Page 18 of Cross Check
My fist hit the wall before I'd decided to swing.
The drywall cracked. Pain exploded up my arm, a bright, clean shock that cut through the noise in my head. I hit it again. The crack widened, plaster dust drifting. Again. My knuckles split. Blood welled hot across the skin.
The door flew open.
Kieran stood in the doorway. His eyes tracked the scene in the order a goalie processes a play, threat assessment first,then details. Me on the floor. Fist bleeding. Dent in the wall. Breathing ragged.
"Get out," I managed.
He didn't move.
"Let me see your hand."
"I'm fine."
"You're bleeding on my guest room carpet."
Something in his voice, the dryness of it, the refusal to treat this as a crisis, cut through the static. I looked down at my hand. The knuckles were split across all four fingers, the skin peeled back, blood dripping onto the beige carpet.
"Stay here," Kieran said, then disappeared.
I leaned my head against the wall and closed my eyes. The plaster dust was settling on my shoulders like snow. I should feel embarrassed. Ashamed. Instead I just felt empty, that specific, echoing emptiness that comes after the pressure finally breaks through the container.
Footsteps returned. Kieran settled beside me, not too close, but close enough, and set a first aid kit on the floor between us.
"This is going to sting," he warned.
He pressed an alcohol wipe to the torn skin. I hissed through my teeth but didn't pull away. His fingers were careful and methodical, cleaning the blood and examining the damage, pressing gently along each knuckle to check for fractures. His hands were warm. The overhead light caught the fine hair on his forearms.
"You should get this x-rayed," he said, wrapping gauze around my knuckles.
"It's fine."
"It's not fine." He tore the medical tape with his teeth and secured the wrap. "Nothing about today was fine."
I opened my eyes. He was sitting beside me on the floor of the guest room with a first aid kit in his lap and blood on his fingers. His expression made something crack wider in my chest.
"I didn't do it," I heard myself say.
The words came out rough, scraped raw. Like they'd been lodged behind a wall for eleven months and the force of my fist through drywall had finally shaken them loose.
"The gambling thing. I didn't fix matches. I didn't throw games. I didn't take money from anyone. Petrov used me—my legal bets, my accounts, my name—and nobody asked me whether any of it was true. They just assumed. Minnesota assumed, the league assumed, the reporters assumed, and everyone here—"
My voice broke. The sentence didn't finish. It didn't need to.
Kieran was quiet for a long moment. He was still holding my bandaged hand. I could feel his pulse through his fingertips, steady and slow, the resting heart rate of an elite athlete. Fifty beats per minute, maybe less. A body trained to stay calm when everything was moving fast.
"I believe you," he said again.
I stared at him. I searched for the lie, the pity, the eventual pivot tobut you understand how this looks.I found nothing. Just steady eyes and a set jaw and the simple, disarming sincerity of a man who meant what he said.
"You don't even know me," I whispered.
"I'm starting to."
The dam broke. Not tears. I was too far past that. Just words. Everything I'd held for a year, pouring out in a flood I couldn't stop, didn't bother to try.
I told him about Petrov's scheme. The legal bets used as cover. The way the investigation had metastasized from inquiry to assumption to conviction-without-trial. The teammates who stopped texting. The agent who dropped me. My father callingonce, a week into the scandal, to sayI always knew you'd find a way to embarrass this family,and then silence. Eleven months of silence.
