They pull Ryan off to the dressing room, skates dragging through the river of blood on the ice. I’ve got to get there. To him.
“Coach.” It’s McKinnon’s friend, Shep. “Medics need you in there.”
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Yeah, Ryan beat the shit out of Ace. My thoughts should be, “Is my star player okay?”
Okay, no. They should actually be, “Is Ace okay? What can I do to help?”
But they’re not. I want to jump the boards, slide through the puddles of blood, and get to Ryan. But I have to approach this logically. My relationship with Luke is already on a one-way ticket to Demolitionville. If I’m not there to make sure his boyfriend is alive, watching over him till he can get to Ace, that’ll definitely torpedo any chance of repair.
Ryan is emotionally distraught, but he’ll live.
Five minutes. I know Luke, and he’ll get to Ace in less than five minutes. Then I head straight to Ryan.
Ibarrel my way down the hallway, turn, and slam my hand against the North Point locker room door, pushing my way inside. I expect the usual chaos and commotion, similar to my team postgame, but you could hear a pin drop over the fans drying the equipment. I set eyes on their giant goalie, mentally snapping my fingers. Rhys. That’s his name. It’s on our wedding certificate. But who I don’t see is Ryan.
What the fuck? He should be in here. There’s no way anyone had time to take him out of here unless it was planned. I don’t believe what my eyes are telling me. I charge further into the locker room. Some of the players have headed to the showers,but a lot of them are waiting to get into the trainer’s room to be looked at. It was a rough game.
That’s where I expect Ryan to be, but a quick peek inside tells me he’s not. There’s a relentless crawling beneath my ribs, the agitated energy gathering. The fragile leash I keep on my temper slips another notch.
I storm back to the dressing room. My eye catches on a jersey number, hanging in a cubby. Usually, these are tossed into the laundry bins after games. This one was left on purpose.
Savage. Number seventy-eight.
I round on the goalie. “Where is my husband?” The words scrape out rough and dangerous.
The big guy actually flinches. “Coach told him to get changed without showering. They just left.”
“Do you know where they went?” I say slowly so it penetrates. Was he hit with too many pucks?
“I don’t.”
Hmmm. On second thought, that’s coolness I detect. Not something I’m a stranger to, but I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve it from him. I don’t doubt I’ve done something, I just don’t know what it was.
The crazy one wanders over, his face tensed with thought, as if he’s still deciding if he should help me. “Sorry about him, he’s going through something. Coach didn’t say where he was taking Ryan. Lemme grab my shirt, and I’ll show you to Coach’s office.”
I shake my head, because I doubt Coach Bruce simply dragged him away to his office. “I’m not going to waste time on a wild goose chase. If you don’t know where he is, I have other ways of locating him.”
My palm hits the door, almost knocking it off its hinges on my way out.
28
TATE
So, I did something. It was precautionary, and if anyone expects me to be sorry, they shouldn’t hold their breath. Because look, I was right to be cautious. I was crazy after the Kline thing, and him not having cell service that one time, and the possibility of them taking his phone was too high—which I was right about.
While he slept peacefully in my office after meeting Pearl, I injected him with a GPS tracking chip I got from one of my shady connections in the Marines.
Mm-hmm. Ryan and Pearl. My dick has the audacity to throb, yes, at a time like this. Times like this, when the adrenaline is racing through me, get me the hardest, especially when I’m thinking of Ryan.
But anyway, I’ve been using the one I attached to his phone until I could properly get him used to the idea. It kind of lies dormant until I activate the tracking software, and then the chip transmits a location. I even have a handy little app my tech guy coded and installed on my phone.
Cute.
After typing in the activation code, I wait in the hallway a little way down from the North Point dressing room, just in caseRyan or Coach Bruce come back this way. It takes thirty fucking minutes, which I was not expecting. This is supposed to be top-of-the-line, Marine-issue technology. But, eureka, there’s a red dot. What the … someone’s already taken him off-campus. I need to move on this.
I got here on the team bus, though, so I don’t have a car. I could call someone to bring me one, but taking Luke’s is the fastest option. A small pang of guilt pulses in my stomach. Soon, Luke will know what I am. He’ll know I’ve lied to him every day since I made my pact with Uncle Jasper. He’ll know his sacrifice was for nothing. And here I am still asking him for favors.
