"First, they suspend you pending review. Then they audit the team’s medical staff. Trainers. Doctors. Conditioning coaches.Every supplement, every treatment, every test result your franchise has recorded for the last three seasons."
My chest felt tight, the air in my lungs suddenly too thin.
"And while they do that," he added mildly, "they interview the rest of the roster. Armstrong. Renaud. Shaw. Anyone who’s shared a locker room with you. Drug tests. Blood panels. Biological passport comparisons."
He tilted his head slightly.
"Playoffs don’t pause for investigations, Mr. Rees."
The words landed like blows.
"Reporters camp outside the arena. Headlines start asking how a player on the Colorado Dragons managed to produce physiological numbers that defy basic human biology."
My fingers had gone numb.
"And maybe," he continued, voice almost sympathetic, "maybe the league eventually decides there’s nothing illegal happening. Perhaps they conclude it was an equipment malfunction. Faulty monitoring software. A data anomaly."
He shrugged.
"But by the time they reach that conclusion, the damage will already be done."
His gaze held mine.
"The Colorado Dragons lose their goalie in the middle of a playoff run. The team spends weeks under investigation. Every win is questioned. Every player dragged through scrutiny they didn’t ask for. Sponsors disappear."
A faint smile touched his mouth.
"You know at your age you won't survive that, Mr. Rees."
"You're bluffing."
"Am I?" He reached into his jacket—again, slowly, choreographed for my benefit—and produced a phone. He held it up, screen facing me. On it was a document I assumed was Cinder's shorthand notation system, the abbreviations andmargin notes and flagged entries that only made sense if you knew what you were looking for.
Someone had known what to look for.
The entries were annotated. Highlighted. Cross-referenced with game dates and performance statistics that had been pulled from public sources. And at the bottom, in a font that was crisp and professional and utterly devastating, was a draft headline:
COLORADO DRAGONS: THE DATA THAT DOESN'T ADD UP
"This goes to three outlets simultaneously if I give the word," he said, pocketing the phone. "Sports media. Mainstream news. And one very interested party at the league's Department of Player Safety who's been waiting for exactly this kind of tip since the betting scandal made the Dragons a liability."
The ice pressed against my skin so hard I thought it might break through. I could feel it crawling up my forearms beneath my sleeves, crystallizing along the veins, my dragon screaming to shift, to freeze, to eliminate the threat standing six feet away with a smile that didn't reach his eyes.
I held it. God help me, I held it. Because if I lost control here—in a bar, in a hallway, with my teammates thirty feet away and civilians on every side—the exposure wouldn't come from a media leak. It would come from me.
"Walk away from Cinder Adair," the man said again, and this time the pleasantness was gone. What was underneath was cold in a way that had nothing to do with my dragon. "End the relationship. Create distance. Make it clean, make it public, and make it convincing. He will be offered another job. You go back to being the goaltender who doesn't let anyone close."
"And if I do that," I said, my voice a scrape of ice against my throat, "what happens to the data?"
"The data disappears. Every copy. Every annotation. Every draft headline. You'll never hear from me again, and neither willanyone on your team." He said it like he was offering a gift. Like he was being generous. "Your franchise keeps its playoff berth. Your teammates keep their careers. And Cinder Adair goes on to a perfectly respectable position somewhere far from professional sports, none the wiser. He will have a job offer he can't refuse within forty-eight hours."
I stared at him. The frost on my knuckles was thickening—I could feel it spreading beneath my sleeves, climbing toward my elbows, the dragon pressing so hard against my ribs that each breath felt like swallowing broken glass. The hallway sconce flickered. The exposed brick nearest to me developed a thin sheen of ice that crept outward in fractal patterns, delicate and deadly.
He noticed. His gaze flicked to the wall, then back to me, and for the first time something shifted behind those carefully neutral eyes—something that wasn't quite fear but was adjacent to it. A recognition, perhaps, that the man standing in front of him wasn't entirely what he'd calculated for.
Good. Let him wonder.
But wondering didn't change the math. And the math was devastating in its simplicity.