All Chapters of My Hockey Alpha Deadly Secret : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Knox's POVThe meeting lasted forty minutes.I had gone in knowing the complaint existed and not knowing who had filed it. I came out knowing both, which meant I had forty minutes to sit in a small office with a management official and discuss whether I had assaulted a person whose name I recognized very well, while simultaneously processing what it meant that she had done this now — this week, of all weeks.The management official was thorough. She went through everything methodically — when the alleged incident occurred, who had witnessed it, whether there were any other people present. I answered every question truthfully because there was nothing I had done that I could not say out loud to a school official without modification.What I had done was this: I had gone to Charlotte to ask her directly about the rumor. The specific one, with the specific angle. The one that had been shaped to damage Ember in the most personal way possible and spread with a precision that told me it was

Knox's POVThe silence between us had gone on long enough.I let it go a little further anyway — long enough to know it was not going to resolve itself — and then I said, "I'm going to prove it."Ember looked at me."I know I can't produce proof right now that I didn't do something I didn't do. I know that's not how this works. But Charlotte filed a false report and I am going to find a way to demonstrate that, and I need you to give me some time to do it.""How?" she said."I don't know yet. But I will.""Knox—""Ember, I am asking you to give me time. Not to pretend I've already proven something I haven't. Just time. You don't have to trust me fully right now. You said yourself you're not there yet. All I'm asking is that you don't close the door while I figure it out."She looked at me for a long moment. The corridor was quiet. The late afternoon light had shifted to something lower and flatter, coming through the windows at the end of the hall at an angle that made everything look

Knox's POVThe training field at midnight was different from the training field at noon.In the day it was loud and purposeful — coaches calling out, blades on ice, the particular noise of a team in motion. At midnight it was just the field and the dark and the sound of your own breathing, and that was exactly what I had come for.I had been out here for forty minutes. Stick work mostly, running the sequences I used to work through when I was younger and something was bothering me and the ice was not an option. The grass was damp under my feet and the air had that particular cold that came on late at night in this part of campus, carrying with it the smell of the woods that ran along the eastern edge of the field. I had the lights off. The field had no automatic lights and I had not turned on the portable ones. I did not need them.This was, technically, not a safe thing to do.I knew that. I had known it before I left my room and I had come anyway, because the alternative was lying i

Knox's POVI had chosen the spot carefully.Not inside, where conversations carried and people remembered them. Not the corridor outside management, which had already seen too much from us. The bench on the small path between the science building and the library — midpoint of campus, lightly trafficked at this hour, public enough that nobody would find anything remarkable about two people sitting and talking, private enough that the conversation would stay between us.Ember came around the corner at exactly the time she said she would. She had her bag on her shoulder and her coat done up and the specific expression she wore when she was walking toward something she had already been thinking about for a while — focused, prepared, not entirely sure what she was going to find.She sat down on the bench beside me."The complaint is withdrawn," I said."I know. I read the campus press.""I wanted to tell you myself but you'd already seen it.""Tell me what happened," she said. Not impatien

Knox's POVCharlotte had chosen the main quad at eleven-thirty on a Tuesday morning.Smart. The quad at that hour was not empty but not packed either — enough of a crowd that the statement would be witnessed by a sufficient number of people for it to travel, not so large that it became a spectacle she would lose control of. She had thought about the staging. That was Charlotte. Even in defeat, she staged things.I was standing at the edge of the path near the science building, far enough back that nobody would connect my presence to what was happening, close enough to see it clearly. I had my bag on my shoulder and a coffee I was not drinking. I had been here for six minutes before Charlotte arrived.She came with two of her usual companions — girls who orbited her in the way people orbited Charlotte, useful and interchangeable and unlikely to say anything she had not already approved. She stood in the middle of the quad path, waited for the natural pause in foot traffic that came wit