“I—” he began, but I was crying again. Fuckingagain. Great, heaving sobs ripped out of my chest, turning me inside out.
“I didn’t have a choice,” he whispered. “You’d just come out of the hospital for the first time, and when Jed Carter offered to pay?—”
“Jed Carter?” The name exploded out of me. Ice flooded my veins as connections started forming, a horrifying web of cause and effect that stretched back sixteen years—longer, even.
Dad nodded, aging ten years in that single movement. The lines around his eyes deepened into chasms. “He owned me by then. Had for years.”
I tugged on his arm, pulling him onto the couch beside me. He was my father, for fuck’s sake. He shouldn’t be kneeling on the floor like he was begging for absolution I couldn’t give him anyway.
“Tell me,” I whispered, because I had to know, even if itdestroyed whatever was left of my world. “Tell me everything.”
He sank into the cushions beside me, and I threw the quilt over his lap, needing his closeness, needing the physical contact to ground me as my world was falling apart.
“I was twenty-two when you were born. A rising star who had everything—a beautiful wife, a perfect daughter, and a future in the NHL.” His laugh was brittle. “But I also had a gambling problem.”
My stomach dropped.No.
“I’d already thrown games for Carter. In small ways at first, just enough to cover my debts. But the hole just kept getting deeper.” His hands shook as they fisted in the blanket. “And then, you got sick.”
I remembered fragments of that time in my life—lying in bed, struggling to breathe, Mom crying, and the maze of machines that had surrounded my hospital bed.
“The surgery was expensive as hell. And you know insurance companies. Especially then, they didn’t want to cover shit for a preexisting condition. So, when Carter offered to clear my debt and pay for your treatment—” Dad’s voice cracked. “I would have sold my soul to save you, Eva.”
“What did he ask you to do?” But I already knew. The pieces were sliding into place with sickening finality.
“He wanted Aleksandr Novikov taken out. Permanently.” Dad’s eyes met mine, and I saw the monster he’d had to become. “Alek was clean. Untouchable. Carter had been trying to get hooks into him, but the kid wouldn’t bite. He decided if he couldn’t corrupt him, he’d destroy him.”
The room felt like it was spinning. “And you said yes.”
“I said yes.” The words fell between us like stones. “Me and three other guys, we waited for him after practice in theparking garage of his apartment building.” Dad’s voice went flat, emotionless. “I held him down while the others broke his ribs, and then I took a crowbar to his knee. Shattered it. Made sure he’d never play again. His teammates came after me in the next game,” Dad continued, his voice eerily calm. “Left me unable to play. And then your mother?—”
“And then Mom left,” I finished, my voice hollow.
“Yep.” He tried for his old sardonic humor, but it came out broken. “Can’t say I blame her.”
He’d started drinking, and I’d lost him too, piece by piece, bottle by bottle, until all that was left was this shell of a man who could barely look at himself in the mirror.
It all circled back to Jedediah Carter. Billionaire. Media mogul. The puppet master who’d been pulling our strings for my entire fucking life.
I knew what I had to do.
There had to be evidence somewhere of what a fucking bastard Jed Carter was, of how many lives he’d ruined. I was going to find it, and I was going to take him down.
Dr. Parker had offered me my job back. I could use that as an excuse to dig into what was going on, to talk to the other teams. I fucking had to.
Carter had taken enough from me. He’d taken from my family, from the people I loved.
And I wasn’t going to let him take anything from anyone else.
No matter the cost.
16
TRISTAN
The restof the team was out mourning our loss while I sat alone on the couch in the hockey house living room. Cole was upstairs, probably drinking. My mind circled around my brother’s words from earlier that week, about our parents, and about Eva.
Fuck. What was I supposed to do?
