Lahat ng Kabanata ng My Hockey Devil: Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 10

Sloane's POVA majority of persons believe that cold is merely absence of heat. They are wrong. To be in the VIP section of the Briarwood University arena, the chill was that of frozen ammonia and bad sweat and impolite male ego. It reeked of athletics and dollars to cover up a short but deep-rooted problem.I looked at my Cartier watch. It said 6:00 AM. The Briarwood Ice Devils were performing difficult exercises below. I heard the noise of the steel scraping ice up into the black rafters. It was violent and rhythmic. A dozen large blacks and reds walloped the boards. They were the champions of the country--as though gods of the campuses--but they were also fearful nightmares.“You see they are angelic boys, coach Higgins muttered to himself.He was too close to me, and the dripping sweat was going through his suits despite the fact that the luxury box was climate-controlled. This was because Higgins smelled of cheap coffee and a sharp dilemma of recognizing that his life, which was

POV: SloaneI could keep hearing the sound of the deadbolt long after Roman had gone out of my office. My hands were shaking. I hated it. I flattened my palms on the chill metal desk, and made my breathing so slow and regular: One, two, thirty. I was a professional. I had dealt with senators who would be charged with manslaughter and CEOs who made millions embezzled. I never broke.But Roman Thorne was neither a politician. He was a landslide.I put my hand into my leather tote bag, drew my laptop out, and got my fingers flat. I had work to do. To get the Thorne syndicate dismantled, I did not only require the level of gut feeling and leaked videos. I needed the digital trail.The next thing I did was to install the mirrored server which I would use to replicate the hard drives in the athletic department. Formally, I was to do PR leaks monitoring of the player communications. I was, in fact, looking after the ledger which attached the ticket sale of the Ice Devils to offshore account

POV: Sloane The smell was the first thing which struck me. It wasn’t the scent of a home. It was the scent of an arena; cold and metallic and weirdly dark mint that oozed out of Roman Thorne through his skin. I froze on the light switch. The shadows in my living room were heavier than they should be and they were thick with a presence which did not belong in my sanctuary. Awareness of being hunted came to me, in a sudden sharp shock, pricking my skin. Three years had passed along with the twenty-four hours a day I had loved to be a shadow, an unseen ghost in PR and legal warfare world. I made no mistakes. I left no trails. But the air in my apartment was filled with the rhythmic, lunging breathing of an indifferent, lawless, person. You have lost time, Sloane, a raw and scratching voice said of the darkness. It did not merely skip my heart, but it stopped. Tears were a confession, and I swore never to bow on my knees. I put my fingers to force the switch. The room was fill

POV: Sloane My phone screen was glaring in the black bedroom. The south docks. Noon. Don't be late. I hadn't slept. The spectral aroma of his smell the intoxicating and frightening combination of dark mint and the scent of ozone still burned into the garment of my blazer, lingering in the air of my apartment, like an actual menace. And now, this text. An unmarked burner number. But I knew exactly who sent it. Roman Thorne. The heir in Thorne crime syndicate. The monster that now had just awakened to a night of proving to me that my locks, my boundaries, and my impeccable professional armour were of no use to him. I awoke with a shiver of the coldness of the apartment cutting at my naked shoulders. I would have sent the information to my contact at the FBI. That was the protocol. That was the job. Dial the feds, provide the place and have them search the docks with a tactical team. But protocol had not considered the flushed heat of my skin at the thought of Roman and his huge t

POV: Sloane The dark leather of the ledger book was decaying copper and forgotten things. It was lying on my marble kitchen island, a hideous ugly rotting object in the blaze of the pendant lights. I had been gazing at the hand written columns six hours. My coffee was ice cold. My eyes burned. The numbers were staggering. Silas Thorne did not merely operate a local crime syndicate, he owned the city infrastructure. He owned the port authority. He had three judges in the appellate court. And he owned Briarwood University board of directors. All the extortion, all the payouts, all the blood shed to keep the Ice Devils out of prison, was written with black ink. It was a wet dream of a federal prosecutor. And it was what my handler, Agent Harris, had sent me to the dark to discover. But I couldn't touch my phone. I could not see justice because whenever I looked at the book, I could not. I saw Roman. His chest, which seemed to me to be phantom-hot, was pushing me against the rusted