Total pages in book: 84
Estimated words: 81281 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 325(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 81281 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 325(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
Adam jerks the towel away from the trainer, presses it to his chin, and waves off any further help. He slowly skates to the penalty box, the altercation apparently over in his mind.
It’s not over for me.
Traitor.
He’s got a lot of fucking nerve calling me out like that, and he should be taught a lesson.
I go back in, fast before anyone understands what’s happening. I lunge for him, catch him by surprise, and manage to land one more hit to the side of his helmet with my fist, hard enough that his skates go out from under him.
The linesmen are on me, each one with a grip on my arms.
“Who’s your traitor now?” I yell at Adam as he gets back on his feet.
He stares at me. His face contorts but not quite in anger. It actually looks uglier than anger and far more complicated. If I broke it down, I bet I would recognize it as the same thing that lives in my chest.
“That’s a misconduct, Donovan,” the ref says as he skates by me. “You’re done.”
Yeah… I’m done. While I’m not officially ejected from the game like I was last week, I have to sit out for ten minutes and the game will be over by the time it expires. I head off the ice as the crowd jeers me and I take stock of a new feeling.
For the first time after a fight—any fight—I don’t feel the familiar flat emptiness that follows the expenditure of rage. I don’t feel the low sick residue of knowing the cost to my team. It feels closer to… relief. Like a pressure that has been building since I was seventeen years old found the one valve it was always meant to come out of and some small portion of it is gone now.
Not healed. Not resolved. Not even close to either of those things.
Just… slightly lighter. Like I dropped an invisible weight I didn’t recognize was still holding me down.
Just before I step off the ice, I glance at the bench to see Livia watching me. Not with her evaluating professional gaze but in the way a person looks at another person when they’ve witnessed something for which they don’t have full context. In a way that transmits she understands instinctively that this incident carries more importance than the surface showed.
She heard him call me a traitor. I’m sure of it.
She saw my face when he said it.
I think about her in that gym two days ago, following a thread about Eisenhower and empires and the cost of doing the right thing, asking me a question I still haven’t answered.
Whether the rightness of that thing is ever actually enough when it costs you a piece of yourself.
She doesn’t look away and neither do I. For several heartbeats, we just stare at each other across the ice amid the noise of the arena and the events that just transpired, full of questions and answers neither of us are ready to share.
I’m the one who breaks the contact and heads toward the locker room though.
Chapter 8
Livia
As Patrick Rowe’s executive assistant, Janine operates with clean efficiency. Her email arrived at six fifty-eight this morning, simple and to the point because when the owner of the Wildfire makes a request, it doesn’t require elaboration.
Mr. Rowe requests your presence in his office at eight a.m. Please arrive promptly.
I noted that I wasn’t the only one on the email. It was also sent to Coach Monahan, the team’s GM Oliver Kemp, and Van Turner. A strange grouping for sure.
The executive suite is bustling when I arrive, but I’m not surprised. Patrick is a hustler. I would expect his entire operational staff to be the same.
Janine is at her desk just inside the mahogany double doors looking composed and precise, but her smile is all warmth.
“Good morning, Livia,” she says brightly. “You can go right on in.”
“Thanks, Janine,” I say and start to move past her desk, but then I jolt because I see Locke sitting in the small waiting area. He’s in one of the chairs against the wall, leaning on an armrest and looking completely relaxed. He’s in street clothes—dark jeans, a navy Henley, hair swept back from his face. Those pale blue eyes meet mine.
“You here for the meeting?” I ask.
I detect a flicker of worry, maybe annoyance. “Not that I’m aware of. I was told to be here and when I arrived, I was told to take a seat.”
The specific quality of that—told to take a seat while a meeting about him happens on the other side of a closed door—well, that has a certain implication, doesn’t it?
I know institutional exclusion when I see it. I also know this man well enough by now to know that he knows exactly what it means too. I can hear it in his dry tone that he’s very much aware this meeting is about him.