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Chapter Seven: The Ghost In The Rink
publish date:
2026-06-21 03:58:04
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The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits Chapter 43: Two Months Ago
POV: RayShe picked the same coffee shop where she'd once told me to call her back.I got there first this time, the corner table near the window, my hands wrapped around a cup I had no intention of drinking. Riley sat across from me, close enough that her knee touched mine under the table, the small steady contact that had become its own kind of language between us. Naomi waited outside in the car, engine off, watching the door.The woman came in at exactly the time she said she would. Plain coat, hair pulled back, the kind of unremarkable presence that had clearly been cultivated rather than accidental. She sat down across from us without ordering anything and folded her hands on the table."Two months ago," she said, no greeting, no preamble, "I was at the Falcons game against Brandt. I had a note in my coat pocket. I was going to put it directly into your hand, Ray, during the pre-game equipment check, when you'd be alone near the visitor's tunnel for ninety seconds while the rest
The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits Chapter 42: Redirected
POV: RileyNaomi enhanced the photograph in nine minutes.I sat beside her in her room while she worked, watching the wide establishing shot from the rink's first week resolve itself pixel by pixel into something sharper. She was not looking at Carol Bishop's face this time. She was looking at the entrance doors behind her, at the small reflective panel in the door's glass insert, the kind of detail most people would scroll past without noticing."There," she said.A second figure. Smaller, further back, barely visible in the original frame, caught in the glass reflection rather than the room itself. A phone screen held up at chest height. Naomi isolated the reflection, enlarged it, sharpened the edges until the screen's glow separated cleanly from the surrounding blur.Text. Fragmented, partial, the angle distorting half the letters beyond recognition.But enough remained....confirm Ashford redirected from Thursday assign...I read it twice before the meaning fully landed."Redirect
The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits Chapter 41: Special Advisor
POV: RileyI went to the practice anyway.Camera bag over one shoulder, the same way I had walked into every Falcons practice since September, and nobody watching me cross the parking lot would have known anything had changed. That was the point. I needed my ordinary self intact, the one who showed up and shot drills and filed assignments on schedule, while the other part of me, the part that now knew a name, sat very still underneath the surface and watched everything differently.Her name was Carol Bishop. Registrar's assistant. Special advisor, Office of Faculty Affairs, buried in fine print nobody was meant to read closely. I had seen her exactly four times since arriving on campus. Orientation week, where she processed my enrollment paperwork with brisk efficiency. The skating placement confirmation, signed at the bottom of an email I had read with nothing but relief. A brief hallway exchange in October about a transcript request. And once more in November, when I dropped off a f
The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits Chapter 40: Three Names
POV: RileyWe used the whiteboard.Naomi's whiteboard, the one above her desk covered in diagrams I had never fully understood, wiped clean for the first time since I had known her. Ray stood at it with a marker in his hand and I sat on the edge of the bed with my knees pulled up, and Naomi sat in her desk chair turned backward, arms crossed over the back of it, watching both of us the way she watched a skater about to attempt something difficult."Every name," Ray said. "Every person you see on a schedule. Doesn't matter how unimportant they seem."I started talking and he started writing, and the list grew faster than I expected because I had never once tried to count the faces in my routine before. It is strange how many people pass through a single ordinary day when you actually stop to name them. Professor Aldine. Declan, though we both knew where he stood now. The dining hall server, Marcus, who always remembered I took my coffee with oat milk before Declan ever did. The librari
The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits Chapter 39: The protective Layer
POV: RayI called her from the stairwell.Not the one in Crestwood Hall. A different one, the empty service stairwell behind the equipment room, the only place on campus I trusted enough to make this call without someone walking past and catching half a sentence they could carry somewhere else. The concrete was cold against my back. My breath came out in short white clouds even though I was indoors, the kind of cold that comes from inside rather than from the air.She picked up on the second ring. She always picked up by the second ring now. I used to think that meant she was waiting for me specifically. I had started to understand it meant something closer to the opposite, that she was always waiting, for someone, for this exact kind of call, and I had simply become the latest person to make it."There's a registered camera," I said. No preamble. We had stopped doing preamble weeks ago. "Long lens. Took a photograph through Riley's window three days ago. The device ID traces back to
The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits Chapter 38: The Angle
POV: RileyI looked at the photograph again before Naomi or Ray arrived.Not the angle I thought. I had been wrong in the first sixty seconds, the wrong kind of wrong that comes from fear moving faster than observation. I sat back down at my desk and made myself look properly, the way Coach Farrow taught me to watch game footage of my own skating, without flinching from the part that scared me.The photograph was not taken from inside my room.It was taken through the window. From outside. The angle came in low and slightly to the left, catching my desk and the edge of my bed and the sunflowers on the sill, but the glass itself was visible at the very edge of the frame, a thin reflective line I had missed the first time because my eyes went straight to the dead flowers and stopped there.Through the window. Not inside.That should have felt like relief. It did not feel like relief. It felt like a different kind of cold, the kind that comes from understanding that someone stood outside
The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits Chapter Five: The Assignment Begins
POV: RayMonday came like a punishment. I stood outside the athletics media room with my hands in my jacket pockets, telling myself I was calm. I was not calm. I'd barely slept. Every time I closed my eyes I saw the photograph on Hartwell's desk, the girl with the laughing eyes and the swinging hai
The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits Chapter Four: He Said Walk Away
Riley The Rink Bar was everything I hated about hockey culture crammed into one sticky, overheated room.Blue and gold jerseys clashed everywhere I looked, Falcons and Eagles pretending to be civil while shooting daggers at each other over red plastic cups. The music was too loud, the bass vibrati
The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits Chapter Three: I Need To Find Her
Riley's Pov Marvel,” I said, the word coming out as a relieved sigh.He didn’t smile. His eyes, usually so warm when they landed on me, were hard. “What’s going on?”“I was looking for you. I came down to… I saw the end of the game.” I took a step toward him, wanting to bridge the gap, to get us a
The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits Chapter 1: To Baby Sit Her?
Ray's PovI should have said no.The second Professor Hartwell asked me to babysit his daughter, I should have walked out. But I didn’t. I just sat there, in the worn leather chair across from his desk, trying to figure out what game we were playing.I’d been in his office plenty of times. Usually,
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