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Bait
publish date:
2026-10-25 00:58:32
Latest chapter
Hockey Hazard: When Desire Crosses the Ice Bait
The text arrived at 9:40 on a Thursday night, eleven days after the last one.Car at the east entrance. 10:30. Dress dark.Noah read it standing in the middle of his dorm room with a FIN 300 problem set half finished on the desk, a valuation model that refused to balance. His stomach turned over, and he hated that some small, stupid part of him felt relief. The silence had been worse. Silence meant something was being decided somewhere above his head.“Everything okay?” Reid looked up from the bed, headphones around his neck.“Study group.” Noah pulled a black hoodie over his head. “Don’t wait up.”“At ten-thirty?”“Group project. Half of them work nights.”Reid frowned, and Noah felt the frown follow him all the way down the stairwell. He was running out of lies Reid would let him get away with.The SUV waited at the curb with its lights off. Two men sat in front. The older one, who had once told him you didn’t call, nodded without a word. The younger one stared straight ahead.Noah
Hockey Hazard: When Desire Crosses the Ice The Ledger
The man from the stands was in the hallway outside Chase’s room the next morning, pretending to read his phone.Chase walked past him without a word. He took the back stairs, crossed the kitchen and went out through the garden door, and when he checked the reflection in the glass, the man was ten paces behind him. Adrian had stopped being subtle. That was almost a relief.It meant the work was reaching something.For two weeks Chase had done what his father had trained him to do his whole life, only in reverse. Follow the money. Every shipment had a payment trail, every payment a shell, every shell a name on a document in some county office. He started with the Voss Foundation and its one patient, protected payment, the same amount every month for nine years, signed off by Adrian himself. He pulled at it at night on a laptop Adrian didn’t know existed. A frozen account here. A misrouted invoice there. Small cuts, none traceable, each leaving a little less of the structure standing.He
Hockey Hazard: When Desire Crosses the Ice Blind Pass
Coach Jenkins ran a three-on-two drill at the end of practice, and he paired them without looking up from his clipboard.“Voss, center. Heyes, right wing. Callahan, left.”Nobody on the bench said anything. Nobody had to. The two of them hadn’t shared a shift in nine days, and everyone had noticed. Reid Callahan caught Noah’s eye and raised a brow. Noah looked at the ice.His ribs had stopped screaming and started muttering. His forearm was wrapped under the sleeve, tight enough to hold. He had told the trainer it was a bruise, and the trainer had looked at the color of it and written something down and said nothing. Noah pulled his helmet on and skated to the faceoff dot.Chase was already there. He didn’t look at him.“Keep it clean,” Jenkins called. “Two touches, and somebody had better finish.”The whistle went.It started badly. Noah could feel it, the stiffness in his stride and the half second he lost on the first turn because his body flinched from a hit that wasn’t coming. Ch
Hockey Hazard: When Desire Crosses the Ice Counter
The first sign was the silence.Noah’s phone had buzzed with an assignment at least once a day for weeks, always a time, an address and nothing else. For three days now it had stayed dark. He checked it between classes, then during lecture, then in the locker room with his gear half off, and every time the screen showed the same blank gray.On the fourth morning, one of the guards stopped him at the foot of the stairs.“Not today.”“What’s not today?”“Anything.” The man’s face gave away nothing. “Boss is busy.”Busy. In a house where the word usually meant a closed door and a long night, it was a strange thing to hear. Noah heard other things too, now that he was listening. Adrian’s voice behind the study door, clipped and low, three calls in an hour. A courier turned away at the gate without his package. Marta, in the kitchen, murmuring into her phone about a supplier who hadn’t called back.He found the rest on his own. A name on Adrian’s list, a man Noah had been sent to see twice
Hockey Hazard: When Desire Crosses the Ice Choice
The corridor was dim, lit only by the sconces Adrian never let the staff turn off. At the far end, outside Eli’s room, Noah sat slumped in a straight-backed chair with his head tipped against the wall. Marta knelt in front of him, her case open on the carpet, a basin of pink water at her knee.Chase had seen Noah hurt before. He hadn’t seen this.His shirt had been cut open down one side and hung off his shoulder in strips. The skin beneath it was the color of old fruit, blooming dark from armpit to hip, and one forearm was swollen so badly the sleeve had been sliced away. Blood had dried in a line from his temple to his jaw, and Marta was working at it with a gauze pad, slowly, the way you clean something you’re afraid to break. Noah’s hand was spread over his ribs. Every breath caught at the top.“Hold still,” Marta murmured.“I am.”“You’re shaking.”“I’m cold.”It was not cold. Chase could feel the heat of the house from where he stood. He gripped the doorframe until the wood bit
Hockey Hazard: When Desire Crosses the Ice You're Hurt
The collection was supposed to be simple.Adrian’s instructions had come with a name and an apartment number, and no explanation. A mid-level dealer had been skimming, and Noah was to collect what he owed and come back. The two guards stayed in the SUV, because, as one of them put it, a scholarship kid in a hoodie was less alarming than a man in a suit.It was the dealer’s brother who changed that. He had been in the back room the whole time, and he came out with a length of pipe and the particular calm of someone who had decided in advance how this would end.Noah remembered the first swing mostly as a sound. His ribs gave a dull, wet crack, and the wall rushed up to meet his face. He got his forearm up for the second and felt it all the way to his teeth. After that he stopped counting and did arithmetic instead. A dead dealer’s brother was a problem Adrian would punish him for. A fight he won too hard was a problem the police would punish him for. Neither was something Eli could sur
Hockey Hazard: When Desire Crosses the Ice Rivals On Ice
By the time Noah reached the university, morning had already settled in fully, bright and indifferent to everything he had endured just hours before. the school felt like a different world entirely, much too normal and too untouched. He knew he was late and he didn’t need to check the time to confi
Hockey Hazard: When Desire Crosses the Ice Paranoia
The icy night air struck Noah the moment he stepped outside the building, filling his lungs with a cold that felt almost deliberate, and it was not just the temperature. It was the kind of cold that seemed to carry intent, as if the night itself were watching him.Behind him, the door closed with a
Hockey Hazard: When Desire Crosses the Ice Hollow
The hospital never slept. It was a deep, creaking, mechanical, unstoppable breath, and Noah felt it the moment he crossed the sliding glass door of Detroit Medical Center. The antiseptic odor struck him first, it was clean and suffocating at the same time, and then there was the low hum of the fluo
Hockey Hazard: When Desire Crosses the Ice Fragile Future
Noah Hayes didn’t know it yet, but he had just thirty two hours before everything in his life collapsed.The pen in his hand felt heavier than it should have been, like the weight of all that he had survived was pressing down into that final stroke. He stard at the bottom of the paper where his nam
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