Chapter 36
Chase POV
The brass key had worn an indentation into the callus of my right thumb.
I sat on the edge of the unmade king-sized mattress in the pitch-black silence of the loft, my bare feet flat against the freezing oak floorboards.
Through the drawn slats of the blinds, the sodium-vapor glare of a streetlamp cut the room into dull amber bars.
Outside, freezing rain tapped against the glass in a persistent, mocking rattle, coating the brick sills in gray rime.
On the kitchen island thirty feet away, four unopened FedEx envelopes from the scouting directors in Denver and Chicago sat beneath an inch of dust.
Beside the trash bin by the front door, the national championship trophy lay on its side on the floorboards, the polished silver scratched against the baseboard, looking like a piece of discarded scrap metal.
Two cardboard cartons of Chinese food sat rotting on the quartz counter, untouched since Tuesday.
My lungs pulled in a shallow, burning draft of air.
The dark charcoal sheets beneath my thighs still held her scent—that sharp, sweet blend of vanilla lotion, clean rain, and warm skin that had lived in my throat for three weeks.
Every time the draft from the radiator stirred the cotton, the phantom presence of her hit my sternum with the force of an unpadded cross-check, driving the oxygen from my windpipe in a dry, rattling wheeze.
I hadn't slept twenty consecutive minutes in seven days.
A thick, dark beard rasped against my jawline, my eyes bloodshot and swollen, the split skin on my lower lip refusing to heal. My left shoulder was locked in a dull, throbbing spasm, but the physical pain was an echo in an empty cavern.
I looked down at my hand.
I squeezed my fingers shut, driving the notched teeth of the brass key deep into my palm until the metal bit through the skin, welling a tiny bead of dark blood over my lifeline.
You were the biggest mistake of my life.
The words echoed off the timber ceiling, chewing through my skull like acid.
I had stood in that concrete underpass in my armor, looking down at her pale, trembling face, and I had used every weapon Marcus ever beat into my ribs to slice her to pieces. I had told myself I was striking first. I had told myself I was cutting the line before she could drown me.
In the dark of the room, the lie was stripped to the bone.
I hadn't protected myself from being broken. I had become the monster. I had taken the only pure, unshielded devotion I had ever been handed in my miserable life and ground it into the slush beneath my skates.
* * *
A sudden, concussive crash rattled the front door frame.
The brass deadbolt gave a violent, screeching snap as a heavy key turned from the outside, followed by the heavy steel door slamming open against the brick stop.
The overhead halogen banks in the kitchen flickered to life with a blinding, white hum that burned the back of my retinas.
Silas Vance stood in the entryway.
He was soaked to the skin, his dark varsity wool jacket dripping freezing water onto the floorboards, his face gray with exhaustion and flushed red with pure, vibrating fury. His fists were balled at his sides, his chest heaving as if he had just skated three consecutive penalty kills.
In his right hand, he clutched a thick manila folder stamped with the seal of the Duluth Police Department and a stack of printed server logs.
I didn't rise from the mattress. I kept my head down, my thumb clamped over the key.
"Get out of my loft, Silas," I rasped, my voice a dead, gravelly hollow that barely carried across the room.
Silas didn't answer with words.
He crossed the dark oak floorboards in heavy, stomping strides, reached down, and hauled me off the edge of the mattress by the collar of my torn black t-shirt.
The cotton strained, choking my throat as he dragged my two-hundred-and-twenty-pound frame to my feet, slamming me backward until my shoulder blades struck the exposed brick wall between the windows.
"Look at me, you blind, miserable bastard," Silas snarled, his voice cracking on the syllables, his spit hitting my cheekbone.
He shoved the manila folder flat against my sternum, pinning the heavy paper to my chest with his forearm.
"Read it," he barked. "Read what campus security and the state police pulled out of Carter Ross’s junior associate forty minutes ago."
My vision swam with gray static, but my fingers rose on instinct, taking the folder as Silas stepped back.
My blood ran to ice water.
The top document was an official police interrogation transcript:
SUSPECT: Tyler Evans, Junior Associate, Ross Sports Management.
STATEMENT: Evans admitted to deploying an automated cryptographic spoofing script from a remote server in Minneapolis at 15:42 on Thursday.
Evans accessed student researcher Nola Wagner’s private university cloud profile, extracted athlete fatigue telemetry, and manufactured an altered compliance document alleging unaddressed neurological trauma.
My breath locked in my windpipe, my knuckles turning bloodless white around the paper.
Silas turned the page with a violent flick of his finger.
Attached was a digital surveillance log from the Special Collections archive on the fourth floor of Goldthwait Library, stamped Friday morning at nine o'clock.
The transcript was taken from an audio-recording device Evans had planted on Carter Ross’s overcoat lapel:
ROSS: You have twenty-four hours to resign your post and sever contact, or this dossier goes to the NCAA.
WAGNER: You're a parasite, Ross. 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. I will never let you touch him.
The paper shook violently in my hands.
The floor beneath my bare feet seemed to tilt sixty degrees.
The final page was an electronic keycard audit from Kehoe Pavilion, dated Saturday afternoon, forty minutes before puck drop:
ACCESS LOG - HOME TUNNEL TURNSTILE:
15:22 - Wagner, Nola (Senior Fellow). Manual override. Emergency entry granted.
The air left my chest in a single, devastating blow that caved my ribs inward.
She hadn't sent the email.
She hadn't taken Miller's money.
She had stood in the dark of that library and looked an extortionist in the face to protect my name. And when the walls were closing in, she had run three miles through a howling blizzard, clawing her way through security just to stand in front of me in that tunnel.
And I had kicked her report into the dirt.
I had looked at the only person who had ever loved me without an angle, and I had told her she was a mistake.
* * *
"She withdrew her registration on Monday morning, Chase," Silas’s voice rumbled, the anger in his tone cracking into an awful, hollow pity that cut deeper than any blade.
I stared at him, my lips parted, a cold sweat breaking out across my temples.
"What did you say?"
"She’s gone," Silas said, stepping back toward the kitchen island. "She packed three boxes, signed an emergency administrative leave, and vanished into the snow. Miller doesn't know where she went. The biomechanics chair has her records sealed. You ran her out of the city, Cap. She’s gone."
Silas turned on his heel. He walked out of the loft, his boots heavy on the threshold, and pulled the heavy steel door shut behind him.
The lock clicked home with the finality of an execution.
I stood alone in the center of the living room.
My legs gave out.
Two hundred and twenty pounds of collegiate bone and muscle collapsed straight down, my knees slamming into the dark oak floorboards with a concussive, violent thud that jarred my spine to the base of my skull.
My torso folded forward, my forehead hitting the cold wood between my splayed hands.
A dry, ragged sob tore out of my chest—a raw, shattered sound that clawed its way through my throat, burning the lining of my lungs.
My fists beat against the hard oak once, twice, three times, until the skin split across my knuckles, smearing fresh crimson over the varnish.
I clutched the brass key in my right hand, pressing the sharp metal hard against the center of my sternum, burying it into my flesh as another fractured, choking heave shook my ribs.
The draft.
The seven-figure signing bonus.
The championship trophy sitting in the dirt by the wall.
It was all ash. Foul, suffocating, meaningless ash that choked the air out of my throat.
I had won the world, and I was bleeding out on the floor of an empty room.
Slowly, dragging my weight up with shaking arms, I pushed my chest off the wood.
I sat back on my heels, wiping the back of my bloody hand across my mouth.
My breathing came in short, jagged gasps, but the wild, blind panic in my blood began to freeze into something else.
The defensive walls were dead. The fear of being broken, the terror of Marcus’s shadow, the obsession with draft rankings—it had all burned away in the fire of what I had done to her.
My eyes locked onto the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the black, freezing waters of Lake Superior.
I was going to dismantle Carter Ross with my bare hands.
I was going to stand in front of the athletic board and burn my own name to the ground until her record was clean.
And then I was going to tear this continent apart until I found her.
I didn't care if it took ten years. I didn't care if I had to spend the rest of my life on my knees in the dirt outside her door.
She was mine.
And the scorched-earth war had just begun.