"Security." He laughed, a wet, ugly sound. "That's what I am to you now? A security problem?"
"You've been a security problem since you showed up at my apartment uninvited."
His expression cycled through something I'd seen a hundred times during our relationship. The rapid-fire shift from wounded to furious to wounded again, each emotion deployed like a tool, tested and discarded depending on which one got the reaction he wanted. I used to fall for it every time. I used to scramble to fix whatever I'd said that triggered the shift, rearranging myself into smaller and smaller shapes until I fit inside whatever version of me he needed.
Not anymore.
"I love you," he said, and I just managed to contain my scoff. "I know you don't believe that. I know I messed up. But everything I did was because I couldn't stand losing you."
"You broke into my home."
"I wanted to talk to you!"
He lurched forward another step, and I felt my back hit the side of my car. The metal was cold through my jacket. I gripped my bag strap, calculating distances, and tried to slide my hand into my back pocket for my phone. The security office was inside the main entrance, maybe two hundred feet. There were no other people in the lot. Not yet. It was too early.
"You don't understand," he said, and his voice dropped into that register I hated most. The one that was supposed to soundintimate but always felt like a hand closing around my throat. "I'm in trouble. Real trouble. And the people I owe money to, they don't care about excuses. They want what I promised them, and if I don't deliver—"
"That is not my problem."
"It could be." The shift happened so fast I almost missed it. One second he was pleading, eyes wet, shoulders hunched in that practiced posture of vulnerability. The next, something cold and calculating slid behind his gaze like a door opening onto a room I wasn't supposed to see. "You have no idea what trouble I can cause you."
My blood went cold. Not Taz's kind of cold. The human kind. The kind that meant danger.
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.
"Yes, you do." He smiled, and it was terrible. A parody of the charming grin he'd used on our first date, twisted now by desperation and whatever was left of the liquid courage that had gotten him here.
"Hey!"
The shout came from behind me, sharp and authoritative, and Gavin's head snapped up. I turned to see two arena security guards striding across the lot, their postures alert, one of them already reaching for the radio on his belt.
"Sir, you need to step away," the taller one called. "This is a restricted area. Authorized personnel only."
Gavin's expression cycled one final time. Fury, despair, and then something that made me want to vomit, but he stumbled away before they reached us. Thanking the guards, I rushed inside. Should I find Taz?
Did he even want to know?
My chest clenched.
Something had been wrong since the bar. Since the celebration last night, since the victory, since the moment thatshould have been the brightest point in both our lives. I'd felt it—the way you felt a weather system moving in before the clouds arrived. A pressure change. A chill that had nothing to do with his nature and everything to do with distance.
He'd claimed tiredness when we got home. And hewastired—I'd seen the exhaustion carved into the lines around his eyes, the way his body moved like it had given everything on the ice and had nothing left. I'd believed it. Of course I had. Thirty-three saves. A playoff spot. The man had earned his exhaustion.
But he hadn't reached for me.
That was the thing. The small, devastating thing I'd cataloged without meaning to, the way I cataloged everything, because my brain was a machine that never stopped taking vitals, even when the patient was the man lying beside me in the dark.
Every night since we'd been together—every single night—Taz had reached for me. Not always sexually. Sometimes it was just his hand on my hip, or his cold nose pressed against the back of my neck, or his fingers finding mine under the covers like a reflex. Contact. Connection. The physical language of a man who'd spent decades touch-starved and was finally allowing himself to need someone.
Last night, he'd lain on his side of the bed. Three inches of mattress between us that might as well have been a canyon.
I'd told myself it was nothing. Postgame fatigue. Overstimulation. The crash that came after adrenaline, when your body finally stopped performing and demanded payment. And this morning he’d left before I woke up.
Michael Dunn’s assistant didn’t smile when she told me he wanted to see me. Michael Dunn—the Athletic Director—was my boss’s boss. That should have been my first clue.
I’d already laid out the travel kits in the medical room—portable stim unit charged, compression sleeves packed, recovery supplements logged and labeled. Four-game road stretch. Long flights. Back-to-back nights. Taz’s maintenance schedule was practically memorized at this point. And all the while I worked, I tried to decide what to do about Gavin.
I knocked once and stepped into Dunn’s office.