Chapter 36
Mauricio POV
The darkness in the carriage house was cold, thick, and stagnant, smelling of dead cedar ashes and dust.
Two-thirty on Wednesday morning. Eleven days since the final horn sounded against Boston Commonwealth, stretching into the second week of silence.
Through the narrow gaps in the wooden window blinds, a single amber streetlamp cast thin, jaundiced bars across the pine floorboards.
In the corner beside the entryway table, the silver conference championship trophy sat on the floor like a piece of discarded scrap metal, green and gold foil confetti still stuck to the tarnished base.
Beside it on the desk lay three unopened FedEx envelopes from the NHL Central Scouting Bureau and a voicemail transcript from my prospective agency in Chicago.
I hadn't opened the mail. I hadn't answered a phone call in ten days.
I sat on the edge of the mattress in the dark bedroom, my bare feet flat on the cold wood.
My body was a hollow wreck. My jaw ached beneath ten days of dark, unkempt stubble; my eyes burned with a dry, bloodshot pressure that made the shadows in the room swim.
The cut on the corner of my lower lip had split open again, the metallic tang of dried blood coating my tongue.
In my right hand, my thumb dragged back and forth across the cold, sharp teeth of the small brass key.
The key to my front door.
The key she had dropped into my open palm before walking out into the blizzard.
The dark sheets beside my hip still carried the faint, agonizing ghost of her skin—almond oil, bitter orange, and the clean rain of her hair. Drawing a breath into my lungs was an exercise in pure physical torment; the air felt like crushed glass scraping through my bronchial tubes.
My chest was caved in, hollowed out by a brutal, self-inflicted void.
I had stood in that underpass, armored in sixty pounds of plastic and pride, and thrown the most vicious, cowardly words I owned into her face.
You were the biggest mistake of my life.
I had looked into her honey-brown eyes, saw her trembling on the concrete, and convinced myself that she was a liar because believing she was a traitor was safer than facing the terror of being loved.
I had let the ghost of Scarborough dictate my life, and in doing so, I had become the monster I always feared I was.
A ghost sitting alone in an empty room, holding a piece of brass.
* * *
The front porch stairs outside groaned beneath heavy, violent footsteps.
There was no knock.
The brass deadbolt rattled as a shoulder slammed into the solid timber of the front door, forcing the latch from the strike plate with a splintering bang that echoed through the quiet apartment.
The front door rebounded against the wall.
"Mauricio!"
Gabriel Thorne’s voice cut through the dark like a blade, rough and furious.
I didn't reach for a weapon. I didn't stand up. I sat on the edge of the mattress, the brass key clutched in my fist, staring into the hallway as Gabe’s heavy boots crossed the hardwood floor.
Gabe reached the bedroom threshold and slapped the wall switch.
The overhead halogen fixture flared to life, a harsh, blinding glare that drove a spike of white pain through my retinas. I squinted, raising a hand to shield my bloodshot eyes.
Gabe looked like hell. His blond hair was wild, his team winter parka soaked through with freezing drizzle, his jaw set in a hard, murderous line. In his right hand, he held a black university-issued laptop and a thick stack of printed network audit logs.
He didn't speak to me like a captain. He didn't speak to me like a friend.
He crossed the room in two strides, slammed the laptop down onto the mattress beside my leg, and threw the printed papers straight into my chest.
The pages fluttered over my bare shoulders, scattering across the dark sheets.
"Look at it, you stubborn son of a bitch," Gabe snarled, his chest heaving under his jacket, his hands shaking with pure, unadulterated rage. "Look at what you did to her."
My pulse thudded once, slow and sickening, in the hollow of my throat.
"Get out of my house, Thorne," I rasped, my voice sounding like iron dragged through gravel.
"Read the damn logs, Leal!" Gabe barked, leaning down until his face was inches from mine, his blue eyes blazing. "Chloe Zhang and I spent forty-eight hours locked in the campus IT security office with the network director. The compliance leak didn't come from Kiyomi. It never touched her machine."
The air seized in my constricted throat.
My vision tunneled.
"What are you talking about?"
"Julian Cross hacked the biomechanics department server on Thursday night at three in the morning," Gabe said, each word landing like an axe strike to my ribs.
"He cloned the motion-capture drive from a remote IP address in New Jersey.
The email Vance received? The one with her digital signature?
Cross spoofed her university domain through an external relay. "
The room tilted on its axis. A cold, deafening roar started behind my eardrums, drowning out the hiss of the radiator.
"No," I whispered.
"Yes!" Gabe shoved the laptop screen in front of my face.
On the display was timestamped video footage from the university library's fourth-floor rotunda, dated Friday morning before the game.
Cross was sitting across from Kiyomi at a study table. I watched her small hands clench into tight fists against the mahogany wood, her chin tilted at that fierce, magnificent angle.
Gabe pulled up an audio transcript from Cross's burner phone, recovered by campus police after Gabe tackled the scout outside the arena hotel on Sunday.
Cross’s voice crackled from the speaker: I want you off his compliance ledger, out of his apartment, and off this campus... or I detonate both of your lives before breakfast.
And then came her voice.
Crystalline. Defiant. Unbreakable.
You're a pathetic parasite, Cross. You couldn't make it as an agent, so you try to extort an athlete who built himself with his own blood. I will never let you touch him.
The recording ended with the sound of Cross sneering and walking away.
"She didn't sell you out, Mauricio," Gabe whispered, his voice cracking on a wave of pure, vicious disgust. "Cross threatened to destroy your draft and take away her fellowship.
She stood in front of him and told him to go to hell.
She ran to that arena forty minutes before puck drop to give you the proof and stand beside you in Vance's office.
And you looked her in the eye and called her a whore. "
* * *
The blood drained from my brain in a single, catastrophic rush.
A sharp, violent convulsion ripped through my diaphragm, driving every particle of air from my lungs. My chest felt as though it had been caved in by a hydraulic press, my ribs fracturing inward against my beating heart.
Gabe stared down at me for five seconds, his jaw tight, his eyes hollowed out by what he had uncovered.
"She's gone, Mauricio," Gabe said quietly, the finality in his tone absolute. "She cleared her apartment on Preble Street at dawn on Monday of last week. She dropped off the registrar's grid, she wiped her student email, and she blocked every number tied to this team. Nobody knows where she went."
Gabe turned on his heel and walked out of the bedroom, his heavy boots striking the floorboards, pulling the splintered front door shut behind him.
The silence that returned was a bottomless, suffocating abyss.
My legs gave out cleanly.
The two hundred and twenty-five pounds of my body collapsed off the edge of the mattress, my knees slamming into the bare pine floorboards with a violent, bone-rattling thud that sent a shockwave straight up my spine.
I didn't catch myself with my hands.
My forehead struck the cold, hard wood.
A dry, ragged sob tore from the bottom of my lungs—a ruined, butchered sound that tore the flesh of my throat raw as it scraped into the empty room.
I clutched the small brass key against my sternum, digging the metal into the skin over my heart until the sharp edges drew blood, my chest heaving in frantic, suffocating gasps that brought zero oxygen to my blood.
I destroyed her.
The truth crushed my soul into powder.
She had stood in the cold underpass, carrying the weight of an extortionist's threat, fighting to save my draft, fighting to save my brother’s future, fighting to protect the man who had promised to stand beside her.
And I had slaughtered her with my pride.
I had weaponized my unhealed trauma to butcher the only pure, selfless love I had ever known.
The NHL draft, the first-round bonus, the silver championship cup sitting by the door, my career, my reputation—every single piece of it was meaningless, blackened ash.
I lay on the floorboards for ten minutes, sobbing into the dust, my fingers clawing at the pine until my nails bled.
Then, slowly, the weeping stopped.
The grief inside my ribs didn't fade; it hardened, cooling into a dense, terrifying center of cold, lethal resolve.
I pushed myself up from the floor, my knuckles leaving crimson smears against the wood.
I stood on two feet, towering in the empty room, my bloodshot eyes wide, dark, and burning with a savage, unhinged clarity that burned away every remaining defense mechanism I possessed.
My pride was dead. My fear was dead.
I looked toward the front door.
I was going to hunt Julian Cross down like a rabid dog. I was going to burn my own draft ranking to the ground if that was what it took to clear her name. And then I was going to tear this continent apart with my bare hands until I found her.
And when I did, I would spend the rest of my life on my knees earning the right to breathe her air.