Chapter 50
SHE’S ASLEEP AND HE’S PLOTTING VIOLENCE
Nate
“She’s in pain and I’m just… sitting here like a Rottweiler with feelings.”
Nate sat in the chair pulled up beside Holly’s bed, his forearms braced on his thighs, fingers loosely threaded together like he was praying to a god he didn’t believe in.
The only light came from the dim lamp above the sink and the faint green glow of the monitor tracking her vitals, the steady beep of her heartbeat the closest thing he’d ever heard to peace.
Holly was asleep on her side, hair spread across the pillow in dark, messy waves, her mouth parted like she’d been arguing with pain even in her dreams. Her ankle was wrapped and elevated, swollen beneath layers of gauze and a plastic brace, and the sight of it still made his jaw lock so hard he could feel it in his teeth.
Nate had watched her break on stage. He’d felt her shake in his arms. Heard the small, brutal sound she’d made when her body hit the floor, and it kept looping behind his ribs like an alarm he couldn’t turn off.
He’d played through broken knuckles, cracked ribs, a shoulder that should’ve been surgically repaired three seasons ago.
But watching her go down like that had done something vicious to him.
It’d called up something primitive. Something that didn’t care about cameras, or contracts, or consequences.
His phone buzzed on the chair arm. He almost ignored it. The world could wait. The league could wait. The show could rot. But then it buzzed again, and the third time it vibrated he checked the screen with the slow irritation of a man being dragged out of a foxhole.
Nick Marlow
Watch this.
His thumb hovered. A cold, instinctive dread crawled up his spine. Nate clicked anyway.
The video loaded in silence, shaky and grainy, filmed from someone’s phone near the backstage entrance.
It was time-stamped ten minutes before their routine.
He watched a blur of crew members, costumes, and movement, then there he was.
Lars. Smiling. Talking with Jorja like it was any other night of manufactured sparkle.
The camera angle shifted slightly, and Nate’s stomach dropped as clarity snapped into place.
Lars reached up with two fingers, catching the string of pearls at Jorja’s throat.
No whoopsie backstage wardrobe mishap. It was fucking deliberate.
The pearls scattered across the floor, glittering under the stage lights.
Nate felt his pulse go murderous as the memory slammed into him.
Holly sprinting into the lift, her shoe rolling out, her ankle snapping sideways with that sickening crack…
His throat tightened. His hands stopped being hands and became weapons, fingers curling so hard around the phone that it creaked.
He replayed it twice, his brain refusing to accept what it already knew.
Rage rose like a tide, cold and heavy, the kind that didn’t roar and burn out but settled, locked in, lethal.
He’d spent a lifetime learning how to take emotion and turn it into impact. He could feel it now, that old familiar switch flipping inside him. The part of him that stopped being a man and started being the wall.
You don’t fucking touch what’s mine.
The thought came uninvited, brutal in its simplicity. It might’ve scared him, once, but now he knew it was just the truth. She was his now. And he was going to get to the fucking bottom of this.
He stood slowly because he wasn’t about to wake her.
He looked at Holly in the bed, at the slack vulnerability of her sleeping face, at the faint bruising on her wrist from where she’d hit the floor, and his chest twisted so hard it almost stole his breath.
She was supposed to be safe with him. She was supposed to be protected.
His phone buzzed again with another message, this time a call from Holly’s producer, Martin.
Nate turned away from the bed, forced himself to breathe through his nose like he wasn’t two seconds away from finding Lars and driving him through drywall.
He padded to the window, stared down at the city lights, and tried to bleed off the violence simmering under his skin.
It didn’t go anywhere, it just collected. But he answered the call anyway.
“What?”
“Nate! Naaaaate, you absolute legend! Are you sitting down? Wait, don’t answer that. You’re probably still at the hospital. Which, first of all, huge sympathies. We’re all devastated about Holly. Just heartbroken, really. So unfair. She’s a warrior, truly. How is she?”
Nate’s jaw worked as he tried to keep his cool after seeing the footage. But Martin’s flippant tone needled him. “What do you want?”
“Okay, okay,” Martin hurried on. “Listen. You guys won the week.”
Nate stilled, glancing at Holly and trying to keep his voice down. “What?”
“I know, I know! Bananas, right? But the judges? They saw enough. Chantreuse said, and I quote, It was enough jive to kiss the hall of fame. Ten. Ten. Ten. Stan even cracked a smile. It was terrifying. And the public vote was insane. Like, record-breaking. People were voting like it was the goddamn Superbowl. I don’t know what you did, but keep doing it.
Well, maybe not exactly this, but the vibes, Nate. The vibes are immaculate.”
Nate’s slowly bubbling anger flared. “It was fucking sabotage, Martin. I’ve seen the backstage footage.”
“What?” Martin sounded panicked. Not shocked. Desperate. “How?”
“Doesn’t matter how,” Nate growled, barely holding his shit together. “And not the first time she’s been targeted. Remember her shoes in week three?”
A shift in the air on the other end of the line. A pause that said yes, I know exactly what you mean, and no, I can’t pretend I don’t. Martin exhaled, all his fake frippery dribbling out of existence.
“We’re handling it.”
“You’re going to handle it faster,” Nate said, his voice calming in a way that meant someone should be very, very afraid. “We both know what happened, and who did it. Deal with this the way it needs to be dealt, or I’m selling the footage to the press.”
And using the fucking money to help pay medical bills.
“Nate—”
“I’m not asking,” he cut in, glancing back at Holly.
She was still dozing. Nate felt his whole chest tighten, then harden into steel.
“If Lars isn’t terminated in the next ten minutes, I’m sending that footage to every network contact I’ve ever met, and I’m calling my lawyer.
I don’t care what this show thinks it can survive. ”
Martin went very quiet. When he spoke again, it was more controlled. Like this was the real Martin, the sharp TV producer who just faked being a ditzy dickhead because it usually got him what he wanted. “You don’t need to do that.”
“Then do your job,” Nate said. He could hear it in Martin’s breathing now. The calculation, the awareness of risk, the understanding that this wasn’t a storyline anymore. This was assault dressed up in rhinestones.
Martin swallowed. “It’s already trending,” he admitted. “We’ve got legal in-house. The network is furious. Lars is in his dressing room right now and security is on the way.”
Nate didn’t blink. “Good.”
“He’s gone,” Martin promised, like he could feel the blade at his throat. “He’ll never step into this studio again.”
Nate’s grip tightened around the phone. “And his partner?”
Another pause. “Suspended pending investigation,” Martin agreed. “We’re pulling the footage from internal feeds and handing it over to the network. They’ll decide next steps.”
Nate stared at the wall, jaw tight, rage still simmering. It wasn’t enough. It would never feel like enough. But it was the only justice this world offered: consequences that looked good on paper and never quite matched the damage.
He lowered his voice anyway. “If I so much as hear Lars’ name in Holly’s vicinity again, I’ll make sure everyone hears about it,” he said. “I’ll make a fucking PowerPoint presentation, Martin. And unlike you, I don’t give a fuck about PR.”
Martin didn’t argue. Didn’t threaten. He didn’t even try to spin it. “Understood.”
Behind him, Holly shifted. A soft sound left her throat, a tiny whimper that hit Nate like a hook to the lungs.
He hung up on Martin without saying goodbye and turned instantly, the rage in him changing shape as he crossed back to her bedside.
Holly’s eyes fluttered open, unfocused and glassy from meds, brows knitting together as reality tried to climb back into her bones.
“Hey,” he said, voice soft as he brushed hair off her face. “Easy, killer.”
She tried to sit up, but the moment her ankle moved even a fraction she sucked in a sharp breath and went pale, her hand flying to the blankets like she could press the pain back down.
“Fuck,” she whispered, voice rough with sleep and adrenaline. “It hurts.”
“I know. I’m sorry, baby,” Nate said, reaching for her hand before she could pretend she didn’t need it. He laced their fingers and held on like it mattered. “But you’ll be okay. They gave you something. It’ll take the edge off soon.”
Her gaze dragged to his face, as if she was trying to read him through the fog. “Why do you look like that?”
Because I’m trying not to commit a felony while you’re in hospital.
But he couldn’t lie to her. Wouldn’t. She deserved to know.
He lifted her knuckles to his mouth and kissed them, slow and steady. “Listen to me, Martinez,” he murmured. “What happened to you wasn’t an accident. Someone did this. Someone made it happen.”
Holly’s eyes sharpened instantly, fear snapping into focus. “What are you saying?”
Nate picked up his phone. He didn’t show her the footage yet, because he didn’t want her seeing it while she was drugged, vulnerable and trapped in a bed.
He didn’t want her to have to carry the visual of Lars choosing violence while she couldn’t even stand.
Nate just held the phone like a weapon and leaned down closer, his voice low enough to keep the moment between them.
Holly blinked hard, and tears sprang up anyway, angry and sudden.
She looked away first, as if it embarrassed her, but her voice cracked the second she spoke.
“Fucking Lars! This is… this is going to cost so much,” she whispered.
“My body is my job, Nate. My ankle is… it’s everything.
This cost me time, it cost me money, it cost me—” She swallowed, throat working.
“What if I can’t dance the way I did before? ”
The fear in her voice was so raw it made Nate’s ribs ache. She wasn’t talking about the show. She was talking about her life. Her future. The thing she’d built herself out of. Nate’s grip tightened around her hand, careful not to hurt her, but firm enough that she could feel the truth in it.
“You will,” he said. He didn’t soften it with maybe. He didn’t poison it with false hope. “You’re going to dance again. I promise you.”
Holly stared at him like she wanted to believe it and was terrified she already did.
Her lower lip trembled as she tried to pull herself together, tried to shove the panic down where she kept everything else.
Nate saw it, that instinct to be strong even when she was bleeding inside, and something hot and protective tore through him.
“He’s gone,” Nate said simply. “I spoke to Martin. Threatened to sue. Lars is fucking gone, babe, I promise.”
Holly let out a shaky breath that sounded like a sob she refused to complete.
Her fingers tightened around his hand like she needed the proof that he was real.
Nate sat back down beside her, close enough that she could lean against him if she wanted, and he braced himself like he always did so that he was ready to take whatever hit came next.
Holly stared at him for a long moment, eyes glossy, her face tight with pain.
But her gaze held onto him like she was trying to decide if it was safe to collapse into relief until the tension in her shoulders finally cracked.
She let her head tip toward him, resting against his arm like she’d run out of ways to be strong.
Nate’s hand slid into her hair, slow and careful, as he held her there and stared at the hospital wall with fury still humming under his skin.
Because she was hurt. She was scared. She was his.
And anybody who tried to take another shot at her was going to learn exactly what a defenseman was made for.
CREW SLACK – #general-gossip
Hailey (B-Cam Op):
ok WHO ELSE was in the lounge when Martin had that speaker call with nate
Liam (Cam 2):
me. and I will never recover.
Hailey:
he sounded like he was trying to sell him a timeshare??? and nate just went full quiet-anger mode and I SWEAR the thermostat dropped
Liam:
he said “i’ll make a powerpoint” and my soul left my body
Hailey:
“i don’t care about PR.” it was like watching John Wick assemble a rifle in a romcom
Liam:
it was like watching someone politely threaten to collapse a whole fucking network… it was so hot
Hailey:
the power of emotionally repressed men when they stop being polite and start being FEROCIOUSLY in love
Nick
Heard you’ve decided to add ‘dramatic injury’ to your resume. Bold.
Holly
Didn’t want to peak too early. Figured I’d save the sob story arc for sweeps week.
Nick
Excellent instincts. Also, heard about Lars. One red flag down, one to go?
Thank fuck that wanker’s out of our hair.
I’d bring scotch, but you shouldn’t mix it with your meds.
Holly
Don’t be mean. It’s exhausting enough being in a hospital bed without getting roasted by a forty-something Brit with commitment issues.
Nick
Thirty-six. And not allergic to commitment. Just choosy.
You should try it sometime.
Holly
Is this your version of checking in on me?
Nick
Absolutely not. I was also going to suggest you milk this injury for everything it’s worth. Sympathy votes, better lighting, possibly a Netflix docuseries.
Holly
Already working on the pitch. ‘Broken Ankles, Broken Trust: The Holly Martinez Story.’
You want an EP credit?
Nick
Only if I get to play myself in the reenactments. I look great in monochrome and guilt.
Holly
Bastard. Thanks for texting.
Nick
Don’t mention it. I only check in on the people I find vaguely tolerable.
Now get some rest. You’re no use to me dead.