My stomach turned.
Every scattered memory snapped into order with surgical precision—the way her eyes had darted away when the topic of her past came up, how tight she held herself whenever someone mentioned the men’s league, how she’d walked out on that reporter last week with her jaw set and her shoulders squared. I’d thought it was just pride or exhaustion.
No. It was him. It was me. All tangled in between.
A dry laugh clawed out of my throat and died halfway. The noise from the TV blurred into static, words dissolving under the pulse roaring in my ears.
Christ. The woman I’d fucked—the one I couldn’t forget—had been with my son.
I pushed up from the couch too fast. Papers scattered off the table, drills falling like white flags onto the floor. My chest felt like it was cracking open, air too thin.
I made it down the hall on instinct, one hand braced against the wall. My reflection caught me in the mirror, eyes wide, skin gone gray.
“What the hell have you done,” I whispered.
The bathroom door swung open. Cold tiles. Dim light. I gripped the sink until my knuckles whitened and bent over, breath shuddering.
For twenty years, I thought I’d hit every kind of bottom a man could hit. Turned out there was still one more waiting.
I paced the length of the room, bare floorboards creaking under every turn. The air felt thin, dragged tight across my lungs. I’d killed the TV, but her name still pulsed behind my eyes like a concussion.
She was my son’s. And I touched her. Took her. Wanted her still.
The thought rotted as soon as it formed, but it kept coming back, crawling under my ribs, settling there with that low, dirty heat I couldn’t stamp out. I raked both hands through my hair and laughed once—short, rough, nowhere near human.
I’d spent half my life breaking things. Bodies. Contracts. Families. But never like this. Never something that should’ve been untouchable.
Nate’s.
My kid.
I leaned against the wall, tried to breathe, failed, straightened again. The light flickered. My pulse refused to slow.
You already crossed the line. You can’t uncross it.
The echo rang in my skull until I couldn’t stand it. My fist moved before I thought, slamming into drywall. White dust burst out, stinging my knuckles. The pain didn’t register rightaway, then hit sharp and clean. I did it again, harder this time. The crack spidered wide.
Across the room, the clipboard lay on the floor, drills scattered like fallout. I stared at the mess. All that order I’d tried to build—lines, systems, control—it never lasted. I was chaos wrapped in tape and callus, pretending to belong in the world again.
And Billie—Christ, Billie—she made me forget what pretending felt like. The way she looked at me on the ice, unafraid. The way she laughed in my bed, quiet but sure. How easily I’d let her in, like she was oxygen.
I turned away from the hole in the wall, flexed my hand. Blood welled between my fingers, dark against skin already split from years of fights. The pain helped. It made things simple again—fist, wall, damage. No feelings to navigate.
But then her face showed up anyway, and suddenly the simplicity was gone.
Because I didn’t hate her. Not even close.
I wanted to. I should’ve.
I wanted to be twenty years younger, a different man entirely, one who could meet her eyes without thinking of headlines, suspensions, sons.
The sound of laughter drifted from outside—a couple of the girls walking past, voices bright against the night. I stepped back into shadow, out of sight. Guilt crawled deeper.
Tomorrow I’d have to stand on that ice like nothing happened. Blow the whistle. Bark orders. Pretend she wasn’t the bleed in every thought I had. Pretend she wasn’t proof that I hadn’t changed—that the old Calder Shaw, the one they warned about, was still alive and wrecking everything he touched.
My knuckles throbbed again. I pressed them to my forehead, closing my eyes.
One mistake, I told myself.
