Page 310 of Power Play

I reached for the phone.

Aura caught my wrist. “No.”

“My mother will worry.”

“She can wait.”

“She’ll keep calling.”

Aura’s grip tightened. “Let her.”

The suggestion felt impossible.

The phone continued ringing while five people watched me fight the need to protect the woman who had helped destroy the best thing that ever happened to me.

I let the call go unanswered.

The screen went dark, but it didn’t feel like courage. It didn’t repair the damage or give me Ryan’s key back. He wouldn’t know I had ignored her call, and even if he did, a hundred unanswered phone calls couldn’t become the sentence I failed to say when he needed it.

I stared at my reflection in the black screen.

My father had taught me that love survived only when I behaved correctly. My mother had taught me that keeping everyone comfortable mattered more than telling the truth. I had spent my entire life terrified that one wrong choice would leave me with nothing.

Tonight, I had made the wrong choice anyway. Ryan had left, and my parents were still calling.

For the first time, I understood that losing their approval had never been the worst thing that could happen to me.

The worst thing had already happened.

Ryan asked me to tell them he mattered, and I proved they mattered more.

23

Ryan

My duffel hit the floor inside my Flint apartment and stayed there.

I locked the deadbolt and stood in the darkness for several seconds before turning around and leaving again. The apartment was too quiet, too small, and too full of plans I couldn’t face until morning.

I couldn’t breathe inside it.

The Furnace was dark except for the maintenance lights burning over the practice ice. Long strips of white reflected across the sheet that had been resurfaced before everyone cleared out for Thanksgiving. The stands disappeared into shadow above the glass, Frost logos blurred along the boards, and every sound inside the empty arena traveled farther than it should have.

My stick struck the puck, sending a crack through the rafters. I caught the rebound off the end boards, cut hard across the slot, and fired again.

The puck clipped the post.

“Fuck.”

It ricocheted toward the corner. I chased it, dug the blade beneath it, and snapped it toward the net hard enough to bury it in the mesh.

I had been on the ice for almost an hour, maybe longer. I stopped checking after my lungs began to burn.

My phone sat facedown on the bench beside the clothes I dropped when I changed. It had vibrated so many times that I no longer heard every notification. I blocked Charm’s number before leaving Kimball Falls and then spent most of the drive imagining every message she couldn’t send me.

I hated myself for wondering what they said. I hated her for still existing inside my head, but that was the one door I couldn’t slam on her.

My edges carved violently into the ice as I turned. I collected another puck near the blue line and drove forward, building speed until cold air cut through the sweat on my face.