Taz's apartment folded around us the same way it had last night—warm, quiet, smelling like coffee and leather and the faint herbal something I was starting to associate with safety. Taz locked the door behind us. I noticed, and the fact that he did it without being asked made my throat tight.
"Sit down," he said. "I'll make something."
"I'm not hungry."
"Sit down anyway."
I sat. Not on the couch this time—at the small kitchen table, where I could watch him move through the narrow galley kitchen with the same controlled economy he brought to everything. He pulled out eggs, bread, butter. Moved a pan onto the burner, broke eggs one-handed with the casual precision of someone who'd been feeding himself in hotel rooms and rental apartments for fifteen years.
I watched his hands. Steady. Sure. The same hands that had grown talons less than twenty-four hours ago.
The eggs hissed in the pan. He didn't speak. I didn't either. The rain kept up its patient rhythm against the windows, and I sat there with my hands in my lap and felt the guilt arrive.
Not all at once. It came in waves—each one bigger than the last, each one dragging something new to the surface. The cloud sync I'd never thought to disable. The shorthand notes I'd typedat two in the morning after games, sitting cross-legged on my bed with my tablet propped against my knees, documenting every impossible number because that was what I did. Except it wasn't. I'd done this to protect myself after Emily.
Except the pattern had never made sense. Not until yesterday, when sense arrived in the form of silver-blue scales and wings that blocked out the sky.
And now every meticulous observation—every flagged temperature, every anomalous cardiac reading, every margin note that saidthis shouldn't be possible—was sitting on a server that Gavin had opened like a filing cabinet.
It had started because of me. And I didn't even know where to go with that.
Taz set a plate in front of me. Scrambled eggs, buttered toast, a glass of water. Simple. Warm. The kind of meal you made for someone who needed to eat but had forgotten how to want to.
"Eat," he said, settling across from me with his own plate.
I picked up the fork. Put it down. Picked it up again. My hand was shaking—a fine, persistent tremor that wouldn't stop no matter how many times I told my autonomic nervous system to get its act together.
"I keep running the scenarios," I said. The words came out flat, clinical, the way I delivered bad news to patients' families. Controlled tone. Measured cadence. As if the information couldn't hurt me if I presented it properly. "If Gavin accessed the notes three weeks ago—which aligns with when the stalking escalated—he's had time to download everything. Organize it. Forward it. Even if Doryu's team locks the account in the next hour, the data's already out there. It's like trying to recall a medication after it's been administered. You can't undo absorption."
Taz ate quietly, watching me over his fork. Not interrupting. Not reassuring. Just listening with that total, devastating attention that made me feel simultaneously seen and terrified.
"The temperature logs alone," I continued, unable to stop the cascade now that it had started. "Seven separate entries documenting core temperatures below ninety-two degrees during or immediately after high-exertion activity. Any sports medicine physician would flag that instantly. And the cardiac data—the way your resting heart rate drops into the low forties during recovery periods without any corresponding decrease in consciousness or motor function—that's not just anomalous, Taz. That's clinically impossible. I wrote that. In my notes. I wroteclinically impossiblewith an exclamation point, because I was excited. Because I thought I was documenting something unprecedented."
My voice shook on the last word, and I pressed my knuckles against my mouth, hard, forcing the break back down.
"I was so careful," I whispered through my fingers. "With everything else. With Gavin, with the move, with the new locks and the new address and the new phone number. I rebuilt my entire life from scratch so he couldn't touch me. And I left the one thing that mattered most sitting in a digital box he could open anytime he wanted."
Taz set his fork down. He didn't reach for me—not yet. He seemed to understand that I needed to get through this before I could accept comfort, the same way I needed to finish charting before I could leave a shift.
I finally looked at him, and the expression on his face—not angry, not accusatory, just steady and sad and so goddamn patient—nearly broke me. "I could take down the entire franchise, Taz. Not just you. The whole team. Nancy's career. Coach Kinkaid's reputation. Everything the Dragons have beentrying to rebuild since the betting scandal. All because I couldn't be bothered to check my cloud settings."
"Cinder—"
"Don't tell me it's not my fault." My voice went sharp, harder than I intended, and I saw him register the shift without flinching. "Don't. Because it is. I'm the one who wrote the data. I'm the one who stored it carelessly. I'm the one who was too exhausted or too proud or too goddamn stubborn to let anyone help me set up a secure system when I left Gavin. I handled everything alone because that's what I do—I handle things alone—and now everyone around me is going to pay for my arrogance."
Taz looked at me for a long moment. Then he stood, came around the table, and crouched beside my chair. Not looming. Not crowding. Just lowering himself to my level, the way you'd approach someone in a crisis—which, I realized distantly, was exactly what this was.
"Are you done?" he asked softly.
I stared at him. "What?"
"Are you done punishing yourself? Because I have things to say, and I'd like you to actually hear them instead of using my words as ammunition for the next round of self-flagellation."
Despite everything—despite the guilt churning through my stomach and the data breach screaming through my head and the bone-deep exhaustion that had been building since yesterday—something in his tone cracked through my defenses. Not warmth, exactly. Something drier. The quiet, immovable stubbornness of a man who'd spent nearly thirty years stopping pucks and wasn't about to let this one past him.
"I'm listening," I managed.
"Good." He took my hand. His fingers were cold, as always, but the grip was firm and deliberate. "First: you documented anomalous data because you're an excellent clinician. That is nota flaw. That is the reason Nancy hired you, the reason the team trusts you."