Chapter 32
Justin POV
The vibration of four thousand boots stamping against the timber bleachers above my head sent a shower of powdered gray rust drifting from the exposed I-beams.
Forty-five minutes remained until puck drop.
Thirty-five days remained until the ECAC Championship in Lake Placid.
I stood in the narrow, unheated concrete tunnel running between the varsity dressing room and the Zamboni bay, fully suited in my Ironclads battle armor.
The black-and-green sweater with the white number four was pulled tight over my shoulder pads, the CCM skate boots laced stiff to my ankles, the blades resting on the grooved rubber runner.
In my left hand, I held my freshly taped composite stick.
The air smelled of shaved ice, vulcanized rubber, floor stripper, and the sharp, bitter ozone of the compressor fans churning thirty feet below ground.
My right AC joint was an iron hinge. No hitch. No swelling.
My chest was steady, my pulse heavy and calm against my breastbone.
I had forty minutes to run special-teams systems, sixty minutes of hockey to put St. Lawrence into the dirt, and then the waiting was over.
I was walking off that sheet, heading straight down this runway, finding Penny by the medical annex, and taking her hand in front of Raymond Cole and every camera in upstate New York.
I had spent four years taking hits so other people could walk away clean.
Today, I was claiming the only thing that had ever mattered.
A metal crash bar groaned at the end of the private coaches' alcove.
The heavy industrial door swung inward, dragging against the uneven concrete floor.
A shadow stepped out into the buzzing glare of the fluorescent tubes, cutting off the draft from the outside dock.
Wade Kozak stood four paces in front of my skate boots.
He wore the same filthy imitation leather jacket, his comb-over plastered to his forehead with freezing drizzle, reeking of stale menthol tobacco and gin.
A yellow, victorious sneer was split across his face, his small, bloodshot eyes glittering with the look of a butcher holding a cleaver.
My fingers clamped around the shaft of my stick, the composite carbon groaning under eighty pounds of pressure.
"I told you to get out of this county, Kozak," I rasped, my voice a flat, lethal vibration that cut beneath the muffled roar of the stands above.
Kozak didn't take a backward step. He reached inside his jacket, pulled out a thick manila folder stamped with red ink, and took two slow, deliberate strides toward my chest.
"Game's over, kid," Kozak chuckled, the sound like gravel rattling inside a tin bucket. "You might want to see what your little saint has been trading behind your back."
* * *
Kozak didn't hand the folder to me.
He stepped into my space, bringing the yellow cardboard up and slamming it flat against the hard plastic crest of my chest protector.
The impact echoed off the concrete with a dull, hollow thump.
"Read it, Ibarra," Kozak whispered, leaning in until the sour stench of his breath hit my visor. "Read what an eighteen-thousand-dollar equipment debt buys on this campus."
My jaw locked so violently the masseter muscles along my ears spasmed.
With my left hand, I caught the folder before it could hit the rubber floor. With a flick of my wrist, I tore the metal clasp open, sliding the contents out into the harsh fluorescent light.
The top sheet was an official memorandum on Department of Biomechanics and Kinesiology letterhead.
TO: Dean Arthur Sterling, Office of Athletic Compliance
FROM: Penny Correa, Lead Student Athletic Researcher
DATE: Friday, January 15
SUBJECT: Formal Misconduct & Intimidation Report – Student-Athlete #4 (Justin Ibarra)
The blood in my veins turned to freezing sludge.
My vision narrowed down to a dark, suffocating tunnel, the gray concrete walls blurring into blackness.
My eyes dragged across the lines of type, every word a hollow-point round tearing through my chest plate:
...Athlete demonstrates recurring patterns of unprovoked physical aggression and territorial intimidation during mandatory clinical hours...
Coercive verbal behaviors deployed to force fraudulent entries in bilateral strength logs...
Student researcher requests immediate provisional removal from case, waiver of the $18,000 Noraxon equipment debt charged to student account, and expedited recommendation for the Vanderveer Clinical Fellowship...
At the bottom of the page, inked in clean, sharp black strokes, was her signature.
Penny Correa.
Beside it was her student identification number, stamped with Dr. Marcus Vance’s department seal.
Stapled behind the memo were photocopied text logs from Hector Correa’s cellular number, dated Thursday night:
Dean’s office agreed. Keep him compliant through the weekend audit. The thirty grand from the booster settlement clears my paper on Monday. You get Colorado, I get clean.
A high-pitched, deafening whine filled my eardrums, drowning out the roar of the four thousand fans above, drowning out the compressor fans, drowning out my own heartbeat.
The concrete floor beneath my skates felt like it was crumbling away into a bottomless chasm.
"She played you, Justin," Kozak’s voice slithered through the ringing in my head, soft, poisonous, and mocking.
"Dean Sterling didn't open that compliance file on an anonymous tip.
Vance and the girl handed it to him. She broke eighteen thousand dollars of gear in the tunnel, and she needed a scapegoat to keep her fellowship from getting revoked. "
Kozak laughed, a wet, rattling wheeze that scraped against my raw nerves.
"You really thought a girl like that wanted a damaged, violent monster from Massena?
" Kozak sneered, his finger tapping the paper against my pads.
"She’s an honor student with a future. You're an enforcer who took booster money in Green Bay and let his own brother get broken on the ice.
She looked at you and saw a paycheck and an insurance policy.
She held your hand in that basement, kept you compliant until the audit cleared, and then dropped the axe on your neck so she could walk away clean. "
My chest caved in as if a two-ton weight had been dropped onto my sternum.
She's up for that fellowship. Be a real shame if her standing got flushed.
The words from Cumberland Avenue flashed across my mind. The night she asked what happened when the season ended. The night she told me she was afraid of being discarded.
It was all an angle.
The trembling hands. The tears on her cheeks. The way she had whispered into my mouth that I was her home.
She had been taking notes for Dean Sterling.
She had traded my sweater, my pro contract, and my family’s survival to pay off her deadbeat father’s debts and wipe away the cost of broken sensors.
Five years of rebuilding myself—five years of believing that I could protect someone, that I could be something more than a blunt instrument used to bleed on the ice—detonated into absolute, ash-gray ruin.
My lungs seized, pulling in freezing air that tasted of iron and bile. A violent, uncontrollable tremor ripped through my forearms, my knuckles turning bloodless inside my leather gloves.
I didn't speak. I couldn't draw enough air into my crushed chest to form a syllable.
Kozak smirked, tapping the bill of his filthy baseball cap.
"Sterling has the file, Justin," Kozak whispered, turning toward the fire exit. "The compliance committee meets at puck drop. Enjoy your last forty minutes on the ice, Captain."
He pushed through the heavy metal door, stepping out into the gray blizzard, leaving me alone in the freezing tunnel.
* * *
The silence of the underpass was a tomb.
The papers shook violently in my hands, the edges of the white sheets rustling like dry leaves against my pads.
Penny Correa.
The signature stared back at me, neat, precise, and surgical.
A low, guttural sound ripped from the back of my throat, raw and animalistic, dragged up from the shattered wreckage behind my ribs.
My gloved fingers clamped shut.
I crushed the memorandum. I crushed the text logs, the compliance stamps, the clean white paper, crumpling them into a mangled, distorted ball inside my fist until the staples tore through the leather of my palm.
Down the hall, the arena warning buzzer sounded.
Three sharp, deafening blasts: BZZZZT. BZZZZT. BZZZZT.
Thirty minutes until the opening face-off.
Declan Ward’s voice echoed down the concrete corridor from the main dressing room: "Ibarra! Hauer’s calling the starters! Where the hell are you?"
I didn't answer. I leaned my forehead against the damp, freezing concrete wall, my teeth grinding together so hard a sharp pain shot through my jaw into my ear canal.
My world was gone. The fortress was ash.
Then, the squeak of running rubber soles echoed from the far end of the tunnel.
Light, rapid steps. Hurried breaths coming in short, shallow hitches.
"Justin!"
The voice was a knife driven straight into my exposed spine.
I froze against the masonry.
Penny rounded the corner of the coaches' corridor.
She was wearing her black Garrison Athletics parka, zipped tight to her chin, her dark curls tumbling over the collar, her cheeks flushed bright pink from the sub-zero wind outside.
She was breathless, her chest heaving beneath her down coat, her small hands holding the front of her jacket tightly closed over her middle.
Her hazel eyes were luminous, wide, and shining with an urgent, desperate brightness as she ran toward me.
"Justin," she gasped, slowing her pace as she closed the distance, her voice trembling with emotion. "Justin, thank God you're still down here. I need to tell you—"
She stopped.
Her boots pulled up short five feet from my skates.
Slowly, deliberately, I turned my back away from the concrete wall.
I stood at my full six-foot-four height, the crumpled ball of her memorandum clenched in my left glove, my composite stick gripped in my right.
I looked down at her.
Every drop of heat, every shred of reverence, every piece of the boy who had knelt at her feet to rub the cold out of her toes was dead.
My dark eyes were hollowed-out craters of black ice, stripped bare of everything except ruined, lethal agony.
Penny’s voice died in her throat.
The flush on her cheeks drained away in a single, terrifying second, leaving her face ashen and pale as a burial shroud.
Her gaze flicked from the mangled paper crushed in my fist to the dead, murderous stillness in my face.
The thirty-minute buzzer sounded again above our heads, but neither of us heard it.
The drop had arrived.
And the ice was shattering beneath our feet.