All Chapters of My Hockey Alpha Deadly Secret : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Knox's POVDinner had gone well.I had not been sure it would. There was a version of the evening I had imagined where it felt awkward — where everything that had happened in the corridor and the management office and the bench and the apology sat at the table with us and made the food taste like the conversation we were not quite having. I had gone anyway because waiting for the perfect moment was how things never happened.It had not been awkward. It had been easy in a way I was still thinking about the next morning, walking across campus toward the main lecture building. Easy in the way that caught me slightly off guard, the way that good things sometimes did when I had been expecting them to be harder.I arrived at the building at 8:52 and joined the tail end of the students heading through the main entrance.She was at the top of the steps.Not waiting. Just arriving at the same moment, coming from a slightly different direction, her bag on her shoulder and her head down looking

Knox's POVAfter she walked away I stayed in the quad for a while.Not long. Just long enough to sit with what Rebecca had said without the conversation still running. She had told me Ember was afraid, not angry. She had said it like it was information I needed to act on, and then she had walked away and left me with it, which was classic Rebecca — hand someone a live wire and then excuse herself from the room before they could ask any follow-up questions.I had training in an hour. I went to the changing room, got my gear together, sat on the bench.Rebecca came in.Not to the changing room — to the corridor outside it. She knocked on the open door in a way that was both a courtesy and a formality, establishing that she was not walking into the boys' changing room uninvited but was also very clearly continuing a conversation."I want to know something," she said.I looked at her. "Okay.""What is this for you?" She said it plainly, with none of the circumlocution she sometimes used w

Knox's POVI stepped into the room and let the door close behind me.Ember was at the bench. Notes out, data on her phone, safety glasses on the counter ready. She had set up for two, which meant some part of her had expected that whoever was coming through that door was going to stay, even if she had been telling herself otherwise."I have a new project partner," she said."I know," I said. "She came and found me at the training field instead.""I told her the location so she could meet me here.""I know what you told her." I came further into the room, put my bag down at the stool on the other side of the bench, and took out my notes. "I'll leave the moment she arrives."Ember looked at me."The moment she walks through that door," I said, "I'll pick up my things and go. You will have your original plan and I won't be part of it." I sat down and set my notes on the bench surface. "Until she arrives I'm your project partner and we have work to do."A pause. Then: "That is a very conv

Ember's POV I got back to the dormitory at half past four and closed the door behind me and sat on my bed and did nothing for a full five minutes. The lab session had been exactly as uncomfortable as I had expected it to be and also somehow more uncomfortable than that, which was an achievement. Knox had tried three separate times to start a conversation and three separate times I had given him the minimum possible response and redirected my attention to the data sheets. By the end of the session the work was done and the bench between us had felt approximately the width of a football field. I had walked out without saying goodbye. I was not proud of that. I was also not going back to fix it today. I changed out of my lab clothes and pulled my hair back and told myself I was going to spend the next two hours on the reading that was due Thursday and not think about Knox or Rebecca or the chemistry lab or any of it. I had a life that existed outside of all of that and it required at

Ember's POV I told her about the delivery. The girl from the floor below, the front desk, the white paper and the ribbon. How I had carried the bouquet across the room and set it on the bed and stood there looking at it. The envelope tucked near the stems. Opening it. Rebecca listened to all of it without interrupting, which was not something she always managed. She sat on her bed with the folded note beside her and her hands clasped in her lap and her eyes on my face, and she let me get through the whole thing before she spoke. "Why didn't you tell me the moment I walked in?" she said. "I was still processing it." "You were hiding it." "I was processing it," I said again. "They are not always different things." Rebecca looked at me steadily. "Ember. You sat on the note." "I put it down and happened to sit near it." "You sat on it." I said nothing. "Why?" she said. "I'm not asking to argue with you. I genuinely want to understand. You got something that frightened you and y