Chapter 34
Dual POV
The red goal light flashed behind the St. Lawrence net, drowning in a storm of white ice shavings.
Four seconds showed on the digital clock.
I didn't celebrate. I lowered my center of gravity, drove my skate blades into the crease, and used my left hip to bury their attacking forward into the corner boards with a clean, concussive check that shook the acrylic glass to its fasteners.
The puck squirted harmlessly into the corner as the horn sounded its long, deafening roar through the rafters: HOOOOOORN.
Game over. Garrison wins, 4-2.
The arena erupted into an auditory avalanche. Four thousand students stomped their boots on the timber bleachers; green and white paper streamers rained down from the iron ceiling trusses, drifting over the ice like synthetic snow.
Declan Ward threw his arms around my neck from behind, screaming into my earhole, pounding his glove against my shoulder pads.
Tyler Hayes came sliding out of his crease on his knees, mobbing my waist with the rest of the defensive pairing.
Coach Bradley Hauer was smiling on the bench, shouting over the din, holding the regular-season division banner high above his head.
Up in the directors' box, Raymond Cole stood with his hands resting on the rail, nodding slowly, a gold pen in his hand.
I stood in the center of the pile, two hundred and twenty-eight pounds of immovable mass.
The noise didn't reach me. It was a dead, hollow vacuum that sucked the air straight out of my chest.
The victory tasted like old copper, floor disinfectant, and dry ash on the back of my tongue.
Declan shoved the silver trophy into my chest, his face red with sweat and grinning ear to ear. "Take it, Cap! You locked down the blue line for twenty-six minutes!"
I gripped the cold metal handles with my leather gloves. I hoisted it for three seconds—just long enough for the university photographer's flash to bounce off the scratched chrome—and then I shoved it back into Declan's arms.
"Take the lap," I rasped, my voice barely carrying over the screaming crowd.
I turned my back on the celebration, on the cameras, on the scouts, and pushed through the players' gate onto the black rubber runner of the tunnel.
The heavy industrial doors swung shut behind me, muttering the roar of the rink into a dull, low vibration.
I ripped my helmet off with my left hand, tossing it onto the floorboards, letting my back slam hard against the unpainted concrete wall.
My chest heaved in ragged, burning gasps, sweat running in cold streams down my temples, stinging the fresh cut on my split lower lip. Blood dripped from my chin, landing in tiny, dark crimson dots on the white crest of my jersey.
My knuckles ached from eighty minutes of crushing composite shafts.
I had won the game. I had locked the division title. I had secured my draft status, my nine-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar contract, and my family’s survival.
And my ribcage felt like a hollowed-out cavern filled with gray lye.
* * *
Penny POV
The silence of the private coaches' runway was thick as wet plaster.
I stood ten paces down the corridor from the dressing room door, sheltered beneath the shadows of an overhead HVAC duct.
My hands were shoved deep into the pockets of my black Garrison Athletics parka, my left palm pressed flat, motionless and protective, over the lower curve of my abdomen beneath the thick down.
Inside my zippered breast pocket, the white digital test—wrapped in its clean linen handkerchief—pressed like an anvil against my collarbone.
I should have left. I should have walked out the moment he hurled that crumpled memorandum at my chest in the tunnel before puck drop.
My boots had refused to take me to the parking lot.
I had stood in the gloom for two hours, listening to the muffled roar of the crowd, listening to the violent, concussive crashes of bodies against the boards, waiting for the final horn.
I needed to see his face when he was no longer holding a stick.
The double fire doors at the end of the hall pushed open with a heavy metallic groan.
Justin walked through the threshold.
He was drenched in sweat, his dark hair plastered to his skull, his green-and-black sweater torn at the left collar from a fight along the half-wall.
His lower lip was split open, leaking a sluggish bead of blood down the dark stubble of his jaw.
He dragged his composite stick behind him in his right hand, his skates clicking rhythmically against the rubber runner.
When his boots cleared the doorway, his head lifted.
His dark eyes found me standing in the shadow of the concrete pillar.
He stopped dead in the center of the runway.
The exhaustion in his posture vanished, replaced in a fraction of a second by a wall of cold, unyielding stone. His jaw clamped shut, the masseter muscles knotting beside his ears, his face draining of all blood until he looked like a statue carved from quarry slate.
"You're still here," he rasped.
The voice was hollow, stripped bare of everything that had ever kept me warm.
I stepped out of the shadow into the yellow glare of the strip lights, my boots silent on the rubber matting. My knees were trembling, a faint wave of nausea curling in the back of my throat, but I kept my chin tilted up, my hazel eyes locking onto his with an iron, unbroken composure.
"I stayed to return your property," I said, my voice steady, crisp, and quiet.
A cruel, humorless sneer tugged at the bloody corner of his mouth.
"My property?" He took two heavy strides forward, the blades of his skates grinding on the floor, his massive frame towering over me in the narrow corridor.
"What's the matter, Correa? Did Vance tell you the report wasn't enough to secure the Vanderveer?
Did you come back down to see if you could squeeze another thirty thousand out of my contract before I sign with Boston? "
The words hit my sternum like a blade, cold and merciless.
I didn't flinch. I didn't let a single tear touch my eyelashes.
"You really believe that," I whispered, the words dropping between our chests like lead weights. "You really looked at a forged piece of paper and decided that five weeks of my life was a calculated transaction."
Justin’s fists clenched, his knuckles white against the black tape of his stick.
"I looked at your signature, Penny," he snarled, leaning down until his dark, ruined eyes were inches from mine, his hot breath smelling of copper and bitter mint.
"I looked at texts from your deadbeat father thanking you for clearing his debts with booster money.
You held my hand in that basement. You lay in my bed and let me tell you about my brother.
And all along, you were logging entries for Dean Sterling so you could walk away with an eighteen-thousand-dollar equipment waiver. "
"I didn't write it, Justin," I said, my voice barely above a breath, but hard as granite.
"Save the lies!" he roared, the sound echoing down the empty concrete underpass, his shadow swallowing me whole.
"You played me like a fool. You looked at a broken enforcer from Massena and saw a ladder you could climb to Colorado.
Well, congratulations, sweetheart. You climbed it.
Now get the hell out of my sight before I have campus security drag you off this ice. "
* * *
Penny POV
The silence that followed his roar fell over the corridor like a collapsed ceiling.
I looked into his face—into the wild, blind agony burning behind his dark pupils, into the terrified, wounded boy who had built a wall of violence around his heart because he couldn't survive being broken twice.
The words I am carrying your baby sat on the tip of my tongue, heavy, burning, and desperate to be spoken.
I looked at his lip, bleeding onto his sweater. I looked at the hatred in his eyes.
I swallowed the words down.
I would not use our child as a shield to beg for mercy from a man who looked at me with contempt. I would not hand my baby’s father an excuse to believe he had been trapped by another calculating scheme.
My dignity was the only armor I had left, and I would wrap it around my child like iron.
I reached into the right pocket of my parka.
My fingers found the heavy brass key to his carriage house on Cumberland Avenue—the key he had placed in my palm on a cold morning in December, telling me that I was his home.
I pulled my hand from my pocket.
I stepped forward, closing the final two feet of space between us until the down of my coat brushed the wet wool of his sweater.
Justin went rigid, his breath cutting off in a sharp, dry hitch as he looked down at my hand.
I didn't hesitate. I reached out, took his large, calloused, bruised left hand, and turned his palm upward.
I laid the cold brass key in the center of his hand.
I closed his scarred fingers over the metal, pressing his knuckles shut around the key with a firm, steady pressure that made a muscle in his neck twitch violently.
"You were so terrified of being broken, Justin," I whispered, my voice level, stripped of anger, carrying the devastating finality of a closing door. "You were so convinced that the world was coming to take something from you that you tore down the only thing that was real."
His chest stopped moving, his dark eyes widening in a sudden, microscopic flicker of terror as he felt the cold brass biting into his palm.
"I didn't write that memo," I said, looking straight into the black void of his gaze. "I didn't take a dime from Arthur Shaw. And I never lied to you for a single second in that bed."
A ragged, silent breath hitched in his throat, his lips parting, but no words came out.
"You broke this yourself, Number Four," I whispered. "Goodbye, Justin."
I released his hand.
I turned on my heel, my boots finding the rubber runner, and walked away down the corridor toward the heavy industrial exit at the end of the tunnel.
"Penny," his voice broke behind me, a low, ruined rasp that sounded like torn ligaments.
I didn't stop. I didn't look back.
I shoved the heavy steel crash bar open with both hands, stepping out into the blinding, screaming whiteout of the Adirondack blizzard.
The door slammed shut behind me with a hollow, concussive thud, sealing him in the concrete dark.
I stood on the snowy curb, the sixty-mile-per-hour wind whipping freezing powder across my face, tearing the breath from my mouth.
My hand moved beneath my coat, pressing flat, warm and unyielding, over the fragile life growing beneath my heart.
The tear finally fell, freezing instantly against my cheek in the sub-zero air.
I was alone in the storm.
And behind me, the only man I had ever loved was holding the key to an empty house.