If I refused, the story broke and the data went public. If the data went public, every anomalous reading Cinder had ever documented would be dissected by people who didn't need to believe in dragons to destroy me—they just needed to believe in doping. And the league, still raw from the betting scandal, still looking for proof that they'd cleaned house thoroughly enough, would come down on the Dragons with the kind of institutional fury that left nothing standing. If it was just me, I would disappear immediately. But it wasn't.
Cole. Max. Ash. Ember. Every kid on that roster who'd poured their guts into clawing this franchise back from the dead. Gone.Not because of what they'd done, but because of what I was. Because of who I loved.
The irony was exquisite. Twenty years of hiding. Twenty years of meticulous, suffocating control—every temperature reading explained away, every cold snap attributed to poor circulation or a quirky metabolism, every relationship held at arm's length so no one got close enough to notice the impossible. And now a man I'd never met was standing in a bar hallway telling me the price of love was everything I'd spent my life protecting.
Not just my secret. Everyone's. "The data you have on me won't bring the team down. I can resign."
He sighed. "I see. Then I realize I will have to blame someone else." He leaned forward and whispered his other threat, and his words made the ice my dragon produced feel like a June day.
Chapter twenty
Rebound - A loose puck that comes back into play after a shot is saved.
Cinder
The morning was gray and cold in a way that felt personal.
I'd woken to an empty bed, which shouldn't have surprised me but did. Taz's side was cool, the sheets smoothed flat with the kind of deliberate neatness that suggested he'd been gone for a while. A note on the kitchen counter, written in his precise, angular handwriting:Early skate. Didn't want to wake you.
No sign-off. No name. No casual endearment slipped in at the end, the way he'd started doing recently, like he was testing whether tenderness could survive being committed to paper.
Just instructions.
I stared at the note for longer than it deserved, turning it over in my hands as if the back might contain something he'd been too careful to put on the front. It didn't. I folded it, tucked it into my pocket for reasons I didn't want to examine, and locked up behind me when I left.
I pulled into my usual spot, killed the engine, and sat for a moment in the silence. Normal. Everything normal. The world continuing to function as if the last seventy-two hours hadn't rearranged my view of reality.
I grabbed my bag from the passenger seat and pushed the door open.
"Cinder."
The voice came from behind me, between the concrete pillars, and every nerve in my body fired at once.
I knew that voice. I knew it the way you knew the sound of a smoke alarm or a car horn or a scream in the dark.
Gavin stood ten feet away, half-hidden by the shadow of a support column. He looked terrible. Not the polished, controlled terrible of a man who'd carefully curated his cruelty behind pressed shirts and a gym membership. This was something disintegrating. His hair was unwashed, standing up in patches where he'd clearly been raking his hands through it. His jacket was wrinkled, hanging open over a shirt that looked slept in. His shoes were scuffed in a way the old Gavin would never have tolerated.
And the smell hit me even at this distance. Liquor. Not the faint whiff of someone who'd had a drink with dinner, but the dense, sour reek of someone who'd been drinking for hours, maybe days, the alcohol seeping out through his pores like something his body couldn't process fast enough to contain. And at eight in the morning.
I scanned the lot behind him. No blue sedan. No car at all that I didn’t recognize, which meant he'd either parked on the street,taken a cab, or walked. None of those options made me feel better.
"You need to leave," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected. Clinical. The triage voice, the one that assessed threats and allocated resources and didn't flinch. "You're not authorized to be here."
"I know." He took a step forward, and I took one back, maintaining the distance between us with the kind of spatial awareness I usually reserved for patients in psychotic breaks. "I know I'm not supposed to be here. I know you don't want to see me. But you won't answer my calls, and I didn't know where else to go."
"That's not my problem, Gavin."
"Please." The word cracked in the middle, and something in his face collapsed. Not the controlled mask. Something underneath it, something I hadn't seen in the entire time we were together. Desperation, maybe. Or exhaustion so total it had eaten through every layer of performance he'd ever built. "Please, just listen to me. Five minutes. That's all I'm asking."
You ran us off the road.I wanted to scream the words, but I still couldn’t prove it, and to be honest, he looked unhinged. I was on my own. Where was security? Or even better, where was Taz? But Taz had left without me.
"I know you broke into my apartment," I said, keeping my voice level. "I know you've been following me. I know about the gambling debts, Gavin."
The color drained from his face. For a second he looked like a patient going into shock, that particular gray-white pallor that preceded a crash.
"Who told you that?" His voice changed. Harder. The softness evaporating like it had never been there, and there it was. There was the man I remembered. The one who'd held my wrist too tight at dinner parties and called it affection. The one who'dmonitored my phone and called it concern. The one who'd made me believe, for nearly five years, that his control was the same thing as love.
"It doesn't matter who told me," I said. "What matters is that you're standing in a restricted parking lot at eight in the morning, smelling like a distillery, and you need to leave before security finds you."