Chapter 34
Dual POV
Nine seconds remained on the third-period clock.
The faceoff dot inside Minnesota’s defensive zone was chewed to gray slush, stained with droplets of fresh blood from a second-period skirmish along the half-wall.
I bent my knees, dropping my center of gravity until my chest was parallel to the ice, the Kevlar shoulder pads digging hard into the bruised cartilage of my fourth rib.
Above the glass, twenty thousand throats were screaming in a deafening, unified roar, but inside my helmet, the universe had narrowed down to a dead, frozen vacuum.
The referee dropped the black vulcanized disk.
I didn't think. I drove my lower body forward with reckless, violent torque, my composite blade snapping through the opposing center’s stick, fracturing the carbon fiber in two.
I dragged the puck to my backhand, absorbed a high, concussive hit from a charging defenseman that rattled my teeth in my jaw, and fired a blind wrist shot toward the crease.
The puck snapped off the inside of the far post, hitting the back twine with a sharp thwack.
The red goal light spun behind the glass.
The horn blared—a massive, mechanical howl that shook the arena rafters down to their iron bolts.
Confetti cannons detonated along the perimeter of the ceiling, raining thousands of glittering black and gold foil ribbons down through the cold halogen glare.
Silas tackled me around the waist from the blindside, screaming into my earhole, followed by four more black sweaters piling onto my shoulders until two tons of ecstatic collegiate champions were crushing me into the ice.
The national championship trophy was hauled onto the sheet, silver gleam catching the television lights as Coach Hastings hoisted the national championship banner. Teammates crowded around, lifting the national championship trophy above their helmets in a blinding frenzy of camera flashes.
I stood in the center of the pile, my chest heaving in ragged, shallow hitches.
The noise meant nothing. The silver hardware meant nothing. The taste in my mouth was not victory; it was the foul, acidic ash of a man who had sold his own soul to the executioner.
I shoved past Silas’s outstretched glove, ignored the television cameras thrust into my visor, and skated off the sheet before the presentation ceremony had even concluded.
I hit the rubber runners of the private underpass forty yards back.
I ripped my helmet off with a violent wrench of my shoulders, slamming the plastic shell against the concrete wall with enough force to crack the ear guard.
I braced both gloved hands flat against the cold cinder blocks, my head hanging between my collarbones, my breath scraping out of my windpipe in jagged, bloody wheezes.
Fresh blood from my split lower lip dripped onto the black cotton of my torn game sweater, pooling over the gold C on my chest.
I had won the game. I had secured the first-round draft lock.
And my chest felt like an empty, hollowed-out grave.
* * *
The celebration from the ice filtered down into the storage alcove as a muffled, distant drone.
I stood in the shadowed recess near the loading dock doors, my hands clamped tightly around the lapels of my dark wool coat. A scattering of gold foil confetti clung to the salt on the soles of my snow boots, tracking into the gray meltwater puddles on the concrete.
My stomach clenched in a slow, sickening spasm of nausea that made the glands beneath my jaw throb.
Beneath the wool, my left hand remained pressed flat over the lower curve of my abdomen, holding the space with a silent, immovable protectiveness. In my breast pocket, the wrapped test sat against my ribs—an unexploded secret burning into my skin like white phosphorus.
Heavy, uneven footsteps echoed down the corridor.
Skate blades walked across the rubber runners, accompanied by the ragged, violent rasp of an athlete struggling for air.
Chase turned the corner.
The breath locked in my lungs.
He was a portrait of collegiate wreckage.
His black-and-gold game sweater was torn open at the left shoulder seam, the bruised, mottled purple hematoma of his damaged joint exposed to the cold draft.
His dark hair was plastered to his forehead in sodden spikes, dark blood welling along his split bottom lip, his left cheekbone swollen beneath the jagged pale scar slicing his eyebrow.
He stopped five paces away.
The instant his obsidian eyes hit my face, the heavy exhaustion on his features snapped into a wall of cold, unyielding iron.
"I told you to be out of this building, Wagner," he rasped, his voice low, dead, and stripped of every drop of the man who had promised to love me in the dark.
I didn't take a step back. I forced my chin up, locking my spine into an unyielding line of steel, refusing to let the trembling in my knees show through my denim.
"I'm not here for your building, Chase," I said, my voice steady, sharp, and cold as glass. "And I'm not here to ask for your permission."
He gave a dry, mocking chuckle that sounded like stones grinding in an iron chute. He stepped closer, towering over me, his sheer mass blotting out the halogen lights overhead.
"What are you here for, then?" he sneered, his breath hot and smelling of copper as he leaned down into my face. "You waiting for Miller to sign the fellowship voucher? You want to make sure your forty-five thousand dollars cleared before you get on the highway to Colorado?"
The words were designed to draw blood. They were calculated strikes aimed directly at the wound I had laid bare to him in his bed forty-eight hours ago.
A sharp, searing ache ripped through the center of my breastbone, but I didn't drop my gaze. I looked straight into the dead, black pupils of his eyes.
"You really believe it," I whispered, my voice barely carrying over the hum of the compressor. "After everything we were. After everything you held in your hands. Your very first instinct was to believe that I was a parasite."
Chase’s jaw clenched so hard the muscles along his temples twitched with violent spasms.
"The digital audit had your signature, Nola!" he snarled, his voice breaking into a ruined, bleeding rasp that echoed down the empty underpass. "The email was sent from your portal! You sat on my couch and let me promise you the world while you were holding the knife behind your back!"
"I didn't send that email, Chase," I said, my words flat, absolute, and devoid of pleading. "Carter Ross stole my credentials when he ambushed me in the library. But you didn't even ask. You didn't give me ten seconds to speak before you decided that I was just like your father."
His frame went rigid, his chest heaving beneath his shoulder pads.
"You think so little of yourself," I continued, each syllable steady as a scalpel slicing through living tissue. "You are so terrified of being broken that you would rather burn down the only real thing in your life than admit that someone could love you without an angle."
* * *
Chase didn't speak.
His fists trembled inside his black leather hockey gloves, his breath coming in harsh, uneven gasps through his nostrils.
I didn't reach for the pocket holding the positive test.
I would not use his unborn child as a hostage. I would not use the life growing beneath my heart as a desperate plea to an enforcer who looked at me with disgust. A child deserved a father who stood in the light, not a coward who hid behind his scars the second the wind blew cold.
I reached into the right pocket of my coat.
My fingers closed around the cold, notched brass resting at the bottom.
I stepped forward, closing the space between us until the damp wool of my coat brushed the torn Kevlar of his jersey.
Chase didn't move away. He stood like an iron statue, his eyes dark with a wild, suffocating agony that he couldn't hide beneath his fury.
I reached out, took his right hockey glove in my bare hand, and peeled the fingers open with slow, deliberate force.
I laid the heavy brass key to his warehouse loft flat against his calloused palm.
The metal clinked softly against his hockey tape.
"You spent your whole life terrified that someone was going to break you, Chase," I whispered, my voice trembling only on the final syllable. "Look at this floor. Look at what you did. You were the only one who broke anything."
I stepped back, pulling my hands into my pockets, wrapping my wool coat tightly across the lower curve of my abdomen.
"Goodbye, Captain."
I didn't wait for him to speak. I didn't look at his split lip or the crushed blue folder lying in the slush behind his skates.
I turned on my heel and walked toward the heavy emergency exit door at the end of the corridor.
I shoved the brass crash bar down with both hands.
The heavy steel door swung open, and the howling, sub-zero blizzard off Lake Superior hit my face in a blinding white squall.
I stepped out into the freezing storm, the heavy door slamming shut behind me with a concussive, final thud that severed my past from my future.
Behind me, in the concrete dark, Chase stood motionless under the humming halogens, staring down at the brass key burning a hole through his gloved hand.
The abyss had opened.
And the silence swallowed him whole.