Chapter 36
Coast POV
The silver championship plaque lay upside down on the pine floorboards beside the hearth, its polished metal face gathering dust like a discarded hubcap.
The house was black. I hadn't turned on a lamp since Sunday.
The cold cut through the unheated living room, freezing rain ticking against the high windows with the dull, persistent sound of sand thrown against glass.
On the cedar coffee table sat three unopened FedEx envelopes from the Boston Bruins front office, alongside an overnight courier package from the NHL Central Scouting Bureau containing my physical combine itinerary.
I hadn't broken the seals.
I sat on the edge of the leather sofa in gray training pants, barefoot, my bare shoulders hunched forward. My jaw ached with a dull, throbbing pressure from clenching my teeth in my sleep; dark, heavy stubble covered my jaw, masking the yellowing bruises from the Harvard game.
My right hand was closed into a rigid, bloodless fist.
Inside my palm, the jagged edges of the brass house key she had pressed into my hand bit deep into the scar tissue of my skin.
It was freezing cold. It never got warm.
Every time I drew a breath into my lungs, the phantom scent of her—sweet almond, fresh rain, and clean lavender soap—clung to the fibers of the wool throw beside me, slicing through my trachea like pulverized glass.
I had spent four years convincing myself that if I kept my armor thick enough, if I treated myself like an anvil, nobody could ever break me.
You were terrified someone was going to break you, Coast, her voice echoed in the pitch-black room, clear and steady as Adirondack shale. But you were the only one holding the hammer.
She had been right.
I hadn't protected my flank. I had panicked like a beaten cur, taken the poison my father handed me, and driven it straight between the ribs of the only woman who had ever looked at my ruins and called me home.
* * *
The front door deadbolt rattled with a violent, metallic scrape.
The heavy oak slab flew open, slamming against the drywall partition with a concussive bang that shook the timber framing.
The hallway light snapped on, blinding white glare spilling across the dark floorboards.
I didn't reach for a stick. I didn't move.
Kip Callahan strode into the living room, tracking wet sleet across the woven rug, his team windbreaker unzipped over a gray hoodie. Following half a pace behind him, her blonde braids pulled tight beneath a navy beanie, her face carved from gray granite, was Sonya Finch.
She was carrying a black leather laptop sleeve and a thick blue university manila folder.
Kip stopped three feet from the sofa, looking down at my unwashed hair, my hollowed-out cheekbones, and the silver trophy lying in the dirt near the stove.
"You look like a corpse, Stuart," Kip said, his voice flat, stripped of all humor.
"Get out of my house, Kip," I rasped, my vocal cords grinding together like rusted iron.
Sonya didn't ask for permission. She walked straight to the cedar coffee table, shoved the unopened Boston draft envelopes onto the floor with a brutal swipe of her forearm, and dropped the blue folder onto the wood with a sharp, heavy slap.
She opened her laptop, hitting the spacebar to wake the screen.
"Shut your mouth and look at the monitor, Coast," Sonya said.
Her voice wasn't loud, but it had the lethal, surgical precision of an executioner laying out the instruments.
I stared at the glowing display.
The screen showed an archived digital surveillance feed from the athletic administration corridor on Sub-Level 2, timestamped Friday, March 6, at 6:08 PM.
The frame showed the door to the neuromuscular lab. Tallulah was not there. The video showed Tallulah walking up the stairs toward Director Thorne’s office, carrying three bound binders of recovery telemetry.
Two minutes later, at 6:10 PM, a tall male in a blue Garrison varsity jacket slipped around the corner from the equipment cages.
He didn't pick the lock. He pulled a cloned white keycard from his pocket, swiped the sensor, and entered the empty lab.
The camera angle through the frosted glass showed him sitting at Tallulah’s terminal, inserting a red USB drive, and downloading files for three minutes before slipping back into the shadows of the corridor.
The timestamp on the file export was 6:14 PM.
Sonya tapped the keyboard, pulling up the university security access log on the right side of the screen.
"Derek Mercer cloned Tallulah’s keycard on March second when she dropped her lanyard beside the squat racks," Sonya said, her words dropping like lead weights onto my chest. "He used an RF cloner he bought online for forty dollars. He logged into her terminal while she was in Thorne’s office delivering your certified clearance.
He exported your private cortisone scans, sent them to The Boston Hockey Ledger from a burner IP, and dropped the paper trail on her student account. "
The air in my chest turned to liquid nitrogen.
A high, deafening screech tore through my eardrums, drowning out the sound of the freezing rain, drowning out Kip’s breathing.
My vision began to tunnel, black static swarming the edges of the room as a violent, sickening cold flooded my veins.
"No," I choked out, the word barely a rasp.
"Shut up and listen," Sonya commanded, her eyes blazing with an unyielding, icy fury that pinned me to the cushions.
She reached into the blue folder, pulling out three glossy eight-by-ten photographs and a handwritten sheet of yellow legal paper. She threw them into my lap.
They were the photographs Arthur had shown me—the ones of me lifting Tallulah into my truck outside the loading dock.
"Arthur Cross cornered her in the North Reading Room on Friday morning," Sonya said, each syllable slicing through my sternum like a serrated blade.
"He dropped those pictures on her table.
He told her that if you didn't wire forty thousand dollars to Plattsburgh by Monday, he would send those photos to Rick Miller and the NCAA ethics board to have you suspended before the Harvard game. "
Sonya leaned down, bringing her face inches from mine, her voice trembling with a rage so profound it made her jaw shake.
"Do you know what she did, Coast?" Sonya whispered.
"She didn't ask you for money. She didn't call Thorne.
She stood in that library, looked your father in the face, and told him that extortion across state lines was a federal felony.
She told him he butchered Julian's spine, but he wasn't going to touch your future.
She told him he wouldn't get forty cents. "
Sonya slammed her palm down on the cedar table.
"She took the bus to the arena on Saturday morning with Arthur’s blackmail envelope in her bag," Sonya rasped, tears of pure fury burning in her eyes.
"She ran down that tunnel forty-five minutes before game time to stand by your side.
She was going to tell you the truth so you could fight it together.
And you looked at the woman who bled for you and called her an informant. "
* * *
The floorboards beneath my feet gave way.
The room tilted into an abyss.
The blood drained from my face so fast my skull spun, my heart hammering against my ribs with a frantic, sickening rhythm that felt like an engine throwing a piston.
She didn't sell the files.
She threatened Arthur with federal prison.
She ran down that concrete underpass to protect me.
And I had torn her bag from her shoulder. I had grabbed her wrists until they bruised. I had looked into her honey-dark eyes and told her she was the biggest mistake of my life.
A ragged, strangled sound caught in the back of my throat—a suffocating, choked wheeze that couldn't drag air past my windpipe.
"Where is she, Sonya?" I whispered.
The words tore out of me, broken and bleeding, my hands shaking so violently the key rattled against my knee.
"Where is she?"
Sonya closed her laptop with a sharp, brutal snap, tucking the leather sleeve under her arm. She looked down at me with an expression of cold, unvarnished disgust that stripped every remaining shred of my pride into gray dust.
"She's gone, Stuart," Sonya said quietly. "She withdrew from campus on Monday morning. She switched her practicum to remote defense, she cancelled her housing, and she snapped her phone card in half."
Sonya stepped toward the front door, pausing on the threshold, looking back at me through the dim hallway light.
"You spent four years being afraid of someone breaking your heart," Sonya whispered.
"Congratulations, Captain. You destroyed the only person in this world who would have taken a bullet for you.
If you have an ounce of decency left in your miserable body, you will stay away from her for the rest of your life. "
She walked out into the freezing rain.
Kip stood by the door for two seconds, his eyes dark with a heavy, devastated pity. He didn't say a word. He pulled the heavy oak door shut behind him.
The latch clicked.
The silence returned to the timber house.
My knees gave out completely.
My 228-pound frame slid off the edge of the sofa, my knees slamming into the hard pine floorboards with a concussive, bone-rattling thud that sent a shockwave straight up my spine.
I didn't catch myself with my hands.
My forehead dropped flat against the cold wood, my arms wrapping around my ribs, my fists clutching the brass house key against my breastbone as a dry, ragged, animal sob tore from my chest.
It was a sound I hadn't made since the night Julian's surgeon walked out of the trauma unit in Albany.
A hollow, shattered wail of absolute, irrecoverable ruin.
I lay there on the cold pine, gasping for air that tasted of dust and self-hatred, my body heaving in violent, uncontrollable spasms.
The Boston contract. The nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The championship banner.
It was ash. It was garbage. It was worthless metal and ink that meant nothing.
I had sacrificed the only woman who loved me to protect a sweater.
Slowly, agonizingly, I dragged my hands beneath my chest.
I pushed myself up from the floor.
The weeping stopped. The tremors in my forearms hardened into iron.
I stood in the center of the dark living room, the cold air rushing into my lungs, my pale green eyes clearing into a lethal, terrifying focus that stripped away every fear, every defense, and every rule I had ever lived by.
The fear was dead.
The enforcer was gone.
Arthur Cross had forty-eight hours to live before I found him. Derek Mercer was going through the glass in the morning skate.
And if I had to tear the state of New York apart with my bare hands, if I had to crawl on my knees from Lake Placid to the Atlantic Ocean, I was going to find Tallulah Barry.
And I was going to bring my girl home.