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The words seemed to take everything else with them.

There was nothing left to hide behind and no explanation that could make them less ugly, while the medication, the exhaustion, and the pain had stripped away whatever strength I'd had left to wait for his reaction.

Max's hand tightened around mine.

When he reached for me with the other, he moved slowly enough that I could've stopped him. I didn't, and a moment later, I was against his chest with his arm carefully around me, holding me without pressing against my ribs.

He didn't tell me I was wrong.

He hadn't seen the video, and I think some part of me would've hated him if he'd offered an absolution he couldn't possibly know was true.

He simply held me.

I buried my face against his chest and cried until exhaustion finally began to drag me under, while Max stayed exactly where he was.

For years, my father had owned the worst thing I'd ever done because he was the only other person who knew.

Now Max knew too.

And he was still holding me.

Chapter sixteen

Assist - Credit given to the player or players whose passes or touches directly contributed to a teammate's goal.

Max

I'd been awake for nearly an hour when Ash finally moved.

Sleep hadn't exactly been plentiful, although for once it had nothing to do with my mother, Melanie, or the particular brand of insanity that came with being a lifebound dragon who had apparently reached thirty-two without knowing some fairly fundamental things about his own nature. Instead, I'd spent most of the night holding a man who believed he'd killed his mother when he was seven years old.

Ash had eventually cried himself to sleep against me on the couch, and getting him into bed without waking him properly had required patience, several whispered curses, and a brief argument with a semiconscious hockey player who'd insisted he could walk while simultaneously trying to go in the wrong direction. Once I'd managed it, he'd curled onto his uninjured side and reached for me before I'd even decided whether I was supposed to stay.

I'd stayed.

Of course I'd fucking stayed.

Cinder had given me instructions about waking him periodically because of the head impact, so every couple of hours I'd dragged Ash far enough out of sleep to tell me his name, where he was, and whether his head hurt. The first time he'd answered everything correctly before informing me that I was an asshole, while the second time, he'd asked whether Étienne knew I was cheating on him with another horse. It wasn't technically one of Cinder's neurological questions, but since Ash had remembered enough of our earlier conversation to insult me with it, I'd taken that as reassuring.

Sometime after four, he'd stopped stirring every time I shifted, and by six, he'd somehow moved closer until his head rested beneath my chin, one hand curled loosely into the front of my shirt and one leg tangled with mine. My left arm had lost most of its circulation at least forty minutes ago, but moving it would've meant disturbing him, so I accepted that I might never feel my fingers again.

Morning light had begun creeping through the gap in his curtains, illuminating a bedroom that told me exactly as much about Ash as the rest of his apartment had. The furniture was functional, the walls mostly bare, and there was nothing expensive anywhere I could see despite the fact that he'd earned millions of dollars playing hockey.

Now I knew why.

My dad takes my money.

I'd already known about the payments, or at least enough for Doryu to establish that Ash had been sending regular amounts to his father for years. Seeing numbers on a screen hadn't prepared me for hearing Ash explain why, though, and nothing Doryu had found had hinted at the truth behind them.

He has a video.

Seven years old.

Ash had been seven fucking years old, running down a fire escape behind his mother while she tried to escape an abusive husband, and somewhere in the confusion of that night, she'd fallen to her death.

Ash believed he'd pushed her.

Maybe he had, and that was the part I couldn't answer no matter how desperately I wanted to. I hadn't seen the video, and telling him it had been an accident simply because I wanted it to be true would've been comfort rather than honesty.