Chapter 36
Justin POV
The carriage house on Cumberland Avenue was a tomb of stagnant air, freezing drafts, and dead silence.
Through the slats of the wooden blinds, a single sodium-vapor streetlamp cast an ugly yellow grid across the dark floorboards. Outside, freezing rain tapped a relentless, mocking cadence against the casement glass, coating the stone sills in black ice.
Twenty-eight days remained until the ECAC Championship in Lake Placid.
I sat on the edge of the unmade king mattress in my black training pants, bare-chested, my bare feet flat against the icy floor.
I hadn't slept more than twenty minutes at a stretch in seven days. Every time my eyelids slipped shut, the tunnel beneath The Forge snapped back into my skull—the look on her face, the way her hazel eyes had shattered into dark glass, the sound of her voice whispering that I had broken us myself.
My beard was a thick, dark growth of unwashed stubble, my eyes bloodshot, ringed with purple hollows that made my cheekbones look like sharp stone. The split on my lower lip from the St. Lawrence match had re-opened, crusted with dry black blood.
In the living room, the regular-season division trophy sat on the hardwood floor by the front door like a piece of discarded scrap metal.
Beside it lay an unopened FedEx envelope from Raymond Cole containing the official Boston Bruins contract addendum.
Nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Ninety-five thousand signing bonus.
It was garbage. Worthless paper meant for a dead man.
I looked down at my left hand.
My knuckles were bloodless, my fingers clamped in a white-knuckled fist around the heavy brass key she had pressed into my palm before walking out into the blizzard.
The cold metal had bit into my flesh, leaving a deep, rectangular brand across my lifeline.
On the dark linen sheets beside my hip, her scent lingered—faint, ghostly traces of vanilla, almond soap, and the crisp winter rain she carried in her curls.
Every breath I dragged into my raw lungs tasted like lye.
You were my biggest mistake.
The words I had snarled into her ear in that underpass echoed through the empty bedroom, an open razor dragging across my sternum.
I had built a fortress of suspicion. I had spent five years waiting for someone to put a knife in my back, waiting for the world to prove that a broken enforcer from Massena wasn't worth keeping.
I had looked at a forged signature on a piece of university paper, and my first instinct had been to tear her to shreds before she could see me bleed.
I hadn't protected myself from being broken.
I had become the monster that destroyed my own home.
* * *
The front door didn't knock.
It was kicked off its latch with a violent, concussive crash that rattled the casement windows in their frames.
The heavy timber door banged back against the entryway wall, the freezing northern gale sweeping into the living room, swirling road salt across the threshold.
Heavy, aggressive boots stomped onto the hardwood.
Declan Ward stood in the living room, his navy winter parka dripping with freezing rain, his blond hair plastered to his forehead in wet spikes.
He didn't take off his coat. He didn't ask for permission.
Declan marched down the short hallway into my bedroom, his face white with an unbridled, ferocious rage that wiped the locker-room easygoing grin off his features.
He flicked the overhead brass light switch.
The sudden, harsh yellow glare hit my retinas like an iron bar, making my vision swim.
"Get up, Ibarra," Declan snarled, his voice trembling with a fury so raw it vibrated the baseboard pipes.
I didn't move from the mattress. I didn't raise a hand. I looked up at him through hollowed-out, dead eyes, the brass key still locked inside my fist.
"Get out of my house, Ward."
Declan closed the distance in two strides. His heavy, gloved hands shot out, catching the neckband of my sweatpants and hauling my two-hundred-and-twenty-eight-pound frame off the mattress with a savage, desperate heave.
He shoved me backward three paces, slamming my bare shoulders hard against the exposed brick wall.
"I said get up, you miserable, blind son of a bitch!" Declan roared, his breath hot, smelling of black coffee and sulfur.
He reached into his parka with his right hand, pulled out an iPad and a thick stack of printed security logs, and slammed them violently against my bare chest.
The corner of the tablet dug into the soft tissue over my healing AC joint, but I didn't feel the pain.
"Look at the screen!" Declan ordered, his voice cracking around the edges, his chest heaving under his soaked down jacket. "Look at what you did!"
The papers fluttered to the floorboards, scattering around my bare feet.
On the illuminated glass of the tablet, a video file was paused.
A high-angle security camera feed from the Third-Floor North Reading Room of Feinberg Library, timestamped: Friday, January 15 – 08:42 AM.
My lungs seized.
Declan jabbed a blunt forefinger against the glass, hitting play.
The silent footage rolled.
Penny was sitting alone at the long mahogany table, her green wool sweater swallowed inside her black coat, her laptop open.
Garrett Shaw stepped into the frame.
I watched Garrett drag out a chair, watched him drop a glossy manila folder on her spreadsheets, leaning across the table with that entitled, poisonous smirk.
"Listen to the audio, Justin," Declan whispered, his voice shaking with a disgust so absolute it felt like an execution. "I pulled the security recording from the campus police desk two hours ago after I cornered Shaw in a bar off Route Nine."
Declan tapped the audio icon.
Garrett’s voice slithered through the tiny speaker, thin and venomous:
...NATA Code of Ethics, Section Three. Conflict of interest, clinical exploitation, and gross professional fraternization.
If this file hits Dean Sterling’s desk at eight o'clock tomorrow morning, Justin is provisionally suspended before the team bus leaves.
Boston drops his draft rights on August fifteenth. His pro career dies before it starts...
The blood in my ears began to roar, a high, deafening rush of freezing ice water.
Then Penny’s voice cut through the speaker.
Quiet. Measured. Hard as tempered steel.
You're a pathetic third-line coward, Garrett. You have spent three years watching Justin skate circles around you, and you know that without your father’s endowment plaque, you wouldn't even make the travel roster.
You think this makes you look like an NHL prospect?
You're a peeping tom with an open wallet.
A violent tremor ripped through the muscles of my throat.
Twenty-four hours, Correa, Garrett’s voice snarled on the tape. Five o'clock today. You submit that withdrawal to Vance, or Justin Ibarra's entire life burns to the ground before the puck drops.
The video showed Garrett storming out, leaving the files on the table.
It showed Penny sitting in the chair. It showed her hands giving out, her head sinking toward the armrest, her small body shaking with silent, ragged sobs as her palm pressed flat over her stomach.
"The compliance report Kozak gave you?" Declan whispered, his words driving like rusted iron nails straight into my skull.
"It was a forgery. Garrett paid Kozak five grand from his father's booster account to type it up on an old biomechanics letterhead. Penny’s signature was pulled from an equipment checkout sheet from October. "
My vision began to gray at the edges, the room tilting at a sickening thirty-degree angle.
"She went to the arena on Sunday morning to warn you, Ibarra," Declan said, his voice dropping into a ruined, broken rasp.
"She ran through the snow forty-five minutes before puck drop to stand by your side.
She had the proof that Garrett was blackmailing her.
And you stood in that tunnel and called her a whore. "
* * *
The tablet slipped from Declan’s hands, hitting the hardwood with a sharp plastic snap.
Declan stepped back toward the bedroom doorway, looking at me with an expression of pure, unvarnished pity that made the lining of my stomach turn to acid.
"She’s gone, Justin," Declan said softly, his hand resting on the door frame. "She went to the registrar’s office on Tuesday morning. Emergency medical leave of absence. She vacated her Vanderveer nomination. She cleared out her apartment, snapped her phone, and disappeared."
A sharp, dry sound tore from my throat, my vocal cords locking.
"Where is she?" I rasped, the words barely a breath, dragged up from the bottom of my lungs.
"Nobody knows," Declan said, shaking his head slowly. "Vance doesn't know. Sterling doesn't know. She severed every single line to this university. She packed her life into three boxes and vanished."
Declan turned on his heel, his heavy boots echoing down the hallway, stepping out into the freezing Adirondack drizzle.
The heavy timber door swung shut behind him, leaving the carriage house in absolute, suffocating silence.
I stood in the center of the bedroom, surrounded by the scattered security logs and the flickering screen of the tablet.
My knees gave out.
Two hundred and twenty-eight pounds of conditioned bone and muscle collapsed straight down.
My kneecaps slammed into the dark hardwood floorboards with a violent, hollow crack that sent shockwaves of physical agony shooting straight up my femurs.
I didn't put my hands out to break the fall.
My forehead struck the cold floorboards, my body folding in half on the floor of the empty bedroom.
A dry, ragged sob ripped out of my chest—a sound so ruined, so monstrous and broken, that it rattled the glass in the casement windows.
My left hand clamped shut against my sternum, pressing the cold brass key she had given back so hard into my flesh that the teeth punctured the skin over my heart, warm blood trickling down my ribs.
She had stood in front of the firing squad for me.
She had looked at Garrett Shaw and Arthur Shaw and told them to go to hell to protect my name.
And when she ran to that arena with her hands shaking, desperate to stand with me, I had thrown her love in the dirt, called her an informant, and ordered her out of my life.
The NHL contract. The Boston Bruins. The regular-season division banner. The nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
It was all ashes. Worthless, suffocating ash.
I stayed on the floor for ten long minutes, my chest heaving in violent, convulsive hitches against the cold wood, tasting the salt of my own blood and tears on the floorboards.
Then, the weeping stopped.
The grief in my veins didn't leave, but it hardened. It compressed, calcifying into an icy, unhinged fury that silenced the roaring in my ears.
Slowly, deliberately, I pushed myself up from the hardwood floor.
I stood at my full six-foot-four height, looking at my reflection in the dark glass of the casement window.
The brawler was dead. The frightened enforcer who hid behind defensive rage and five-year-old guilt was dead.
There was only a predator with nothing left to lose.
I looked down at the brass key in my bloody palm, then at the Boston Bruins contract lying on the living room floor.
I will burn my reputation to the ground.
I will tear Garrett Shaw’s life apart at the seams.
And I will rip this entire continent apart with my bare hands until I find her.
Act four was starting.
And heaven help whatever stood in my way.