Page 2

Chapter two

Noah

T he ceiling had exactly forty-seven tiles. I'd counted them eleven times in the past three days. I had to keep counting because my mind refused to accept its conclusion, rejecting unnecessary information.

Beige squares with tiny perforations. It was the hospital's idea of decoration.

My throat burned, scraped raw, though I hadn't spoken in hours. The pain meds were starting to wear off, barely taking a bite out of the pain. I needed the nurse to return so I could report a level of 4 or maybe 5. I wanted to remember.

Every breath reminded me of what had happened—cracked ribs that shifted beneath my torso's muscles, threatening to splinter if I laughed or coughed too hard.

I turned my head, wincing at the protest from my neck. A stack of cards sat untouched on the side table, their cheerful envelopes garish against the sterile white of everything hospital-owned. Fan mail, probably.

I spotted my mother's looping handwriting on one. My agent's secretary sent another. I hadn't opened them. Words wouldn't fix what I'd been through.

My phone didn't light up with texts from teammates. No visits. Carter played on my line for half the season and couldn't be bothered to check whether I was still among the living. The team's social media posted some hollow "Get well soon, Langley!" bullshit with prayer hands emoji.

Professional hockey. Where they break you on Tuesday and forget your name by Friday.

The nurse finally returned, clipboard tucked against her hip. An industrial antiseptic odor followed her.

"Scale of one to ten?" she asked, fiddling with the IV.

"Four," I lied. The truth was more like an eight.

She pressed fresh tape against my skin to secure the line, and the small sting sparked a memory. It was crystal clear, despite the concussion the doctors whispered about.

I was back on the ice.

The memory wasn't fuzzy like everyone always claimed. It came to me in high definition, frame by frame, a highlight reel with the pain activating it by remote control.

Third period. Score tied. My lungs burned from a double shift. I'd just sent a shot wide, cursing as I chased it behind the net. The puck skittered along the boards. My gloves scraped against the glass as I fought for possession.

I never saw him coming.

The warning was a sudden displacement of air like a giant vacuum switched on. An ominous silence filled the moment before impact.

A mountain of muscle slammed into me at full speed. My body crumpled against the boards, which gave way like they were made of paper, not plexiglass. The cracking reached my ears a split second after the sensation rattled my bones. My helmet snapped sideways, wrenched by a force my neck couldn't resist.

Before darkness claimed me, I had one moment of clarity. It was one frozen frame filled with his face.

Micah Keller. Six-foot-four. Two hundred twenty pounds of raw fury.

He had dark hair plastered to his forehead where his helmet had ridden up. There was blood crusted on his cheek—not his, a trophy from an earlier hit. His mouth opened wide in something between a roar and a confession.

His eyes. Christ, his eyes.

Like blue sapphires, focused so completely on me, I could have been a buck in the sights of a rifle. He wasn't targeting the puck. The play either. It was me.

Most frightening was that in that one terrifying, electric second, he saw me. He recognized something in me that I'd spent years burying. I sensed that he'd found precisely what he was looking for.

Then, black.

"Your vitals are good." The nurse's voice dragged me back to the present. "Doctor thinks you might be ready for discharge tomorrow."

I nodded, unable to explain that control of the physical pain didn't mean I'd healed.

What haunted me most was the silence from the predator after I woke up on the rink. Micah skated away after they stretchered me off, disappearing down the tunnel while the crowd thundered with mixed horror and bloodlust.

The league suspended him the next day. It would last for almost an entire season. No hearing. No appeal. Just gone.

It was a response from the suits that telegraphed what happened didn't matter.

Or it may have mattered too much.

When I was alone again in the hospital bed, I reached for my phone. I pulled up the replay for what had to be the thirtieth time. The NHL Network had turned it into a cautionary tale, their analysts clutching invisible pearls as they debated whether the sport had become too violent.

I didn't care about their opinions. I wanted to see his face again.

I slowed the footage and crept through it frame by frame. I froze the replay at the moment before impact.

His eyes. The clench in his jaw. The barely perceptible hesitation—a rejected opportunity to change course.

It wasn't mindless violence. Nobody seemed to understand that. It wasn't some enforcer losing control.

It was deliberate. Personal. Almost an intimate act.

I wondered whether Micah was like that with everyone who crossed his path. Did he focus on every opponent with that burning intensity? The kind that made them feel like they were the only person in a crowded arena.

Something twisted low in my stomach. Heat bloomed across my skin. What would it feel like to provoke him again?

Chills raced through my body. It was a dark sensation that made me touch my bruises when no one was looking.

"Mr. Langley, we strongly recommend at least three more days of observation."

The doc didn't look up from her clipboard as she delivered the news. I stared at the purple ink stains at the tips of her fingers and wondered whether she'd been writing notes all day or if the stains came from a love of drawing with colored pens.

"I have someone taking care of me," I lied. "Family."

"Your scans show—"

"I'll sign whatever you need me to sign."

She pushed her glasses down her nose and looked into my eyes. "We're not only concerned about your physical recovery. Traumatic injuries often come with psychological—"

"I'm fine."

Four hours later, I packed the few belongings my agent had dropped off. Hospital-issue sweatpants hung loose on my hips where I'd already lost weight. My t-shirt draped awkwardly over my new, bulky shoulder brace.

I left the cards untouched on the table along with the wilting flowers some PR intern had probably ordered. I deleted the team group chat thread about my encounter without reading the messages and blocked the team manager's number for good measure.

No one would look for me. Not in any way that mattered.

They could replace an AWOL rookie. We were interchangeable puzzle pieces they traded when convenient. I'd learned that lesson when teammates vanished overnight, their lockers emptied without ceremony.

I signed the hospital forms and nodded through the discharge instructions. Asked the nurse to call me a cab instead of the car service the team would have sent.

"Where to?" the driver asked when I slid into the back seat, wincing as my body protested.

I gave him an address—a storage facility where I kept a second car. With the advice of a veteran, I'd bought it in case I ever needed anonymity.

For the next several months, all the way through summer, I lived a blissful life in a small Wisconsin town along the Lake Michigan shore, broken only by my visions of Micah and a deep longing in my gut—for what? I didn't want to analyze it too closely.

My rookie salary supported me while the injuries healed, and I avoided the sports establishment. Without a regular training regimen, my body softened slightly, and I lost weight.

When I skipped out on the beginning of a new season, I stared at Micah's cabin location on my phone. I'd filed it away weeks ago after some reporter mentioned it in a hit piece about his "wilderness exile."

In the endless forests of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Remote. It was an off-season retreat turned into a full-time hideout.

It would take me a total of around eight hours to drive there, stopping only for gas.

As I set out on my journey, my phone buzzed. My agent. I silenced it, then turned the phone off entirely.

My fingertips tingled as I crossed the Wisconsin border. About three more hours to go to Micah's hideaway on the edge of a private lake.

It was only October, but snow started to fall. It was Michigan's welcome, fat flakes drifting downward until they shattered against the windshield. The highway was nearly empty, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the occasional semi rumbling in the opposite direction.

I rolled down the window, letting the cold air slice into my lungs. It brought bracing moments of clarity. I needed to feel everything and remember why I was on a journey into unknown territory.

At a gas station near the Michigan border, I caught my reflection in the bathroom mirror. Pale. Hollowed out. I looked like a ghost chasing after its own killer.

Maybe that's what I was.

The final stretch of road was unpaved. The GPS lost signal twice before I found the turnoff—barely visible through the pines. There were no other houses around. Only wilderness.

I let the car idle a hundred yards from where a cabin sat on the edge of a small lake. Smoke curled from the chimney. It was the only sign of life.

He was there.

I shut off the engine, listening to it tick as it cooled. The silence that followed was absolute. No city noise. No distant highways. Only my breath and the slow build-up of snow on the car.

My hand drifted to my shoulder, fingers pressing against a spot that was still tender months later. It was a souvenir from Micah that might never go away.

"He left a mark on me," I whispered to the empty car.

And not only on the outside.

***

When the cabin door swung open, the first thing that hit me was heat. After hours in a freezing car, it was like walking into a furnace—infused with woodsmoke and something earthy, like resin or sweat. Micah stood aside, his jaw clenched so tight I watched a muscle twitch beneath his stubble.

He hadn't invited me inside. He resigned himself to my refusal to leave.

"Don't touch anything," he growled, shutting the door against the wind.

I set my duffel down, taking in the space he'd carved for himself away from the world. It wasn't what I expected. No empty bottles or scattered clothes. I saw no evidence of a man falling apart.

The cabin was sparsely furnished. A worn leather couch faced a stone fireplace where flames licked at blackened logs. A handmade bookshelf sagged under the weight of paperbacks with broken spines. The kitchen area—if you could call the corner with a two-burner stove and mini-fridge that—was spotless. A single mug sat upturned on a dish rack.

"Nice place," I announced.

Micah stood with his back against the door, arms crossed, as if ready to physically remove me if necessary. His hair was longer than I remembered, falling across his forehead in dark waves. His eyes tracked my every movement—those same sapphire eyes that locked onto mine before everything went black on the ice.

"Your stuff goes in there." He nodded toward a narrow hallway. "Bathroom's the first door. Spare room's at the end."

Wilderness hadn't softened him. If anything, isolation had stripped away whatever social veneer he'd maintained in the league. This Micah was more feral.

His thermal shirt clung to his chest, damp with sweat despite the cold outside. A thin scar bisected his left eyebrow.

I picked up my bag and walked deeper into his sanctuary, aware of his gaze burning into my back. The spare room was barely that—a twin bed with a navy blanket pulled military-tight across it, plus a wooden chair and a single, small dresser. No decoration or personality. Pure function.

I turned to find him filling the doorway with his broad shoulders, blocking any escape. "You're wasting your time," he said. His voice was rough from disuse. "There's nothing for you here."

I set my bag on the bed, making myself at home. "Strange. That would have been my statement before you nearly put me through the boards."

His eyes narrowed, but something else flickered there, too. Recognition, maybe. Or fear.

I moved toward him, closer than I should have dared. The scent of him was stronger—pine and clean sweat. His nostrils flared as I entered his space.

"I can leave tomorrow." My voice was calm and measured despite the way my heart hammered against my ribs. "After you tell me why you looked at me like that before you hit me."

A muscle worked in his jaw. For a moment, I thought he might grab me—push me back, throw me out, something to reestablish the control I was deliberately taking from him. Instead, he stepped back, creating distance between us.

"Dinner's at seven." His voice was flat. "There's only one rule here. Don't ask questions you don't want the answers to."

He turned, disappearing back down the hallway, leaving me alone in the room that suddenly felt too small and intimate, as if the walls themselves had absorbed his presence and were breathing it back at me.

I sat on the edge of the bed, feeling the ache in my shoulder where it had never quite healed right. Outside the window, snow fell harder, blurring the line between earth and sky until there was nothing but white.

I was trapped here for now, whether Micah wanted it or not. I'd come for the truth, but he didn't only leave a mark on me. He left something behind. And I think part of me wanted him to take it back.