I looked at him. At this man who'd spent four days destroying himself to keep me safe. Who'd let me believe he didn't want me because the alternative was watching me burn. Who'd played the worst hockey of his career, absorbed every ounce of that humiliation, and never once cracked enough to tell me why.
He was still bracing. I could see it in every rigid line of his body, in the way his hand sat passive in mine instead of gripping back, in the careful blankness he was trying to rebuild across his features even as the truth leaked out of him like meltwater. He'd given me the worst of it, and now he was waiting for me to calculate the cost and walk away.
That was the thing about Taz. He always expected people to leave. Not because he was dramatic or self-pitying, but because everyone always had. He'd built an entire life around the assumption that love was temporary and proximity was dangerous, and the man in the hallway had known exactly which wire to cut.
I didn't say anything. I leaned forward, took his face in both hands, and kissed him.
Not the desperate, claiming kiss from the locker room. Something slower. Deliberate. The kind of kiss that said I heard every word you just said, and I'm still here, and I'm not going anywhere, and you are going to have to physically remove me from this hotel room if you want me gone. I kissed him the way I'd wanted to four nights ago, when he'd lain three inches away and I'd felt the distance like a wound and hadn't understood why it was there.
He resisted for exactly one second. One frozen, trembling second where his whole body locked up, where I could feel the cold spike beneath his skin as his dragon fought between self-preservation and surrender.
Then he broke.
His hands came up and grabbed my wrists, not to pull me away but to hold me there, fingers wrapping around my forearms with a grip that would probably leave bruises, and I didn't care. The sound he made against my mouth was something I never wanted to hear again and never wanted to stop hearing: a low, shattered noise that came from somewhere so deep it had probably never seen daylight before. The cold poured off him in waves, frosting the pillows, icing the headboard, crystallizing the moisture in the air between us until we were kissing inside a cloud of our own breath, and none of it touched me. It never did. The cold parted around me the way it always had, and I felt it recognize me the same way I recognized it.
When I pulled back, his eyes were closed and his lashes were wet, and his hands were still locked around my wrists like he thought I might evaporate.
"Open your eyes," I said quietly.
He did. The gray-blue was almost entirely silver now, bright and liquid and terrified.
"I'm not running," I told him. "I know you think I should. I know you've already built the case for why it would be rational and safe and the smart thing to do. I know you've probably got a speech prepared about how I deserve better than a life spent hiding someone else's secret."
His throat worked. He didn't deny it.
"But I'm a nurse, Taz. I don't leave when things get critical. I stay. I stay and I document and I fight, and if someone threatens to take my license and send me to prison for doing my job, then they'd better be prepared for exactly how stubborn I can be when someone I love is on the line."
The word hit him visibly. Love. His grip on my wrists tightened, then loosened, then tightened again, like he couldn't decide whether to hold on or let go.
"You can't just..." he started, voice wrecked.
"I can. I am. It's done." I brushed my thumb across his cheekbone, catching a tear he probably didn't know was there. "Now. I need you to tell me something."
He blinked, thrown by the shift. "What?"
I held his gaze. Steady. The way I held it when I needed a patient to trust me with something they'd never told anyone.
"What happened with your parents?"
Chapter twenty-five
The Bench - The area where players sit when they’re not on the ice.
Taz
The question hung in the air between us, and for a long time, the only sound was the hotel ventilation and the faint, rhythmic tick of frost expanding along the headboard behind me.
I hadn't talked about this. Not to Max. Not really to Ignatius. Not to anyone, in thirty years, because talking about it meant going back to that house, to that winter, to the version of me that still lived in a bedroom with ice climbing the walls and a mother who couldn't look at me.
Cinder waited. He didn't prompt. Didn't push. Just sat there with his hands warm on my face, his thumbs tracing slow arcsbeneath my eyes, steady as a pulse. The patience of a man who spent his life sitting with people in the worst moments of theirs and never once looked away.
I closed my eyes. Breathed. Let the cold settle.
"My father was a dragon," I said.
The words came out flat. Stripped of inflection, the way you delivered clinical information. Safe that way. Manageable.
"He was quiet about it. Careful. The kind of careful that becomes your whole personality if you do it long enough. He worked on a sheep farm outside Glasgow, Scotland. Manual labor, outdoor work, the sort of life where being a bit cold all the time didn't raise questions. People just thought he was hardy." I paused. "Scottish winters. Everyone's cold."
