Chapter 2
Mauricio POV
The dull, grinding ache in my right fibula wasn't new, but forty minutes of full-contact defensive drills had turned the hairline fissure into a localized furnace.
I sat on the wooden bench in the captain's stall, the smell of damp wool, ammonia, and friction tape hanging thick in the air.
My breath still scraped against the back of my throat in dry, ragged bursts.
With a pair of dull medical shears, I sliced through the layers of cloth tape binding my right wrist, peeling the hardened adhesive away from raw skin.
Across the rubber-matted floor, Gabriel Thorne dropped his composite stick against his locker with a loud clatter. "You're hitting late, Leal. Lindqvist was turning purple behind the bench."
"I hit on the whistle," I said. My voice sounded like gravel shifting under boots.
"You hit half a second after the whistle, and you drove a third-line winger through the Zamboni gate.
" Gabe pulled his practice jersey over his head, his blond hair standing on end.
He cast a sharp, measuring glance at my right boot, where I hadn't yet unlaced the carbon-fiber skate.
"You're favoring the outside edge again. "
"I'm fine."
"You're stiff. And you look like you want to put your fist through a concrete pillar."
I didn't answer him. I reached for my phone on the upper shelf. The screen lit up with a notification from New England Neuro-Restorative Center: an automated invoice for Rafael’s physical therapy account, due on the first of November. Four thousand two hundred dollars.
A tight band of pressure clamped around my chest, restricting the expansion of my ribs.
Rafael was nineteen now. Three years spent sitting in an electric wheelchair with high-back postural supports because nineteen-year-old Mauricio thought an off-season pond scrimmage in Scarborough was the place to teach his younger half-brother how to take a hit.
Rafael had gone headfirst into an old timber piling.
A crushed C6 vertebra. An instant, permanent silence where a future used to be.
My mother, Elena Ramos, worked double shifts at the medical billing office in Portland, but her wages barely covered the specialized van payments.
The math was simple. I had fifteen weeks of the regular season left.
I needed to stay upright, secure the top-ten selection, and lock in the ninety-five-thousand-dollar signing bonus that came with a standard entry-level NHL deal.
Nothing else existed. No distractions, no fatigue, and no pain.
Except my knuckles still held the phantom memory of grabbing Kiyomi Blake’s fleece sleeve in the runway ten minutes ago.
The contact had jolted through my forearms before I could check the impulse.
She was small—barely reaching my collarbone—but she had hit my chest like a lead weight, refusing to stagger back more than a single pace.
When I caught her arm, she hadn't flinched.
She hadn't looked at me the way the other girls on this campus looked at varsity athletes, with that eager, nervous deference.
She had looked at me like I was an obstacle in her way.
The scent of her skin—something sharp like bitter orange mixed with clean almond—was still caught in the fibers of my damp compression shirt, cutting through the sour stink of hockey pads.
It irritated the lining of my nasal passages.
It made the muscles along my jaw lock until my teeth clicked together.
The locker room door banged open, rebounding hard off the concrete block.
Coach Henrik Lindqvist stood in the threshold, his face mottled red beneath his gray crew cut. "Leal. Put a shirt on and get up to Vance’s office. Now."
* * *
I didn't bother changing out of my sweat-soaked training shorts.
I pulled a dry gray team hoodie over my head, shoved my bare feet into rubber slides, and followed Lindqvist up the metal utility stairs.
Every time my right foot struck an iron tread, a hot wire of pain flared from the ankle bone straight up into the calf, but I kept my weight distributed evenly.
A limp in this building was a blood trail in front of sharks.
Lindqvist didn't knock. He shoved Arthur Vance’s frosted glass door wide and stepped aside.
I walked in, expecting to find the Athletic Director holding another stack of penalty printouts.
Instead, I stopped two paces into the room, my slides catching on the plush navy carpet.
Kiyomi Blake stood in front of the executive desk.
Her back was straight, her hands clasped loosely over a black tablet resting against her stomach.
Her dark hair was anchored high on her head in some plastic clip, exposing the pale, slender curve of her neck and the sharp angle of her jaw.
Beside her sat Dr. Warren Hayes from the Biomechanics department, looking like an undertaker with his thin wire frames and gray suit.
Her eyes flicked toward me the moment the latch clicked. She didn't drop her gaze. Her chin rose perhaps an inch, her honey-brown eyes narrowing with an icy, clinical focus that scraped against my raw nerves.
"Close the door, Henrik," Arthur Vance said from behind his desk. He looked gray around the jowls, his collar open at the throat.
Lindqvist pulled the door shut, leaning his heavy back against the wood.
"What is this?" I asked. My voice remained flat, but my hand curled into a loose fist at my side, the knuckles straining against the skin.
"This is your season, Mauricio," Vance said, slapping a manila folder flat against his blotter.
"The regional NCAA compliance board reviewed the footage from your altercation against Boston Commonwealth.
Four roughing majors in three pre-season matches.
The league was twenty minutes away from handing down a six-game suspension. "
The air went dead in my throat. A six-game sit-out in November would pull me off the ice during prime scouting visits from Montreal and Chicago. It would drop my draft projection into the second round. It would cut Rafael’s safety net out from under him.
"Brody skated into our crease," I said, the words forced through clenched teeth. "He took a poke at our goalie's mask. I cleared him out."
"You drove him into the penalty box glass after the whistle," Lindqvist barked from the door. "And the conference board has your skating metrics flagged for erratic lateral movement. They think you're compensating for an unhealed injury, and they’re calling it reckless endangerment."
My pulse hammered a hard, heavy rhythm against my eardrums. My jaw clenched until the bone ached. They know about the leg.
"My leg is fine," I lied, keeping my weight planted solid on both feet. "I passed the team physical in September."
"The team physical doesn't track dynamic rotational torque under game loads," Dr. Hayes chimed in, his thin voice slicing through the heavy silence.
"The compliance committee agreed to defer the suspension under one strict condition: sixty documented hours of targeted neuromuscular re-alignment and dynamic biomechanical monitoring to correct your mechanical asymmetry. "
I stared at Hayes. "Sixty hours with varsity PT? The season starts in three weeks."
"Not varsity PT," Vance corrected. He gestured with his pen toward the girl standing beside the window. "Miss Blake is directing the intervention. You will report to the auxiliary basement ice-treadmill lab at five-thirty every weekday morning. Two hours a day. Starting tomorrow."
The silence in the room stretched until I could hear the high-frequency hum of the fluorescent lights overhead.
I looked at Kiyomi. She was staring straight ahead, but the tendon in her neck was taut, and the small silver ring on her left thumb spun round and round against her knuckle. She wasn't happy about this either.
"No," I said simply.
Vance’s eyebrows climbed. "Excuse me?"
"I don't need a student tracking my stride with a camera," I said, keeping my gaze pinned to the side of her face. "She's an intern. If the league wants hours, assign me to the head athletic trainer."
"The head trainer has eighty other varsity athletes to manage," Lindqvist cut in, his voice dangerous. "Miss Blake has the highest force-plate accuracy rating in the department. She has the clearance, she has the software, and right now, she holds your clearance card."
Kiyomi finally turned her head to face me.
Her expression was completely devoid of warmth.
"If you're concerned about my qualifications, Leal, I can show you the force-distribution maps from your last three games.
You're losing four percent of your push-off power on your right inside edge during backward crossovers.
You're leaning on your left hip to hide it, and it's throwing your center of gravity off by two inches.
That's why you're taking penalties. You're arriving late to your checks because you can't pivot fast enough. "
The words hit like cold water thrown directly into my face.
She had seen it. In three games of footage, from the stands, with her plastic sensors and computer models, she had found the exact flaw I had spent three weeks taping and icing to hide from Lindqvist.
My pulse surged, thick and hot, in the hollow of my throat. I stepped toward her, stopping when the toes of my slides were inches from her neat leather boots. I looked down at her, letting the full height differential work, crowding the space until the scent of her skin flared in my nose again.
"My pivot is fine, Blake."
She didn't take a single step back. Her eyes stayed locked on mine, steady and defiant, though I saw the quick, shallow flutter of the pulse point at the base of her throat.
"Your pivot is compromised," she whispered, her voice crisp enough to draw blood. "And unless you want the entire draft board to know it, you'll be on the treadmill at five-thirty."
* * *
The heavy wood door of Vance’s office clicked shut behind us, leaving the two of us standing in the empty, carpeted second-floor corridor.
Hayes and Lindqvist had stayed behind to finalize the paperwork with Vance. The silence of the administrative hallway was heavy, broken only by the distant, muffled thrum of the arena's ventilation system.
Kiyomi tucked her tablet under her arm and turned toward the stairwell, her boots making quick, sharp sounds against the runner.
I moved before the thought fully formed.
I took three long strides, ignoring the sharp protest in my fibula, and planted myself directly in front of the stairwell door. My hand came up, slamming flat against the heavy steel push-bar, blocking her exit.
She stopped six inches from my chest.
She looked up at me, her chest rising and falling beneath her fleece vest, her breath coming in quick, shallow draws. A faint flush of red had crept up the sides of her neck, staining her pale skin.
"Move, Leal."
I leaned down slightly, bringing my face into her line of sight, crowding her until she was forced to lean back against the corridor’s wood paneling. The heat from my body hung between us, trapped in the narrow space.
"You're going to walk back into that office," I said, keeping my voice low, rough, and level. "You're going to tell Hayes you have a scheduling conflict with your fellowship application. You're going to get yourself reassigned."
Her mouth pressed into a thin, stubborn line. "I don't take orders from you."
"You don't know what you're getting into, Blake.
" I stepped closer, closing the last few inches of distance until my chest nearly brushed the front of her vest. "You think this is an academic case study for your resume.
It's not. I don't sit on tables, and I don't let people pick apart my game.
You spend two hours in a locked basement with me at dawn, and I'll make sure you regret taking the assignment by day three. "
She didn't flinch. If anything, the cold defiance in her honey-brown eyes hardened into something unyielding.
Instead of shrinking away from my mass, she stepped forward. The front of her fleece brushed against my hoodie. The contact was brief, but it registered through every layer of cotton like a physical blow. She tilted her head, her lips parting slightly as she held my gaze with absolute composure.
"Listen to me, Mauricio," she said, her voice dropping to a smooth, dangerous whisper that vibrated right through the center of my chest. "I don't care about your ego, I don't care about your captaincy, and I certainly don't care about your threats.
My fellowship at the Olympic Training Center depends on this clinical baseline.
If you miss a single minute of those sixty hours, I will sign the non-compliance strike myself.
And I will watch the athletic department pull you off the ice without losing a single night of sleep. "
She held my eyes for two long, agonizing seconds, daring me to speak.
Then she brought her hand up, set her small, cold palm flat against the center of my sternum, and shoved me back.
The physical push didn't move me an inch, but the shock of her palm pressing against my chest—cold skin through damp cotton—made my breath catch in my throat. I stepped to the side before I could stop myself.
Kiyomi hit the steel bar with her shoulder, pushed the door open, and started down the concrete stairs without looking back once.
I stood in the empty corridor, listening to the sharp, fading echo of her boots descending into the lower arena.
My right hand came up, my fingers brushing the spot over my ribs where her palm had rested. The skin beneath my shirt was burning hot. My jaw clamped shut, a dark, heavy knot twisting low in my gut.
She wasn't going to break.
And being locked in a windowless room with her for sixty hours was going to tear me apart from the inside out.