Chapter 29
Nola POV
The fourth-floor archives of Goldthwait Library smelled of decomposing rag paper, drying book glue, and the bitter, chemical sting of floor wax.
It was nine in the morning, the day before the national championship game.
Outside the tall, leaded-glass windows, freezing sleet tapped an erratic, frantic rhythm against the panes, driven by thirty-mile-an-hour squalls off Lake Superior.
The room was a vault of shadows, lit only by small green banker lamps casting emerald pools across scarred mahogany carrels.
I sat alone at the farthest table, my hands curled around a cold bottle of spring water.
My stomach gave a slow, sickening heave, a persistent wave of sour nausea burning the lining of my throat. I took a small, measured swallow of water, forcing the bile down with a dry, painful swallow that made the glands beneath my jaw throb.
Beneath my dark wool sweater, my left hand rested motionless over my lower abdomen.
The skin beneath my denim was flat, warm, and soft.
In the bottom of the leather shoulder bag resting against my ankle sat a plain white cardboard box from a twenty-four-hour pharmacy three miles north of campus. Two rapid-result pregnancy tests. The plastic wrapper was still sealed, burning against my calf like a lit fuse through the leather.
Chase was across campus at Kehoe Pavilion.
His phone was locked in the athletic staff safe, his entire roster sequestered in mandatory closed-door film review and power-play walkthroughs until four in the afternoon.
For five days, he had skated with the relentless, unyielding fury of a man possessed, carrying the weight of the Frozen Four on his bruised ribs while I spent my mornings dry-heaving over porcelain basins in private restrooms.
The heavy iron hinges of the double archive doors groaned open.
The sound broke the dead silence of the room like a gunshot.
Heavy, unhurried leather soles clicked against the polished parquet flooring, moving down the central aisle between the tall, shadowed bookshelves.
I didn't move. My knuckles tightened around the plastic bottle, my pulse knocking against my eardrums with a sudden, sharp spike of adrenaline.
* * *
A figure turned into the narrow alcove between the stacks.
He didn't wear a collegiate parka or a student backpack. He wore a tailored charcoal cashmere overcoat, a gray silk scarf tucked neatly into the lapels, and an Italian leather portfolio tucked beneath his arm.
Carter Ross.
The predatory sports agent who had cornered Chase at the booster gala and circled the locker room like a buzzard since October.
The heavy, cloying scent of his cedar-and-tobacco cologne rolled into the alcove, hitting my hypersensitive nostrils with enough force to make my stomach clamp in an agonizing dry-heave. I clamped my teeth shut, digging my fingernails into the wood beneath the table to keep from gagging.
Ross didn't ask permission.
He pulled out the heavy oak armchair across from me, the legs scraping loudly on the floorboards, and sat down.
"Miss Wagner," Ross said, his voice a smooth, oily purr that made the hairs on my forearms stand straight up. "Fascinating place to study. Very private."
I forced my spine straight, locking my shoulder blades together into a rigid line of steel. "This is a restricted research room, Mr. Ross. You aren't authorized to be on this floor."
"I'm authorized by reality, Miss Wagner," he countered, unzipping the brass teeth of his leather portfolio with slow, deliberate precision. "And reality has a way of showing up whether you have a library card or not."
He reached inside the leather case and pulled out a thick, glossy manila folder stamped with a red administrative seal.
He slid it across the mahogany table.
It stopped two inches from my water bottle.
"Open it," Ross said, leaning back in his chair, folding his hands over his knee.
My fingers were cold as ice as I reached forward. I flipped the heavy cardboard cover back.
The breath locked in my windpipe, the air turning to jagged glass in my chest.
Inside were four high-resolution, eight-by-ten photographs, crisp and unmistakable under the green banker lamp:
The first was a telephoto shot of the private loading bay from yesterday evening—Chase lifting me straight into the cab of his truck, his large hands clamped around my waist, his face buried deep in the curve of my neck.
The second was a shot from the night of the blizzard, taken through the windshield of a car parked across from his warehouse loft, showing Chase with his arm locked around my waist as he unlocked the heavy front door.
Beneath the photographs lay a printed digital audit of the Vault’s electronic keypad logs, four dozen entries highlighted in yellow ink, all registered between nine at night and two in the morning.
And beneath the logs lay a printout of my own private research cloud portal: Chase’s raw neuromuscular fatigue telemetry, doctored and annotated with forged notes indicating severe, unaddressed cervical spine damage, stamped with my official digital student signature.
The blood drained from my skull, leaving my vision gray and buzzing with static.
"Marcus Guzman provided the family history," Ross murmured, leaning forward until his elbows rested on the table.
"My private investigators handled the digital capture. It’s a very compelling story, Nola.
An ambitious student fellow doctoring recovery logs to keep an elite draft pick on the ice in exchange for... personal access."
"This is falsified," I whispered, my voice shaking with a rage so violent my teeth clicked together. "This data was tampered with. My signatures were spoofed."
"It doesn't matter," Ross said, his dark eyes flat as river stones. "Tomorrow morning at eight o'clock, this exact dossier will be delivered to the NCAA player safety committee, Director Miller, and the scouting directors of twelve NHL franchises."
My fingers dug into the edge of the table until the wood bit into my skin.
"Chase will be placed on immediate provisional administrative suspension," Ross said, his words landing like heavy, concussive blows against my sternum.
"He sits out tomorrow's championship. His draft stock drops out of the first round.
No franchise invests six million dollars in an enforcer carrying an open medical fraud investigation and an ethics scandal.
And you, Miss Wagner? Your research grant is revoked.
You are expelled for academic misconduct.
Your fellowship recommendation is burned. "
A cold sweat broke out along my hairline, soaking the skin beneath my collar.
"What do you want?" I rasped, the question tearing out of my throat.
"I want what I'm owed," Ross sneered, tapping the table with a manicured fingernail.
"Chase needs professional management that understands how to protect an asset, not a little student playing house in his loft.
You resign from the compliance protocol today.
You pack your things, you leave this campus before six tonight, and you sever every single contact you have with him. "
He leaned across the table, his breath sour with mint.
"You break his heart, Wagner. You make him think you used him for your project.
You make sure his head is off you, and he signs with my agency on Monday.
You do that, and this folder goes into the shredder.
Chase gets drafted in the first round, and you keep your clean record.
You stay, and I incinerate both of you before the puck drops tomorrow night. "
* * *
The silence in the room was deafening.
The sleet battered the high leaded glass, howling like an animal tearing at the frame.
My vocal cords felt swollen, my mouth dry as ashes, but the cold dread in my veins suddenly hardened into pure, blinding iron.
I pushed the folder back across the table with two steady fingers.
"You're a parasite, Ross," I whispered, holding his unblinking stare, refusing to let him see the tremor in my knees. "You and Marcus are bottom-feeders trying to bleed a man dry because you know he has more strength in his broken knuckles than both of you have in your entire bodies."
Ross’s eyes narrowed into slits of pure venom. He gathered the folder, sliding it back into his cashmere coat.
"The clock is running, Miss Wagner," he said, rising from the chair, towering over the table. "Twenty-four hours. Save his life, or watch him drown in the mud with you."
He turned on his heel and walked out of the room, his leather soles clicking away until the heavy iron hinges grooved shut behind him.
The lock clicked home.
The room went dead.
The iron in my spine shattered into dust.
My vision collapsed into black static. A violent, suffocating wave of cold nausea wrenched my stomach upward. My knees gave out, buckling beneath me as I fell forward, my hands slapping flat against the cold mahogany table to keep my skull from striking the wood.
My body convulsed in three dry, hollow heaves, the adrenaline burning through my bloodstream like pure acid.
My right hand rose, trembling violently, and flattened against the lower curve of my abdomen beneath my wool sweater.
His child.
The white cardboard box in my leather bag screamed in the silence.
If I stayed, the dossier detonated. Chase’s championship, his first-round contract, his entire life’s work—it would all turn to ash before tomorrow's game.
And if I left...
I gripped the edge of the table, dragging in a ragged, weeping breath against the freezing air of the archives, knowing that the trap had snapped shut, and I was holding the blade to his throat.