The hallway to the restrooms was narrow and dim, the kind of afterthought corridor you found in old Denver bars that had been renovated just enough to pass inspection but not enough to feel modern. Exposed brick. A single flickering sconce. The muffled thump of music from the main room fading to something distant and hollow the farther I walked.
I pushed through the men's room door, handled my business, washed my hands. The mirror above the sink showed me a face I almost didn't recognize—flushed from the win, from the drinks, from the unfamiliar experience of sitting in a bar surrounded by people I cared about and not wanting to be anywhere else. I looked almost happy. It was unsettling.
I dried my hands and pulled the door open.
He was standing in the hallway.
Not leaning. Not casual. Just standing, centered in the narrow corridor, blocking the path back to the bar with the kind of deliberate positioning that told me this wasn't accidental. Average height. Nondescript build. A face designed to be forgotten—the kind of face that slid out of your memory the moment you looked away, all soft edges and neutral features, like someone had built him specifically to disappear in crowds.
He was wearing a dark jacket over a button-down, no tie, hands in his pockets. Nothing about him screamed threat. Nothing about him screamed anything. And that, more than anything else, made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
My dragon surged—hard, fast, ice crackling along the inside of my ribs like a warning shot.
"Mr. Rees," he said. His voice was pleasant. Modulated. The kind of voice that came from practice, not personality. "Congratulations on the win. Quite a performance tonight."
I didn't move. The door swung shut behind me, cutting off the last thread of noise from the restroom, and the hallway went very quiet.
"Do I know you?" I asked. My voice came out flat. Controlled. Goaltender's voice—the one that gave away nothing.
"No," he said simply. "But I know you. I've known about you for quite some time, actually." He tilted his head, studying me with the detached interest of someone examining a specimen. "Thirty-three saves tonight. Impressive. Especially considering the cardiac output required to sustain that level of performance over sixty minutes." He paused, letting the words land. "Cardiac output that, according to some very detailed nursing notes, shouldn't be physiologically possible."
The ice inside me went from warning to weapon. I felt it press outward, felt the temperature in the hallway drop by several degrees, felt the moisture in the air begin to crystallize at the edges of my breath. I held it. Barely.
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.
"Of course you do." He smiled—thin, professional, utterly devoid of warmth. "Core temperatures averaging ninety-one point four degrees Fahrenheit during high-exertion periods. Resting heart rate of forty-two beats per minute without corresponding loss of consciousness." He recited the numbers with the casual precision of someone who'd memorized them. Who'd studied them. "Your nurse is very thorough. Meticulous, even. The kind of documentation that would hold up beautifully under scrutiny."
My hands clenched at my sides. The cold bit into my palms, frost forming against the skin of my knuckles where no one could see.
"What do you want?" I asked.
"I want what I've always wanted, Mr. Rees. To protect the team." He removed one hand from his pocket—slowly,deliberately, the way you'd move around an animal you knew was dangerous—and adjusted his cuff. "But since you're asking what I want from you specifically, I'll be direct. I want you to step away from Cinder Adair."
The name hit me like a physical blow. Not because I was surprised—I'd known, the moment I saw him standing there, that this was about Cinder—but because hearing his name in this man's mouth felt like contamination. Like something clean being touched by something rotten.
"No," I said.
He didn't blink. "That wasn't a request."
"I don't care what it was."
"Then let me reframe it."
He shifted his weight slightly, hands sliding back into his pockets, his expression unchanged.
"Right now, I have comprehensive physiological data on you. Data that documents performance metrics so far outside the range of normal human capability that there is only one possible explanation: that your team is running the most sophisticated doping program in the history of professional sports."
He let the words settle between us.
The hallway felt like it was shrinking.
"What do you think the league will think when they see those numbers."
My stomach turned to ice.
"They won’t ignore it," he said calmly. "They can’t. Not after the betting scandals, not with the money involved in playoff races. The moment this data lands on the commissioner’s desk, the league opens a performance-enhancing investigation."
He spoke like he was outlining the weather.