Cool down. Like I was the problem. Like I was the one being irrational.
I looked around the locker room—at Max, who wouldn't meet my eyes; at Cole, who looked uncomfortable; at the rest of the staff, who were suddenly very interested in their equipment bags. No one was going to back me up. No one was going to listen.
The familiar helplessness crashed over me like a tsunami, and I turned to get to the bus. Fuck them.Fuck them all.
Chapter seven
Breakaway - A player skates in alone on the goalie with no defenders between them.
Taranis
I'd barely made it through the doors of the training facility five days later—still shaking off the flight, still replaying the way Cinder had looked at me in the locker room like I was something broken he couldn't fix—when Coach Kinkaid intercepted me.
"Rees. My office. Now."
His voice was flat. Controlled. The kind of controlled that meant something was very, very wrong.
I followed without argument, my dragon stirring uneasily beneath my ribs. Theron Kinkaid was the ultimate in controlled. He moved like a man who'd seen centuries come and go, andwhen he closed the office door behind us, the weight of whatever was coming pressed against my chest like a physical thing.
"Sit," he said.
I sat.
He didn't. Instead, he turned his tablet toward me and slid it across the desk.
The headline hit me first.
HERO OR LIABILITY? Colorado Dragons' New Medical Staff Under Fire After Shocking Past Revealed
Below it, a photo of Cinder—kneeling on the ballroom floor, hands pressed to a stranger's chest, face tight with concentration. The image should have been heroic. Instead, it was framed like evidence.
I scrolled down, my stomach dropping with every line.
Cinder Adair, recently hired as a traveling medical assistant for the Colorado Dragons, was photographed performing CPR on a cardiac arrest victim at a Vancouver hotel this week. While the intervention was successful, sources have raised serious concerns about the organization's vetting process.
Adair was terminated from Denver General Hospital five months ago following a devastating incident in the pediatric emergency department. A six-year-old girl died under circumstances that remain disputed, with Adair's then-boyfriend—journalist Gavin Mercer—publishing a detailed exposé that named Adair specifically as the nurse who had complained the attending doctor failed to escalate care in time.
"He told me everything," Mercer stated in a follow-up interview. "I thought the public deserved to know what happened. I never expected him to lose his job over it."
The article went on to question whether Adair could be trusted with sensitive team information. "If he shared confidential patient details with a journalist once, what's stopping him from doing it again? How can a top-tier organization trust Cinder Adair to keep his mouth shut about player injuries, medical conditions, or anything else that might make headlines?"
I stopped reading.
My hands had gone cold—actually cold, not just the ambient chill of the facility. The dragon in my chest coiled tight, protective instincts flaring so hard I had to grip the edge of the desk to keep from standing up and doing something stupid.
"This is bullshit," I said, my voice coming out rougher than I intended. "He didn't fail anyone. His boyfriend screwed him over. Cinder did everything right."
Kinkaid watched me with those ancient eyes, expression unreadable. "You know this how?"
"I looked it up." The admission felt like exposing something private, but I didn't care.
Kinkaid leaned back in his chair, fingers steepled. For a long moment, he didn't speak. Then, quietly: "You like him."
It wasn't a question.
"Yes," I said. There was no point lying. Not to another dragon. Not about this.
"And last week, in the locker room, when he tried to pull you from the game—"