Chapter 5
Nola POV
Freezing sleet lashed the high, barred basement vents of Kehoe Pavilion, rattling the rusted iron grates like loose teeth.
It was twenty past eight in the evening.
My eyes burned from eight straight hours of biomechanical modeling labs, and my lower back ached from carrying two textbooks and the telemetry kit across the ice-slicked quad.
The corridor outside the Vault was dim, the maintenance staff having switched the overheads to night-cycle, leaving only the buzzing amber emergency strips to cut the gloom.
I reached the reinforced door, lifting my hand to punch the keypad, but stopped.
The heavy steel slab was ajar by an inch. The magnetic latch hadn't caught against the strike plate, leaving a narrow vertical slit of fluorescent white cutting across the dark concrete.
From inside, a voice leaked into the hallway.
It wasn't Chase's. It was coming through a phone speaker on max volume—tinny, harsh, and cutting like a serrated blade.
"You were late on the backcheck twice in the third period on Saturday, Chase. The regional scouts from Boston were in the mezzanine. They aren't blind. If you're favoring that left arm, you're throwing away five years of my money and your brother’s legacy."
I stood frozen on the rubber mat, the air locking in the middle of my throat.
A long silence followed. Through the gap, I could see Chase sitting on the edge of the examination table.
His massive shoulders were hunched forward, his forearms resting on his knees, his head hanging between his collarbones.
A plastic bag of half-melted ice had fallen to the floor by his sneakers, leaking a slow puddle of water across the gray floor.
"I'm handling the arm," Chase said. The words were quiet, but they sounded scraped raw, as if the syllables were tearing through his vocal cords.
"Handle it on the ice," the man on the other end barked, his tone flat and devoid of warmth.
"Declan couldn't walk away from a street brawl, and now he spends his life in a motorized chair while I pay his medical tabs.
You lose your draft standing because you got soft, Chase, don't bother driving back to Marquette.
You aren't worth a dime to this family off the ice. "
The line disconnected with a sharp, digital tone.
The silence that rushed back into the room was suffocating.
Chase didn't throw the phone. He didn't curse. He simply dropped the device onto the vinyl mat beside his thigh and pressed the heels of his calloused hands hard into his eye sockets.
For five seconds, the arrogant, untouchable enforcer ceased to exist. His broad back hitched once, a shudder of pure, isolated exhaustion rattling through his ribs.
The dense muscle across his shoulders looked curved, sagging under an invisible weight that could have crushed granite.
He sat there in the harsh white light, a six-foot-four wreck of athletic ruin, bleeding out in silence.
My boot heel shifted on the damp concrete.
The rubber sole gave a tiny, wet squeak.
The shift inside the room was instant. In less than a heartbeat, Chase’s hands dropped.
His spine snapped straight, his chin coming up with lethal precision.
The hollow weariness in his face vanished, swallowed behind an expression so cold and impenetrable it felt like stepping into an industrial freezer.
His gray eyes locked onto the seam of the door.
"Get in here, Wagner," he rasped, his voice dropping into that dark, flat monotone that brooked no argument. "Or turn around and walk away."
* * *
I pushed the door open, the heavy steel swinging wide on its hinges.
The air in the room was thick with the scent of melted ice, menthol wax, and the raw, electric tang of a man pushed to his absolute threshold. I walked to the stainless steel cart, setting my notebook down with a deliberate click. My throat was dry, coated in a fine dust of adrenaline.
Contempt was a simple thing to manage. It had sharp edges; it gave you a weapon to hold in your hands. But the knot tightening beneath my sternum right now wasn't contempt. It was the sickening, hollow ache of recognition, and it terrified me far more than his temper ever had.
Chase didn't say a word. He stood up, towering over the examination table, and gripped the hem of his dark gray workout shirt with both hands. He dragged it over his head in one violent, fluid motion, tossing it onto the rolling stool.
His torso was a map of collegiate violence.
Across his left anterior deltoid, the skin was mottled in shades of dull yellow and deep, plum-colored hematoma—the direct result of the labrum refusing to seat properly in the glenoid cavity.
Fresh skate-tape burns ran along his ribs, framing the hard, defined ridges of his abdomen.
"Take the readings," he said, turning his back to me and bracing his hands against the edge of the table.
I pulled on a pair of blue nitrile gloves, the snap of the rubber breaking the heavy silence. I squeezed a dollop of conductive gel onto my fingertips, stepping up behind him.
The heat radiating off his bare back hit my face like an open oven door.
I raised my hands, pressing my thumbs into the knotting along his upper trapezius, tracing the line down toward his rhomboids. The instant my fingers made contact, the muscle beneath his skin seized, locking as hard as a steel plate.
"Relax your shoulder," I murmured, my voice unsteady before I forced it into clinical neutrality. "You're guarding against the palpation."
"Just log the mobility index," he grunted, his knuckles white where they gripped the vinyl edge of the table.
I ignored him, sliding my thumb laterally, applying deep, targeted pressure into the insertion point of the supraspinatus tendon.
A sharp, ragged hiss of air punched through his teeth. His head dropped back between his shoulders, his jaw clenching so violently that the tendons on either side of his neck stood out like taut wires.
"Your father doesn't know what he's talking about," I said quietly, keeping my fingers pressed into the hot, inflamed tissue.
The room went dead.
The only sound was the distant hum of the ice compressors two levels above us.
Under my hands, Chase's skin went cold. Slowly, deliberately, he straightened his spine, peeling himself away from my touch. He turned around, stepping off the platform until he was standing a foot in front of me, looking down from his immense height.
His eyes were black with a venom so concentrated it made the tiny hairs on my forearms stand on end.
"What did you say?" His voice was barely above a whisper, a low, grinding growl that vibrated against the floorboards.
My heart hammered against my ribs like a fist hitting drywall, but I refused to take the step back. I looked straight into the jagged pale scar splitting his right eyebrow.
"I said your father doesn't know what he's talking about," I repeated, enunciating every syllable.
"Compensating for a structural labral tear isn't being soft.
It's basic neuromuscular survival. If you don't unload that joint, the rotator cuff is going to rupture clean off the humeral head before February. "
"You think because you stood outside that door for thirty seconds, you know a single damn thing about my life?
" He took a half-step forward, closing the space between us until the dark hair on his bare chest was inches from the fabric of my scrub top.
"You're a student with a tablet, Wagner.
You don't know shit about what happens on that ice, and you sure as hell don't know anything about my family. "
"I know what an abusive transaction looks like," I fired back, my fingernails digging into the palms of my gloves until the nitrile stretched to the breaking point.
"He talks to you like you're a draft pick on a ledger, not a human being.
And you stand there and take it because you think getting your body broken is the only way to pay for whatever happened to your brother. "
* * *
The air detonated.
Chase moved so fast my eyes barely registered the blur of his bare shoulders.
His hand clamped around my left bicep, his grip iron-hard, and spun me toward the laminate work counter. My thighs hit the sharp wood edge with a dull thud. My notebook and telemetry sensors clattered to the floor, the plastic casing of the monitor cracking against the tile.
Before I could draw breath to scream, he stepped into the notch between my knees.
He planted both hands flat on the counter behind me, one on either side of my hips, caging me completely within the circle of his mass.
He leaned down. Two hundred and twenty pounds of bruised, fever-hot athlete descended over me, blotting out the fluorescent light until my entire field of vision was the dark line of his jaw and the obsidian fury in his eyes.
The scent of him was everywhere—freezing rain, cedar shavings, old tape, and the dark, musky heat of pure exertion. It filled my nose, my mouth, coating the back of my throat.
"Say that again," he rasped. His face was three inches from mine. The words came out in a broken, lethal rasp, his breath hot against my cheek, stirring the loose hair at my temple. "Say one more word about my brother."
My vocal cords locked.
The heat coming off his bare chest was a physical assault, sinking through my cotton scrubs and warming the cold skin of my collarbone.
My ribs constricted, trapping a shallow, ragged breath high in my lungs.
My pulse was a frantic, wild percussion hammering in the hollow of my throat, beating so hard against the skin that he could see the flutter from where he hovered.
I was pinned. Trapped between the hard laminate behind me and the immovable wall of his chest in front of me.
My fingers curled into the denim covering my thighs, gripping the fabric to keep my knees from buckling beneath me.
"Or what, Chase?"
The name slipped out before my brain could stop it. Soft. Shaking. Stripped of the clinical armor, stripped of the sarcasm, hanging between our mouths like a dropped match.
Chase froze.
The muscle along his jaw twitched once, twice. His gaze broke from my eyes, dropping down the bridge of my nose, settling directly onto my parted lips.
His chest hitched—a deep, shuddering inhalation that brought his bare sternum so close to my shirt that the cotton brushed against his skin. The fury in his eyes didn't leave, but it warped, twisting into something heavy, dark, and utterly starved.
His hands gripped the edge of the counter beside my hips so hard the laminate groaned under the torque of his knuckles.
"You don't get to use my name," he whispered, his voice scraping the bottom of his register, rough with a desperation that sent a shockwave straight through the pit of my stomach.
"And you don't get to look inside my head.
Stick to the protocol, Wagner. Because if you keep pushing me like this, I'm going to forget every single reason I shouldn't take what you're daring me to give you. "
His mouth lingered there, barely two inches from mine, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off his bottom lip.
My lips parted on a silent gasp, my chest rising until it pressed flat against the bare, burning wall of his ribs.
Neither of us breathed. Neither of us moved. The line between hatred and combustion dissolved into ash, leaving only the sound of our racing hearts echoing through the concrete box.