Chapter 11
Penny Correa POV
The steam off my black coffee carried the bitter trace of chicory, doing nothing to cut through the dry ache in the back of my throat.
Outside the fifth-floor window of our Elm Street apartment, six fresh inches of Adirondack powder had swallowed Plattsburgh in a dead, muffling white. The trees along the curb bowed under the weight of the glaze, their branches frozen into brittle glass.
Ninety-one days remained until the ECAC Championship in Lake Placid.
I sat at the narrow kitchen island with my knees pulled to my chest, my thick wool socks digging into the rung of the stool.
On the laminate surface, my laptop screen glared with an open spreadsheet of joint kinematic curves, the cursor blinking with mocking regularity.
I hadn't added a single data point in forty minutes.
My lips still felt swollen, sensitive to the hot ceramic of the mug.
Every time I closed my eyes, the memory of Saturday night in the cab of his truck slammed through my nervous system like a physical impact—the smell of crushed cedar and wet wool, the rough drag of his thumb across my lower lip, and the ruined gravel of his voice whispering that he wouldn't stop.
Then don't stop.
The words I had whispered into the dark made a scalding flush crawl up from my breastbone, burning the skin beneath the collar of my oversized knit sweater.
I had spent all of Sunday locked in my bedroom, hiding behind closed blinds, convincing myself that the near-miss was an isolated chemical reaction.
Adrenaline. Sleep deprivation. The natural consequence of spending forty hours a week with my fingers pressed into the bare, feverish skin of an athlete who looked like he had been chiseled out of iron.
It was an anomaly. A clinical breach that could be corrected with discipline.
I would rebuild the wall. I would show up to Lab 04, keep the stainless-steel clipboard between our chests, speak only in anatomical planes and force vectors, and treat Justin Ibarra like the broken assembly of ligaments he was.
Across the island, Chloe Ross pulled an oiled sharpening stone down the inside edge of her right figure skate blade.
Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
The sound was rhythmic, metallic, and sharp as a scalpel.
Chloe blew a dusting of fine steel shavings from the hollow of the blade, set the stone down on a clean paper towel, and looked up. Her pale blue eyes were narrowed, tracking the tight line of my shoulders with the forensic focus she usually reserved for triple toe loops.
"You haven't blinked in two minutes, Pen," she said, her voice dry as salt.
My fingers tightened around the warm ceramic mug, my fingernails biting into the glaze. "I'm reviewing the eccentric loading models for Vance."
"You're staring at an empty column," Chloe countered smoothly, leaning her forearms on the counter. "And your left foot has been tapping the stool rung since six in the morning. What happened this weekend?"
A tiny hitch caught in the base of my throat. I forced my posture upright, rolling my shoulders back to shake off the stiffness. "Nothing happened. The compliance audit cleared. Dean Sterling signed the preliminary waiver."
"I'm not asking about Dean Sterling," Chloe said. She reached across the laminate, her fingers tapping the edge of my untouched mug. "I'm asking about Number Four."
* * *
The air in the small kitchen went suddenly thin.
"There is nothing to ask about," I said, reaching for a sponge in the sink and aggressively scrubbing a clean circle of laminate beside my keyboard.
"He's an assigned clinical case. I treat the AC joint, I log his neuromuscular symmetry, and I hand the file back to Dr. Vance so I can get my Vanderveer nomination. "
Chloe let out a soft, humorless laugh that grated against my raw nerves.
"You really think you're fooling me?" Chloe asked, picking up her sharpening stone again, turning it between her slender fingers.
"Penny, you have spent three years avoiding the varsity crowd like they carried the plague.
You wouldn't even walk past the arena doors if you could cut through the quad instead.
Now, you come home smelling like menthol rub and cold leather, you jump every time your phone chimes, and you've got that look on your face. "
My hand froze on the sponge. "What look?"
"The look of someone who knows the ice under her feet is barely an inch thick, but she's skating out into the deep end anyway."
"The ice isn't thin," I snapped, the heat rising into my cheeks, betraying me. "I have complete control over this situation."
"Justin Ibarra is not a situation you control," Chloe said, her voice dropping into a flat, deadly seriousness that wiped the sarcasm from the room.
"He is an enforcer with eighty-four penalty minutes on his junior record and a nine-hundred-thousand-dollar contract waiting for him in Boston.
He plays dirty, he lives isolated, and if the athletic department catches even a whisper of an ethics violation between a student trainer and their captain, who do you think they throw to the wolves? "
A cold needle of dread pricked the lining of my stomach.
"They protect him," I whispered, the words tasting like copper.
"They protect the draft pick," Chloe corrected, leaning in until her sharp gaze pinned me to the stool.
"Every single time. They will strip your fellowship, void your clinical credits, and hand the Vanderveer check to Brianna Diaz without a second thought.
And Ibarra will skate onto the ice in TD Garden next October like you never existed. "
The truth of it hit my chest like a cold weight.
Chloe was right. I knew the institutional machinery of collegiate athletics.
I had seen how easily peripheral staff were discarded whenever a star athlete crossed a line.
My entire future—my ticket out of my father's mountain of predatory debt, my clinical placement in Colorado, the only thing I had worked for eighty hours a week to achieve—hung on an unblemished academic record.
Letting Justin Ibarra put his hands on me was self-destruction dressed as desire.
"I know," I said, my voice barely audible over the clanking rattle of the baseboard heater. "I know the stakes, Chloe."
"Then act like it," Chloe said, her tone softening with genuine worry. "Build the wall back up, Pen. Put the lock on the door and throw away the key. Because if you let him pull you down, nobody is coming to fish you out."
I nodded slowly, drawing in a long, shuddering breath that filled my tight chest with cold air.
She was right. The near-miss in the truck was a warning shot from the universe. I would take the warning. I would keep my distance, maintain absolute clinical detachment, and finish the remaining seventy-eight hours of this mandate as a stranger.
* * *
My phone buzzed against the laminate counter.
The sharp, abrasive vibration skittered across the surface, rattling the edge of my coffee saucer.
My heart executed a violent, erratic leap against my ribs, knocking the air clean out of my lungs.
Chloe’s eyes flicked to the screen, then back to my face, her brow arching in silent interrogation.
My hand moved on pure reflex, my fingers cold as I picked up the glass rectangle. The screen displayed a notification from an unsaved number I had memorized down to the area code forty-eight hours ago.
Lab 04. Now. Bring the moist heat packs.
Seven words. No greeting. No punctuation. Just the low, gravelly authority of a man used to having his commands obeyed without hesitation.
The ice in my stomach dissolved into a sudden, scalding rush of adrenaline that set the skin along my collarbones on fire.
"Is that him?" Chloe asked quietly.
I stared at the black text on the screen, my thumbs trembling faintly against the casing.
The logical, rational part of my brain screamed to delete the message.
The protocol stated sessions began at six in the morning, not mid-afternoon during a holiday week.
I could text back a clinical refusal. I could forward the message to Dr. Vance and demand a staff monitor.
I could save myself.
Instead, my thumb hovered over the keyboard, typing two words before I could stop the impulse:
Ten minutes.
I hit send.
The realization of what I had done crashed down on me, heavy and suffocating. Chloe closed her eyes, shaking her head in silent, grim resignation as I slid off the barstool.
"Don't say it," I whispered, my voice rough.
"I don't have to," Chloe replied, not looking up from her skate. "You're already bleeding, Pen."
I didn't answer. I grabbed my heavy black parka from the hook by the door, yanked my snow boots onto my feet, and slung my canvas clinical satchel over my shoulder.
The four-block walk through the snow-choked streets to The Forge was a blur of grey sky and biting wind. The campus was completely deserted for Thanksgiving break, the brick dormitories dark, the paths unplowed.
The cold air seared my lungs, but the heat burning beneath my ribs refused to cool.
I entered the arena through the service dock, my boots squeaking on the salt-stained rubber mats. The building was empty, the cavernous silence broken only by the distant, rhythmic hum of the brine pumps.
Two flights down. Past the deserted hydrotherapy plunge tanks. Down the narrow, unpainted cinderblock corridor to the heavy steel door of Lab 04.
I paused on the threshold, drawing in a sharp, jagged breath, smoothing the front of my gray athletic scrubs, forcing my chin up into that sharp, professional mask.
Clinical. Detached. Untouchable.
I pushed the door open.
The heavy latch released with a dull, hollow pop.
Justin stood in the center of the room.
He didn't have his gear on. He wore only dark charcoal compression shorts and a sleeveless black training shirt that clung to his wide torso, leaving his heavily muscled arms and broad clavicles bare to the cold room.
His right shoulder was free of tape, the skin pale over the healing AC joint, a fresh line of dark purple contusion marking where Garrett Shaw had clipped his ribs on Friday.
He had his back to the door, his hands braced against the edge of the stainless-steel examination table, his head hanging between his shoulders.
When the hinges groaned, he turned.
His dark eyes found mine, and the breath locked in my throat.
There were dark, bruised hollows beneath his eyes. His jaw was shadowed with three days of dark stubble, his masseter muscle twitching as his teeth ground together. He looked ravaged, sleepless, and dangerous—an animal pushed to the absolute edge of its tether.
He didn't look at my clipboard. He didn't look at the heat packs in my bag.
He looked at my mouth.
The silence of the room collapsed around us, thick, heavy, and boiling with the unfinished business of Saturday night.
"You're late, Correa," he rasped, his voice a low, ruined rumble that vibrated straight through the soles of my boots.
I stood in the doorway, my fingers frozen around the strap of my bag, my carefully constructed armor crumbling into dust at my feet.
There was no wall. There was no lock.
There was only him, and the fire we were both about to walk into.