Chapter 5
Penny Correa POV
The wind off Lake Champlain drove a mixture of freezing rain and grit against the high, iron-grated window well at the end of the corridor, rattling the glass in its rusted steel frame.
One hundred and five days remained until the ECAC Championship game in Lake Placid.
My thighs ached from trudging across campus through slush, and my skull throbbed with the dull residue of a four-hour biomechanics lecture on angular momentum.
I had spent the afternoon hunched over forced-plate calibration software while Brianna Diaz hovered by Dr. Vance’s open office door, loudly discussing her clinical hours with the women's alpine ski team.
I hugged my black vinyl binder tighter against my ribs, the plastic goniometer in my pocket digging into the crest of my hip.
Subterranean Lab 04 sat at the darkest bend of the basement hallway, two levels below the rink. The air here was always colder than the floors above, thick with mineral scale and the dull, grinding hum of the ice-compressor pumps vibrating through the foundation.
The heavy steel door was cracked open two inches, spilling a sharp blade of fluorescent light across the stained concrete.
I slowed my pace, my sneakers squeaking faintly on the damp floor. I reached for the brass handle to push it open, but the sound of a voice inside froze my hand in mid-air.
It was a voice stripped of the sneering arrogance he wore on the ice. Low, frayed at the edges, and heavy with an exhaustion that sounded bone-deep.
"Elena, please," Justin rasped. "Do not put the pharmacy bill on the Discover card. The interest is twenty-two percent."
I stopped. My breath hitched in the back of my throat.
Through the two-inch gap, I could see his back.
He was sitting on the edge of the black vinyl plinth, his massive frame hunched forward, elbows resting on his knees.
He wore only gray training pants. His bare back was a landscape of broad, conditioned muscle, but the skin was slick with cold sweat, the right trapezius bunched into an angry, swollen ridge that twitched with involuntary spasms.
In his left hand, he pressed his phone hard against his ear. His right arm hung limp at his side, the fingers loose, dangling toward the concrete floor.
"Watertown isn't going to drop him," Justin said, his voice dropping so low I had to strain against the hum of the compressors to hear it.
"I called the clinic administrator this morning.
I will wire two thousand from my off-campus meal stipend tomorrow afternoon.
That covers Mateo's neuromuscular sessions through the end of the month. "
A pause. The muffled sound of a woman’s voice crackled through the speaker.
Justin closed his eyes. His head sank lower between his broad shoulders, his dark hair falling over his forehead.
"He needs the five days a week, Ma," he whispered, the words scraping out of him like broken glass. "If he stops the assisted standing therapy now, the contractures in his hamstrings will set. The surgeon said the window closes after five years. I'm not letting him slide backward."
Another pause. Justin swallowed hard, the tendons in his neck pulling taut.
"I'm fine," he lied, his voice flattening into an empty cadence. "The shoulder is just a contusion. I'm playing non-contact drills. The Bruins scout is coming in two weeks, and Hauer says the contract offer is solid. We just have to hold on until March. Tell Mateo I'll call him after film review."
He tapped the screen to disconnect, dropping the phone onto the black vinyl beside him.
For five seconds, Justin didn't move. He sat in the center of the fluorescent light, staring at the floor between his bare feet, his chest rising and falling in ragged, uneven hitches.
He reached across his body with his left hand, trying to wrap a wide elastic bandage around his right shoulder, but the movement dragged on the injured AC joint.
A sharp, guttural hiss broke through his teeth, his forehead dropping into his hand as a violent tremor shook his frame.
The enforcer was gone. The campus king was gone. In their place sat a twenty-two-year-old carrying a family’s survival on his broken back, bleeding out in silence so no one would see him fall.
A cold ache tightened beneath my sternum, squeezing the breath from my lungs.
My foot shifted. The sole of my shoe scraped on a patch of grit.
The sound was microscopic, but Justin reacted like an animal caught in a snare.
His head snapped up. In less than a second, the exhaustion vanished from his face, replaced by a mask of cold, unyielding granite. He lunged up from the plinth, snatching his black Ironclads hoodie from the cart with his left hand, whipping around to face the door.
His dark eyes found me through the crack. They were black, hollow, and burning with a lethal fury that made the hair on my arms stand straight up.
* * *
I pushed the door open, the hinges groaning against the silence.
Justin didn't say a word. He hauled the thick fleece hoodie over his head with his left arm, gritting his teeth so hard the muscles along his masseter bulged against his jawline. He favored the right shoulder, but he forced the limb through the sleeve anyway, refusing to let me see him flinch.
The air in the room was suffocating, thick with the smell of sweat, cold skin, and the acrid zinc of the tape on his wrist.
"You're early," he said, his voice flat, rough, and stripped of all the raw vulnerability I had witnessed five seconds earlier.
"Session starts at eight-thirty," I said.
My throat was dry. I walked to the stainless-steel desk and set my binder down with deliberate precision, giving my hands something to do so he wouldn't notice the faint tremor in my fingers.
"It's eight-twenty. I wanted to calibrate the isokinetic protocol before we started. "
"Then calibrate it," he muttered, turning his back to me and walking toward the weights in the corner.
"Take the hoodie off, Justin."
He paused. His shoulders locked. "No."
"We have seventy minutes of eccentric stabilization," I said, forcing my voice to maintain its crisp, clinical authority. "You cannot do the external rotations with a heavy fleece bunching around the acromion. I need to see the joint glide. Take it off."
Justin turned around slowly. His jaw was set like an iron vise, his eyes narrowed into cold, dangerous slits. "My joint glides fine. Start the timer, Correa, or log the hour as complete and go home."
"I don't forge logs," I replied, holding his gaze without blinking. "And I don't pretend I'm blind."
He took a slow step toward me, his boots heavy on the concrete. "What is that supposed to mean?"
The smart move was to back down. The smart move was to open the clinical binder, hand him the red resistance band, and pretend I hadn't heard him talking about Watertown and credit card debt and a brother who needed machines to stand up. That was the safe, professional boundary.
But looking at the dark purple hollows beneath his eyes and the brutal tension coiled in his neck, the boundary snapped.
"Watertown is two hours north," I said quietly, the words dropping into the space between us like stones into deep water. "Is that where Mateo is?"
Justin stopped dead.
Every drop of color drained from his face, leaving his skin an ashen, stony gray. The silence that followed was so absolute I could hear the faint, high-pitched whine of the strip lights overhead.
His fists balled at his sides, knuckles turning white as bleached bone.
"What did you say?" he whispered. The voice didn't sound like him at all; it was a blade sliding out of a sheath.
"I heard you on the phone," I said, refusing to drop my chin, though my heart was hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. "You’re wiring your meal money north. You’re trying to rehab a Grade Two separation while your joint is screaming in spasm, and you’re acting like you can take the entire world on your shoulders without breaking. "
"Shut your mouth," he snarled, taking another violent step forward.
"No, I won't," I pushed back, the adrenaline surging hot through my veins.
"You think you're being noble, Justin? You think hiding an injury and running yourself into the ground is protecting your family?
If that ligament snaps in a game against Harvard, the Bruins tear up your contract.
The money is gone. The clinic bills don't get paid.
And your brother stays in that chair while you sit on the bench feeling sorry for yourself. "
"I said shut your mouth!"
* * *
Justin moved with the terrifying, explosive speed of a forward breaking through the crease.
He didn't shove me, but the sheer momentum of his advance drove me back three paces until the small of my back slammed hard against the cold edge of the stainless-steel desk.
Before I could draw breath to speak, his hands came down on either side of my hips, his heavy, scarred palms slamming flat against the metal surface.
He caged me.
His massive frame towered over mine, blocking out the light, blocking out the room, blocking out everything except the suffocating heat radiating from his chest. He leaned down until his face was barely four inches from mine, his breathing harsh, shallow, and ragged.
The scent of him filled my lungs—crushed cedar, cold lake rain, the bitter tang of athletic tape, and the dark, intoxicating heat of his skin.
"You don't know anything about my family," he rasped, his voice dropping into a low, terrifying growl that vibrated straight through my collarbones.
"You don't know what happened to my brother.
You don't know what I owe him. And you sure as hell don't get to stand there with your neat little binder and judge how I carry my life. "
My bronchi constricted, my lungs seizing on the thick air. My fingers gripped the edge of the steel table behind me, the metal biting into my skin, but I refused to cower. I tilted my face up, exposing the pale line of my throat, my hazel eyes locking dead onto his.
"I'm not judging you," I whispered, the words trembling with a sudden, breathless intensity. "I'm telling you that you're human, Justin. And humans break."
Justin's jaw muscle spasmed violently. His eyes, dilated until the brown was swallowed by ink, searched my face with a dark, unhinged intensity.
His gaze dropped to my mouth.
The anger in his posture didn't leave, but it mutated, shifting into something heavy, thick, and raw. His chest was heaving, the coarse cotton of his hoodie brushing against the front of my scrub top with every shallow breath he took.
The air between our lips grew fever-hot.
He was so close I could feel the microscopic tremor in his fingers where they gripped the table beside my thighs. The hostility in the room didn't vanish—it compressed, burning down into a suffocating, magnetic tension that pulled at the base of my spine.
"You push me, Penny," he murmured, his voice dipping lower, rough as gravel, the sound scraping over my sensitized skin. "You push and you pry, and you have no idea how close you are to the edge."
"Maybe I'm not afraid of the edge," I whispered back, my voice barely audible over the chaotic thrum of my own pulse.
His eyes snapped back to mine, dark and feral. His left hand lifted from the metal table, moving slow and heavy through the air until the calloused pad of his thumb brushed the hollow beneath my cheekbone.
His skin was scalding. The contact sent a sharp, electric jolt straight through my nervous system, freezing the breath in my throat.
His thumb stroked once over my flushed cheek, slow and possessive, before dropping to rest against the rapid, violent thudding of the pulse point at the base of my jaw.
"You should be," he rasped, his lips hovering an inch from mine. "Because if I fall, sweetheart, I'm taking you down with me."