Page 25 of Ruthless Game

Everyone, that was, but Lawson.

8

Lawson

He’d been skating toward the goal when the ice cracked.

It was only a fissure at first. Nothing more than a spiderweb of ice splinters, nothing to worry about. He barely even noticed, too focused on getting the puck in the net.

He was alone on the ice pond. He’d left the house and walked here. His parents were too busy fighting, his dad drunk, his mom drunker. Neither even noticed their son was gone. Not until too late.

So when the crack widened from a small fissure to a freezing cold abyss, there was nobody around to see him fall in.

One second he was on top of the ice, the next he was under it. The water was cold in ways he didn’t know were possible. His skin felt like it had been ripped off his body, and the ice water had made direct contact with bone. He swallowed water and his throat froze. He couldn’t even scream.

He was lucky that someone showed up to go ice fishing, saw the hole, saw him in the water. They called 911, and paramedics and the fire department came and pulled him out. He was dead by then, or he’d stopped breathing, but they brought him back. Took him to the hospital. He didn’t remember being in the hospital. He didn’t remember much—except for waking up to see his father in the hospital, his mom nowhere in sight.

“She left,” his father said. “She left, because she was weak, and so are you. If you were stronger, if you were a man, she would’ve stayed.”

He never forgot that, not even after his father died.

I hated bodies of water. Pools, ponds, lakes, oceans, even fucking puddles. I hated them all, and had absolutely no interest in being near any of them. Except if I didn’t learn how to swim, I couldn’t graduate, and my father would be right about me. So when my spy—Emma’s advisor who was a huge fan of hockey, and now had season tickets behind the penalty box, courtesy of me—told me Emma was teaching swim class, I didn’t waste a second signing up for her section. But even my ex-girlfriend in a wet one piece couldn’t get me in that goddamn water.

I stood a few feet from the edge of the pool, arms crossed over my chest, trying to act as nonchalant as possible and not run the fuck out of here. Logically, I knew the water was shallow enough to stand in. Logic had no power here.

“Lawson.” A girl whose name I couldn’t remember reached her hand out of the pool and wrapped it around my ankle. I had to swallow the scream bubbling up in my throat and force myself not to kick her. “Come in the pool and keep me company!”

I also hated when women touched me. When anyone touched me, except, apparently, for Emma. Their touches felt like ice, like I was drowning.

Distantly, I realized I was having a panic attack.

“Lawson? Lawson?” A familiar voice was calling my name, somewhere above the surface. But I couldn’t reach it. “Let go of him,” it ordered.

There was a soft touch on my cheek, warm and comforting. Nothing like the hand that had been on my ankle.

“Max!”

My head cleared.

Emma was out of the pool, standing in front of me, her head tilted back to look up at me, right hand cupping my cheek.

“You called me Max,” I said stupidly.

She shook her head. “Are you okay? I didn’t even realize this might be too much⁠—”

This might be too much.

Like I couldn’t handle it.

Like I was weak.

Men aren’t weak. Men don’t get hurt. Men are in control. You’re weak, son. You’re not a man.

“I don’t need your help, Angel,” I spat, needing distance from the one person who could make me break down in public when I was hanging on by a thread. I ripped her hand off my face and shoved her away from me.

What happened next moved too fast for me to stop it. To catch her.

One second, Emma was standing inches from me. The other, she lost her footing, slipping and tumbling backward into the pool with a shriek and a huge splash. She briefly disappeared under the water, and my heart disappeared with her.