Chapter 34
Dual POV
The red goal light behind the Harvard net was a blinding smear of crimson through the sweat stinging my eyes.
Twelve seconds on the digital scoreboard clock.
I set my edges into the chewed-up ice inside our defensive zone, my chest heaving against the carbon plates of my shoulder pads in ragged, violent expansions. A Harvard winger came flying through the neutral zone, head down, hunting a loose rebound.
I didn't play the puck.
I stepped into his lane, driving twenty-two pounds of momentum and 228 pounds of mass straight through his sternum.
The collision was concussive. The plexiglass groaned; the kid bounced off my chest and hit the ice like a sack of wet sand, the puck spilling harmlessly into the corner where Kip Callahan smothered it beneath his blocker.
The final buzzer detonated through the arena rafters.
GARRISON 3, HARVARD 1.
Blue and white foil confetti exploded from the ceiling cannons, raining down through the halogen haze like a cloud of frozen tinsel.
Six thousand two hundred people were on their feet, screaming my name, stamping their boots until the concrete foundations trembled.
Kip tackled me from behind, his padded arms wrapping around my neck, screaming into my earhole.
Teammates mobbed the crease, gloves flying, sticks clattering against the ice in a deafening wall of sound.
Coach Bramwell Hayes pushed through the scrum, thrusting the silver ECAC semifinal plaque into my chest, grinning around his cigar stub.
I looked down at the trophy.
The silver metal was freezing against my torn leather gloves.
The roar of the crowd didn't reach my ears; it was dead, muffled static, like listening to a radio through twenty feet of lake ice. My lip was split, bleeding a slow, warm trickle of copper down my chin; the wrap around my ribs felt like an iron band snapping my intercostals.
I looked up at Section 108.
The bleachers were empty.
No olive coat. No dark hair pinned with brass drafting clips. No honey-dark eyes watching my transitions.
The victory sat on my tongue like a mouthful of dry sulfur and ash.
I shoved the silver plaque into Kip’s chest, turned my skates toward the gate, and pushed past the television cameras without answering a single shouted question.
I cleared the ice-level tunnel, tore my helmet off with a violent jerk of my forearms, and slammed my forehead flat against the cold cinderblock wall of the subterranean corridor.
I hauled air into my lungs, but my trachea was closed tight, my chest refusing to expand.
I had won the game. I had locked down the Frozen Four berth. I had secured the ninety-five-thousand-dollar bonus from Boston.
And my soul was laying in pieces on the rubber runner where she had left it.
* * *
The concrete exit alcove was forty degrees, chilled by the blizzard howling against the exterior steel crash doors.
I stood in the shadow of the structural pillar, my hands buried deep inside the pockets of my olive coat, my right palm pressed flat, unmoving, over the soft, dragging warmth beneath my sweater.
My knees were trembling. A persistent, cold nausea clenched the back of my throat, but my spine was locked into rigid stone, my chin tilted at that lethal forty-five-degree angle.
Heavy, uneven footsteps echoed down the rubber matting from the locker room tunnel.
Coast rounded the corner.
He had stripped off his shoulder pads and helmet, wearing only his sweat-soaked blue game sweater, the fabric torn along the right shoulder seam.
His dark hair was dripping wet, plastered to his forehead; a jagged purple contusion bloomed along his left cheekbone, fresh blood dripping from the corner of his mouth into his dark stubble.
He saw me and stopped dead.
His massive frame went rigid, his jaw clamping shut so hard the muscle along his temple jumped in violent spasms.
His green eyes didn't hold warmth. They were flat, dead chips of flint, looking at me as if I were a ghost that had crawled out of the ice to poison his air.
"I told you to be gone by the final buzzer, Barry," he rasped, his voice a low, ruined scrape that echoed off the concrete.
I didn't flinch. I didn't step back.
I reached into my leather messenger bag, pulled out the mangled, flattened compliance dossier he had dropped at my boots before the game, and laid it carefully on the flat top of a metal recycling bin between us.
"You left your proof on the floor, Captain," I said.
My voice was quiet, steady as Adirondack granite, stripped of every trace of the weeping girl who had begged him in the underpass.
Coast let out a short, harsh breath through his nose, his lips curling into a cruel, defensive sneer that made my stomach contract with a sharp, physical ache.
"Keep it," he whispered, stepping into my space until his towering height blocked out the emergency exit light. "Frame it. Take it to the dean on Monday morning and tell them how you tamed the Garrison enforcer to guarantee your eighteen-thousand-dollar tuition waiver."
The cruelty in his words was an intentional strike, designed to draw blood, designed to force me to scream so he wouldn't have to look at the devastation in his own chest.
I looked into his ruined, beautiful face, holding his stare until the sneer on his mouth began to fray at the corners.
"You really believe that," I said softly, the words dropping between us like stones into deep water. "After four weeks in that basement. After Valentine’s night. After you held me on your sofa and told me I was your home. You really believe I spent sixty hours calculating how to destroy you."
A flicker of raw, blinding agony crossed his pale green eyes, vanishing before his jaw clamped shut again.
"The server audit has your login, Tallulah," he rasped, his voice shaking with a suppressed, violent tremor. "The email to Vane has your signature. Arthur told me what you said in the library."
"Arthur Cross is a convicted extortionist who butchered his own family for money," I said, my voice steady, cold as winter shale.
"And Derek Mercer cloned my keycard on Monday when I was in Thorne's office.
The forensic audit will prove it next week.
But you didn't ask for an audit, did you, Coast? "
Coast’s hands clenched into fists at his sides, the white tape around his wrists straining.
"You didn't ask me what happened," I continued, taking half a step toward him, forcing him to look down into my unarmored, dry eyes.
"You didn't give me five seconds to explain.
You saw an anonymous blog post, and you immediately decided that the woman who gave you her body was a calculating parasite. "
"You don't know what it’s like—"
"I know exactly what it's like," I cut in, my voice dropping an octave, carrying the weight of four years of survival. "You're a coward, Coast Stuart."
A dark, dangerous fire flared in his eyes, but I didn't stop.
"Your father didn't break you four years ago in Plattsburgh," I said, each word driven home with surgical precision.
"You broke yourself. You spent four years hiding behind two hundred and thirty pounds of muscle and a reputation for violence because you were terrified that if you let anyone love you, they would see how broken you are.
You were waiting for me to hurt you. You wanted this paper.
Because being betrayed is safe for you. It means you get to put your armor back on and bleed alone. "
Coast’s chest heaved in a sharp, suffocating expansion, the blood draining from his lips until his face looked like ash.
"Tallulah—"
"Don't say my name," I whispered, echoing the exact words he had used against me forty-five minutes ago.
* * *
I reached inside the left pocket of my olive coat.
My fingers closed around the cold, heavy brass key to his timber house—the key he had placed in my hand on Monday morning, telling me that I belonged in his space forever.
I pulled it out.
I stepped forward until my boots touched the toes of his skate guards, close enough to feel the furnace heat radiating off his torn uniform, close enough to smell the sweat and blood on his skin.
I reached out, took his right hand, and pried his bruised, scarred fingers open.
I set the cold brass key flat in the center of his calloused palm.
Coast flinched as the metal touched his skin, his fingers trembling as if the brass were coated in acid. His eyes dropped to his palm, his pupils dilating into wide black rings, his breath hitching on a ragged gasp.
"Tallulah, wait," he rasped, his voice cracking down the middle, the arrogance and fury evaporating into pure, unvarnished panic.
"You told me that we weren't negotiable," I whispered, looking straight into his ruined green eyes, my hand leaving his palm to rest flat, protective, and immovable over my lower abdomen.
The two plastic tests were pressed tight against my ribs in my breast pocket, burning like coal against my sternum.
I didn't pull them out.
I would never use a child to beg for a man's trust. I would never use our baby as leverage against a man who looked at me with disgust.
"You were terrified someone was going to break you, Coast," I said, a single, scalding tear finally breaking over my lower lash, tracking hot and silent down my cheek. "But you were the only one holding the hammer. Goodbye."
I turned my back on him.
"Tallulah, stop!" his voice roared behind me, rough and ruined, but I didn't pause.
I hit the steel crash bar of the exterior emergency door with my hip.
The heavy door flew open.
The Adirondack blizzard slammed into the corridor—a sixty-mile-an-hour wall of whiteout snow, sub-zero wind, and screaming ice that swallowed the sound of his skates, swallowed the sound of his shouts, and froze the tear on my cheek before it could drop.
I stepped through the threshold into the blinding storm, letting the heavy steel door slam shut behind me with a concussive, final bang that severed my life in two.
Behind the glass, Coast stood alone in the drafty concrete alcove, his knuckles white around the brass key, staring into the howling dark as the abyss closed over his head.