My stomach dropped. "My notes."
"Your medical documentation. Every anomalous reading you'd ever flagged on me. My cardiac output, my core temperatures." His jaw worked. "He had a draft article ready to send to three media outlets and the league's Department of Player Safety."
Gavin.
"What did he want?" I asked, even though some part of me already knew.
Taz looked at me then, and the expression on his face was the worst thing I'd ever seen. Not anger. Not fear. Grief. The deep, hollow grief of a man who'd been forced to choose between two things he couldn't survive losing.
"He told me to walk away from you," Taz said. "End the relationship. Create distance. Make it clean, make it public, make it convincing. And if I did, the data would disappear. Every copy. Every draft. Every annotation. You'd be offered a good job somewhere else, far from professional sports." He swallowed. "And if I didn't, the story would run. Every reading would be used as evidence of a doping operation. The league might suspend the franchise. Launch an investigation that would make the betting scandal look like nothing." His voice dropped. "Every player on the roster. Cole, Max, Ember, Ash. Every dragon who's spent their entire life hiding. Every career. Every future. Gone."
I sat very still.
The room was quiet except for the hum of the hotel's ventilation system and the faint, distant sound of traffic on the street below. The cold radiating from Taz had intensified, not dangerously, just the ambient leak of a man whose control was stretched to transparency. Frost crept along the edge of the bedspread nearest to him, tiny crystalline fractals that caughtthe lamplight and glittered like something beautiful built from something terrible.
I watched his face. The tight set of his jaw. The muscle jumping beneath his left eye. The way his hands gripped his thighs hard enough to blanch his knuckles. The particular quality of his gaze, which wasn't meeting mine because he was bracing for impact.
He expected me to break.
I could see it. The careful way he'd arranged the information, leading with the team, with the franchise, with the careers of people we both loved. He'd built the case the way he built his game: methodically, positioning himself as the last line of defense, making the sacrifice seem structural rather than personal. He expected me to hear "I chose the team over you."
But I knew this man. I knew him the way I knew cardiac rhythms and respiratory patterns and the precise temperature his skin dropped to when his dragon was distressed. I knew him because I'd spent months reading him, not just his vitals but the silences between his words, the things he protected by never saying them, the vast and terrifying feeling he kept locked behind the goaltender's mask. He wasn’t saying it because he didn’t think I was worth it, he was saying it because despite my love, he didn’t think he was. He was giving me an out. Even though he loved me desperately, he was still giving me an out.
"What else?" I asked.
His head came up. The surprise on his face was so naked it almost hurt to look at.
"What?"
"You heard me." I kept my voice steady. "What else did he say?"
Taz stared at me. His mouth opened, then closed. The frost on the bedspread crackled softly, expanding another inch.
"Cinder, I just told you I chose the team over—"
"No, you didn't." I leaned forward, closing the gap between our knees until they touched. The cold bit through my sweatpants, sharp and immediate, but I didn't flinch, because the cold wrapped around me and made me feel safe. "You love me, Taz. I know that. I've known it since before you said it. I knew it when you shifted on a mountain road to keep me safe. I knew it when you pressed your forehead against mine in your kitchen and told me you were counting. I knew it four days ago when you couldn't even bring yourself to say good night properly because the lie was eating you alive."
His eyes were glassy. The muscle in his jaw had stopped jumping. It had locked entirely, like his whole face was trying to hold itself together through sheer stubbornness.
"So don't tell me you weighed my heart against the team and the team won," I said softly. "Because I don't believe you. Not for a second. Something else made you run. Something he said about me specifically. So I'm going to ask you again, and I need you to answer me honestly."
I reached out and took his hand. "What else did he threaten?"
The sound that came out of him wasn't quite a breath. It was closer to the noise the ice made when it cracked under too much weight, a structural failure that started deep and radiated outward through every layer.
"You," he whispered.
The word landed between us, small and devastating.
"He said if the story ran, you'd be blamed." Taz's voice was barely audible now, scraped down to something raw and exposed, nothing left of the goaltender or the dragon or the man who'd spent thirty years perfecting the art of giving nothing away. "Not just fired. Not just blacklisted. He said the data trail would be traced back to you as the source. That whoever had leaked it, whoever had sold it or allowed access, thedocumentation had your fingerprints all over it because it was your work."
My blood went cold. The human kind.
"He said evidence would show a nurse who documented impossible readings and never reported them through proper channels, who maintained a relationship with a player whose data he was responsible for monitoring, who had a prior history of employment disputes and access to drugs."
The room tilted. Just slightly. Just enough that I had to tighten my grip on his hand to stay anchored.
"He said losing your nursing license would only be the start," Taz said. "He said he'd make sure you went to prison, Cinder. That by the time the investigation was finished, no one would hire you, no one would believe you, and everything you'd rebuilt since Gavin would be gone."