Chapter 33
Penny Correa POV
The security guard at the service checkpoint barely glanced at my laminated medical credential before buzzing the heavy iron gate open.
I broke into a run, my rubber boots slapping hard against the wet rubber runner of the subterranean runway.
Above my head, the concussive, rhythmic stamping of four thousand boots against the timber bleachers vibrated down through the concrete foundations, shaking fine gray rust from the ceiling trusses into my hair.
The air in the tunnel carried a biting, caustic chill: vulcanized rubber, stale machine oil, floor disinfectant, and the sharp, freezing draft of fresh ice.
It was 11:22 AM on Sunday in Term Week 12. January 18.
Thirty-five days remained until the ECAC Championship in Lake Placid.
My heart hammered against my ribcage like an engine running without oil, my lungs pulling in the freezing air in short, burning gasps.
Inside the zippered breast pocket of my black Garrison Athletics parka, resting flat against my collarbone, was the clean linen handkerchief wrapping the white digital stick. The black pixels were burned into my retinas: PREGNANT.
My left hand was shoved deep into my outer pocket, my palm pressed flat, warm and protective, over the lower curve of my abdomen beneath the thick down of my coat.
I had to reach him before puck drop.
I had spent two days carrying the suffocating burden of Garrett Shaw’s blackmail file—the photos of Lab 04, the threats to his Bruins contract, the extortion aimed at my fellowship. I had planned to take the hit alone, to let Garrett’s threats crush me if it meant keeping Justin safe.
Then that digital window had lit up on my bathroom counter.
The equation had changed. I wasn't an isolated student defending an academic standing anymore; I was a mother carrying his child. We were an iron front. We would walk into Dean Sterling’s office together, lay the truth on the mahogany, and face the compliance committee as an unbroken line.
I rounded the corner of the coaches' corridor, my breath hitching in relief.
Justin stood five paces ahead, framed by the harsh fluorescent glare of the underpass.
He was in full armor, the green-and-black sweater with the white number four pulled tight over his shoulder pads, his composite stick gripped in his right hand.
"Justin!" I gasped, the relief tearing through my chest, my legs pushing forward across the rubber runner. "Justin, thank God you're still down here. I need to tell you—"
He turned.
The relief died in my throat, freezing into a solid lump of ice behind my teeth.
* * *
The man who turned to face me was a stranger.
The tender protector who had knelt on the floor to rub the cold from my feet, the boy who had held me against his bare chest while the blizzard roared outside, was gone.
Justin stood at his full six-foot-four height, his massive shoulders locked into a rigid, terrifying wall of muscle. His face was blanched to the color of wet slate, the masseter muscles along his jawline bunched so tight the skin looked ready to tear.
His dark eyes were dead. Hollowed-out craters of black frost, burning with a ruined, lethal agony that knocked the breath clean out of my lungs.
My boots skidded on the rubber matting, pulling up short three feet from his skates.
"Justin?" I whispered, my hand leaving my pocket, reaching out on pure instinct toward the sleeve of his jersey. "What's wrong? What happened?"
Justin flinched backward.
He recoiled from my reaching fingers as if my skin were coated in raw strychnine, his body jerking back two feet, his lips curling in a snarl of visceral revulsion.
"Don't put your hands on me," he rasped.
The voice didn't sound human. It was a low, shredded blade dragged across rusted iron, stripped of every trace of warmth he had ever given me.
My hand hung frozen in the freezing air between us. "Justin, please—"
His left arm moved with a sudden, violent snap.
A mangled, crumpled ball of white paper flew from his gloved fist, striking me hard in the center of my chest before bouncing off the down of my parka and rolling onto the wet concrete at my boots.
"Read it, Correa," he whispered, each word dropping like a lead weight into my ribcage.
My knees trembled, a cold wave of nausea lurching up into the back of my mouth. I forced my eyes down to the floor.
The paper was mangled, crushed by the force of his hands, but the bold black letterhead was unmistakable: DEPARTMENT OF BIOMECHANICS AND KINESIOLOGY.
Beneath the crumpled creases, fragments of text glared back at me: ...formal risk incident report... unprovoked physical aggression... coercive intimidation tactics during mandatory rehabilitation... waiver of $18,000 equipment debt... expedited fellowship recommendation...
And at the bottom, reproduced in crisp, horrifying detail, was my own signature and student ID number.
The tunnel began to spin.
A high, deafening whine filled my ears, drowning out the roar of the four thousand fans stomping on the bleachers above.
"No," I choked out, looking up at him, my vision blurring with sudden, frantic tears. "Justin, no. I didn't write this. Garrett Shaw—"
"Save the performance, Penny," he cut in, the cruelty in his voice so absolute, so deadened, that it felt like an open check into my sternum. "I saw the texts from your father. Thirty thousand dollars from booster settlement accounts to clear his paper on Monday. You get Colorado, he gets clean."
"Justin, that's a lie! My father—"
"How much did Vance promise you?" he roared, taking a single, intimidating step forward, his shadow swallowing me whole, his fists trembling with a suppressed violence that made the air turn to poison.
"Was an eighteen-thousand-dollar equipment waiver worth opening your legs in my bed?
Did you need my name on a misconduct filing to guarantee your forty-five-thousand-dollar grant? "
The words struck my face like an open hand.
The blood drained from my skull, my vision going black around the edges.
The nausea seized my stomach in a violent, convulsive heave, forcing me to clutch the front of my parka with both hands to keep my knees from buckling onto the floor.
He believed it.
After five weeks of holding each other in the dark. After I had stripped away twenty-one years of armor and laid my soul bare in his sheets. He had looked at a forged piece of paper and decided that I was a calculating parasite who had traded his heart for a scholarship.
"Look at me," I pleaded, my voice breaking on a shattered sob, my fingers knotting into the fabric over my chest. "Look at my eyes, Justin! You know me! You know I would never—"
"I don't know a damn thing about you," he rasped, his voice dropping into a ruined whisper that shook with an agony so profound it bordered on madness.
"You stood in that basement and played me like a street mark. You held my hand, you let me tell you my brother’s business, you waited until my clearance was signed, and then you sold me to Dean Sterling to save your own skin. "
* * *
My mouth opened, but no sound came out.
The linen-wrapped test in my breast pocket burned against my ribs like white-hot metal.
Tell him.
The scream ripped through my brain, desperate and wild. Tell him you're carrying his baby! Tell him you're five weeks pregnant!
My fingers touched the zipper of my pocket, but they froze.
The truth withered on my tongue, turning to ashes in my mouth.
If I told him now—if I pulled out that white plastic stick while he was looking at me with those dead, murderous eyes—he wouldn't see a miracle. He wouldn't see his home.
He would see another calculated trap.
He would believe I had trapped him for his nine-hundred-thousand-dollar contract. He would believe I was Hector Correa’s daughter, running an extortion scheme to squeeze child support out of the Boston Bruins.
The realization hollowed out my chest, carving out every remaining piece of hope until there was only a vast, freezing void.
A sharp, abrasive klaxon sounded down the corridor.
BZZZZT. BZZZZT.
Twenty minutes until puck drop.
The heavy industrial door of the varsity dressing room flew open thirty feet down the hall. Coach Bradley Hauer stepped onto the rubber runner, flanked by Declan Ward and Tyler Hayes in their helmets.
"Justin!" Hauer barked, his voice echoing off the concrete. "On the ice! St. Lawrence is taking the sheet!"
Justin didn't look at his coach. He didn't turn his head.
He took one final, deliberate step toward me, closing the space until his broad, armored chest was inches from mine.
He leaned down until his mouth was level with the shell of my ear, his hot breath smelling of bitter mint and ruined stone.
"We are finished, Penny," he whispered, each word a cold iron bolt driven straight through my soul. "You were my biggest mistake. Have your things out of my house before the final buzzer, or I'll throw them into the snow myself."
He pulled back.
He didn't give me another second. He turned on the steel blades of his skates, his composite stick gripped in his right hand, and stalked down the rubber runway toward the roar of the arena.
Declan Ward paused as Justin passed him, his blue eyes flicking down the tunnel, catching me standing under the buzzing fluorescent lights. Declan’s mouth opened in shock, but Coach Hauer shoved his shoulder, herding the team out toward the ice.
The heavy fire door swung shut behind them with a definitive, hollow thud that sealed the underpass in darkness.
The tunnel fell dead silent.
Above my head, four thousand voices erupted in a deafening, thunderous roar as the Garrison Ironclads took the sheet.
My knees finally gave out.
I hit the cold, wet concrete, my palms slapping into the muddy runoff, my breath tearing from my throat in a silent, suffocating scream of pure agony.
The crumpled memorandum lay beside my knee, the red compliance stamp mocking me in the gloom.
My trembling right hand lifted from the floor, sliding beneath the down of my parka, pressing flat against the fragile warmth of my lower abdomen.
I was alone.
He had walked into the light, and he had left me in the dark.
I dragged myself up from the concrete, gripped the cold wall to stay on my feet, and turned toward the exit, my hand shielding our baby as the world burned down behind me.