping into a register so ruined it sounded like tearing metal. "You let me sleep in that bed with you. You let me look at you and think I had something clean. And the whole time, you were writing down the data to sell to Boston."
"Coast, please," I sobbed, my vision whiting out with dizziness, my knees buckling as my forehead pressed forward, desperate to touch his jaw. "Look at my eyes. Look at me. I'm carrying—"
* * *
The arena warning buzzer detonated down the hallway.
A harsh, mechanical, deafening blare that cut through the underpass like a war siren.
From the ice-level tunnel fifty feet away, Coach Bramwell Hayes burst through the double doors, followed by three assistant trainers and two line judges.
"Stuart!" Hayes roared, his voice echoing off the concrete. "Anthem in two minutes! Get your ass through the gate!"
Coast froze.
The sound of his coach’s voice seemed to snap the last thread of his composure, hardening the grief in his face into a mask of pure, impenetrable granite.
He released my wrists with a violent flick of his fingers, stepping back two full paces, putting an ocean of cold concrete between us.
He looked down at me.
His eyes were completely empty. The man who had kissed my eyelids at dawn, the man who had promised to take my hand in front of the world, was dead and buried beneath the ice.
"You played me, Barry," he whispered.
The gravel in his voice was quiet, dead, and utterly final.
"You were the biggest mistake I ever made in my life."
He stepped closer, leaning down until his lips were an inch from my temple, his breath freezing against my damp skin.
"When this game ends," he rasped, "you have your things packed and out of my house. If you ever come near my locker room, if you ever step foot on my ice again, I will personally hand that compliance file to the dean and have you expelled before morning. We are finished."
He straightened his spine, pulling his leather gloves over his scarred hands with two sharp, violent tugs.
He turned on his heel.
His skate blades clicked sharp and rhythmically against the rubber runner as he walked down the corridor toward the blinding white glare of the arena gate, his massive shoulders squared, his head held high.
"Coast!" I choked out, but the word was drowned in an instant.
The double doors swung open at the end of the tunnel.
The concussive, deafening roar of six thousand fans exploded through the corridor—a wall of thunder, cheering, and stomping boots that swallowed the sound of his skates, swallowed the sound of his name, and swallowed the sound of my life shattering into dust.
The heavy doors slammed shut behind him.
The latch clicked.
I was left alone in the concrete underpass, standing beneath the buzzing yellow bulb.
My knees gave out.
I collapsed onto the wet rubber matting, my palms slapping into the puddle beside my dropped bag, my breath coming in ragged, silent gasps that tore at the lining of my throat.
Inside the zippered breast pocket of my coat, pressed tight against my heaving ribs, the two plastic tests dug hard into my sternum.
My right hand left the wet floor.
Slowly, trembling with a cold, devastating agony that stopped my heart in my chest, my fingers flattened over the warmth of my lower abdomen.
He hadn't let me speak.
He hadn't let me tell him about the baby.
I sat alone on the freezing floor beneath the cheering stadium, clutching my womb in the dark, knowing that the only man I had ever loved had just walked onto the ice believing I was the monster who destroyed him.