My phone rang.
Not Cinder. The screen read Ignatius, and the sight of that name at this hour—after a loss, on the road, when nothing about my life was functioning the way it should—sent a jolt of ice through my veins that had nothing to do with my nature.
I grabbed a towel, stood, and walked out of the locker room into the concrete corridor beyond. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting everything in that flat, institutional glow that made hospital hallways and hockey arenas feel interchangeable.
"Ignatius," I said, pressing the phone to my ear.
"Taranis." His voice was measured—the careful register he used when delivering information that required precision. "I have two things to tell you, and I need you to listen to both before you react."
My dragon coiled tight, every frozen instinct screaming alert. "Go ahead."
"First: Gavin Mercer is dead."
The words didn't land immediately. They hung in the air like a puck suspended at the moment of a shot, weightless for one impossible second before gravity reasserted itself.
"What?"
"His neighbor called emergency services this evening. Paramedics pronounced him at the scene. The police are treating it as an apparent suicide, pending toxicology and a full investigation." Ignatius paused. "I've already spoken to Cinder. He's shaken, but he's safe."
I leaned against the concrete wall and felt the cold radiate out of me in a wave I couldn't contain—frost spreading across the painted cinder blocks in delicate, branching patterns that climbed toward the ceiling like frozen lightning. My breath came out in visible plumes.
"This wasn't us," Ignatius said, and the steel in his voice was unmistakable. "This wasn't the Council. This wasn't my people. I told you I would handle Gavin through legal and financial pressure, and that is exactly what we were doing. Slowly. Methodically. The way I handle everything."
"Then who—"
"I don't know yet. But the timing concerns me." He let that settle. "Now. The second thing."
I closed my eyes. The frost on the wall crackled softly, spreading further. Somewhere down the corridor, a pipe groaned.
"I watched the game tonight, Taranis."
The words were quiet, but they carried the particular weight Ignatius gave to statements that were actually indictments. I said nothing.
"I have watched you play through injuries, through grief, through the kind of isolation that would have broken lesser men. I have never seen you play like that. Not once."
My throat worked. Nothing came out.
"So I'm going to ask you a question," Ignatius said, "and I need you to answer honestly. Not as a goaltender. Not as a dragon who's spent three decades hiding. As a man."
The silence stretched. I could hear the distant thump of music from the locker room, the muffled voices of my teammates, the steady hum of the building's ventilation system pushing recycled air through concrete arteries.
"What happened?" Ignatius asked.
And maybe it was the loss. Maybe it was Gavin's death and the sick realization that the web surrounding us was darker and more tangled than I'd understood. Maybe it was the frost climbing the walls of a corridor in a Vegas arena, visible evidence that my control was fracturing, that the cold I'd held in check for thirty years was finally outpacing my ability to contain it.
Or maybe it was just that I was tired. Bone-deep, soul-deep tired of carrying this alone.
"Someone approached me," I said. My voice came out raw—scraped clean of the goaltender's composure, the dragon's discipline, everything I'd ever used to keep the world at a manageable distance. "After the win. At the bar. A man. No name. No identifying features. The kind of person designed to be forgotten."
Ignatius went very still on the other end of the line. I could feel it—not silence, but the particular quality of attention that radiated from an ancient dragon who'd just caught the scent of something dangerous.
"He had Cinder's notes," I continued. "All of them. The cloud data—every anomalous reading, every flagged temperature, every impossible cardiac rhythm I've produced since Cinder started. Annotated. Cross-referenced with game performance stats. He had a draft story ready to send to three outlets and the league's Department of Player Safety."
"Taranis—"
"He told me to walk away from Cinder. End the relationship. Create distance. Make it clean and public and convincing, or the story runs and the franchise burns. Not just me. Everyone.Cole. Max. Ember. Every player whose data doesn't add up. Every dragon on the roster. He said the league would frame it as doping, and we'd lose the chance of a playoff berth, and every career on this team would be destroyed." I didn't say what else he'd threatened. The final nail.
But still the words poured out of me like meltwater—fast, unstoppable, carrying debris from weeks of silence. I told him everything. The forty-eight-hour deadline. The reference to Phoenix. The implication that this was the same operation, the same ghost, the same patient, precise, invisible architecture targeting the people closest to dragons rather than the dragons themselves. Until me.