Chapter 32
Chase POV
The concrete slab above my helmet vibrated with the rhythmic, concussive stomping of eight thousand pairs of boots.
From the arena bowl overhead, the deafening roar of the crowd filtered down into the sub-basement underpass, rattling the galvanized conduit pipes running along the ceiling.
“LET'S GO SENTINELS!” thudded through the floorboards in heavy, synchronized pulses that shook the mortar dust loose from the cinder blocks.
The air in the tunnel was freezing, smelling of freshly cut ice, skate-blade friction, sharp citrus stick wax, and the damp, metallic mist rising off the refrigeration drainage troughs.
I stood forty yards behind the home bench, my composite stick resting blade-down against the rubber runner.
I was fully suited in my black-and-gold game sweater, the heavy Kevlar shoulder pads making my frame broad as a brick wall, the gold C stitched over my left breast catching the harsh white glare of the overhead halogens.
Clear poly tape was wrapped tight around my shin guards; my wrists were locked in fresh black athletic tape.
My body was primed for war.
For the first time in four years, the war wasn't against the noise in my skull.
I was thirty minutes away from leading my roster through that tunnel to take the national championship banner. I had sixty minutes of hockey to play, sixty minutes of dropping my weight into checks and winning faceoffs, and then the hiding was finished.
I was going to skate off that ice, walk straight to the compliance bench, and take Nola’s hand in front of every camera, every scout, and every trustee in the building.
We were packing her boxes tomorrow. We were driving west to Denver. The future was an open sheet of clean ice.
A heavy iron latch clicked twenty feet to my left.
The emergency access door leading from the subterranean parking bay groaned open on rusted hinges.
Marcus Guzman stepped out onto the rubber runner.
He didn't wear his stained work jacket today. He wore a clean dark overcoat, his graying hair combed back with water, but his eyes carried that same yellowed, bloodshot malice that had haunted every hallway of my life.
In his bare right hand, he held a heavy blue university administrative folder.
My boots stopped dead on the rubber matting.
My jaw locked so violently the joint clicked beneath my ear, a sharp, familiar surge of adrenaline flooding my veins.
"Get out of the tunnel, Marcus," I rasped, my voice a low, warning rumble that cut straight through the roar of the crowd above. "Hastings has campus security on the perimeter."
Marcus didn't flinch. He smiled—a thin, yellow-toothed slit that made the skin along my neck pull tight.
"Security won't touch me today, boy," Marcus said, taking three slow, deliberate strides toward my stick. "Not after they read what I'm holding."
* * *
Marcus stepped into my perimeter, stopping eighteen inches from my chest.
He didn't raise his fists.
He lifted the heavy blue folder, driving the hard cardboard edge flat against the gold C stitched over my sternum.
"Pre-game reading, Captain," Marcus sneered, his voice dropping into a venomous, triumphant purr. "Take a look at what your little savior has been doing while you were playing house in your loft."
A cold spike of irritation hit the back of my throat.
I raised my gloved left hand, fully intending to shove the folder down his throat and throw him through the emergency doors.
Then my eyes caught the letterhead beneath the clear acetate cover.
OFFICE OF ATHLETIC COMPLIANCE & RESEARCH OVERSIGHT – SPECIAL DISCLOSURE.
The document bore an official digital date stamp from yesterday afternoon at four o'clock.
Beneath the header sat Nola Wagner’s full name, her senior student ID number, and her official cryptographic signature, validated by the university’s administrative network.
The text on the page was a clinical, merciless execution:
FORMAL ADJUDICATION REQUEST: Biometric Telemetry Audit of Student-Athlete Chase Guzman.
Attached are unredacted acceleration files and verified impact logs confirming severe, unaddressed left glenohumeral labral tears and two distinct post-game cognitive baseline failures during the North Dakota series. Continued athletic participation presents catastrophic physical liability.
Beneath the clinical summary lay a printed email thread between Nola’s student account and Athletic Director Miller’s private administrative address:
Director Miller: Per our initial agreement, I have compiled the non-compliance data confirming athlete medical disqualification.
In accordance with the terms established in January, please verify the immediate release of the forty-five-thousand-dollar departmental research grant and expedite my institutional recommendation for the Colorado Springs Olympic Fellowship upon the athlete's formal removal from the active roster.
The concrete floor beneath my skate blades seemed to dissolve into nothing.
My vision snapped inward, collapsing into a pinprick of blinding white static.
A physical blow hit my breastbone—not a hockey check, but a massive, concussive pressure that felt as though my ribs had been caved in by an iron bar. The air left my lungs in a single, dry, rattling gasp that burned the back of my tongue.
The chant of “LET'S GO SENTINELS!” pounding from the eight thousand voices above vanished into a dead, pressurized void.
A high, shrill ringing detonated in both of my eardrums, loud and deafening, drowning out the compressors, the crowd, and the sound of my own ragged respiration.
Marcus leaned in, his face inches from mine, the stench of stale whiskey washing over my visor.
"You thought she looked at you and saw a man?" Marcus whispered, each word a serrated knife dragging across the raw nerves of my throat. "You thought an honors student with fifty thousand dollars in family debt looked at a broken, violent ape and fell in love?"
The paper crinkled beneath my gloved fingers as my hands clamped onto the edges of the folder.
"She used you, Chase," Marcus sneered, his eyes dancing with savage, victorious delight.
"Just like everybody uses you. She laid in your bed, she let you buy her groceries, and she logged your cracked bones every time you fell asleep so she could hand the file to Miller and buy her fellowship.
She sold your draft card to pay for her ticket out of here. "
The memory of last night detonated behind my eyes.
Nola sitting in my lap. Nola crying against my throat, whispering that she was terrified of being disposable, kissing me with a desperate, breathless hunger on the leather couch.
She wasn't terrified of losing me.
The realization ripped through my marrow like barbed wire.
She had already sent the email. She had already signed the disclosure. She had sat in my lap knowing she had delivered the kill shot to Miller four hours earlier.
The trust I had bled to give her—the five years of silence I had shattered just to lay my head on her chest—turned to pure, boiling acid in my gut.
I wasn't a partner. I wasn't a sanctuary.
I was an assignment holding the sensors. A broken piece of athletic meat traded for an administrative signature.
* * *
Marcus took a step back, his smile widening as he watched the color drain from my lips.
"Carter Ross has the press release queued up," Marcus muttered, tapping my shoulder pad with mocking familiarity.
"Miller is holding the suspension until the post-game press conference so the ticket gate clears.
But after tonight, boy, your first-round money is dead.
Nobody drafts an enforcer with a fraudulent medical record. Have a good skate, number nineteen."
He turned on his heel and walked through the emergency door, the heavy iron slab slamming shut with an echoing, concussive boom that vibrated through the floor.
I stood alone in the concrete corridor.
My hands shook with a violent, terrifying tremor. The blue folder was crushed in my hockey gloves, the stiff cardboard crumpling under the torque of my fingers, the printed pages tearing down the middle as my knuckles squeezed until the seams of the leather gloves groaned.
Down the tunnel, the five-minute warning buzzer sounded.
A harsh, mechanical blast echoed off the concrete, followed by the clatter of twenty pairs of skate blades walking down the rubber runners from the dressing room.
"Chase!" Silas’s voice shouted from the far turn. "Gate is opening! Lineup check!"
A different sound cut through the tunnel.
Light, hurried boot steps clicked against the wet concrete behind me.
"Chase!"
Nola’s voice.
I didn't breathe. My spine locked into rigid, frozen iron.
She rounded the corner of the auxiliary hallway, out of breath, her dark wool coat buttoned tightly to her throat, her heavy snow boots wet with slush from the blizzard outside. Her cheeks were flushed a brilliant, wind-burned rose, her dark auburn hair tumbling loose around her shoulders.
Her hazel-gold eyes were wide, shining with urgent, unshed tears, her small hands clutching the lapels of her coat against her chest as she ran toward me.
"Chase, thank God," she gasped, stumbling slightly on the rubber matting, reaching out for my arm. "I had to find you before you went out. There’s something I need to tell you—"
Slowly, dragging my weight through an ocean of black ice, I turned to face her.
My gloved hand opened.
The mangled, crushed ball of her disclosure report slipped from my fingers, dropping to the wet rubber floor between my skate blades.
I looked down at her.
My obsidian eyes were dead.
Every drop of warmth, every scrap of reverence, and every promise I had ever whispered into her skin had burned away, leaving behind only the cold, lethal void of an enforcer looking at his executioner.
The words died on her lips.
The color drained from her face in a single, terrifying instant, her eyes dropping to the crushed blue folder at my feet, then rising back to mine as the air in the corridor froze into glass.