Watchdog

Chapter 2 : Watchdog

Hunter Conner

"Tell that doctor to take one more step toward him and see what happens."

My voice came out low, flat, and final. The doctor froze in the doorway, clipboard halfway raised, then thought better of whatever he'd planned to say and backed out into the hall. Good. Smart man.

The room was too small for me. It was built for people who fit in plastic chairs and spoke in soft voices, not for someone my size standing over a bed like a wall. My shoulder brushed the blood pressure monitor every time I shifted, and I didn't care. Let it beep. Let something else in this room make noise besides that machine tracking his heartbeat.

My knuckles were split open, and dried blood cracked into the creases. I'd put my fist through a locker door in the tunnel the second they carried him off the ice, and I hadn't felt it then, and I barely felt it now. Some distant part of me understood I should get it looked at. That part didn't matter.

I wasn't leaving.

A nurse had asked twenty minutes ago if I wanted to wait outside while they ran another scan. I'd looked at her until she stopped asking. Nobody had tried since.

I stood over him, arms crossed so tight my own biceps ached, and watched his chest rise and fall in small, careful pulls. Too careful. Too shallow. Every breath he took wrong reminded me exactly whose fault this was.

Reyes.

I saw it again, the way I'd seen it forty times already since the whistle blew — Cody flying, weightless, untouchable, and then Reyes coming in from the blind side with no play on the puck at all, just a body thrown like a weapon. I'd been on the bench. Fifteen feet away. I hadn't moved fast enough, hadn't screamed loud enough, hadn't done one single thing to put myself between them.

My jaw locked so hard my molars ached. Cold sweat prickled down my spine even in the overheated room. I wanted Reyes's throat under my hands. I wanted it so bad my palms twitched at my sides, fingers curling into the memory of a grip I hadn't gotten to use yet.

I stepped closer to the bed instead. That was the only place my hands were allowed to go.

Cody looked wrong like this. Pale under the fluorescents, a bruise already purpling along his collarbone where the brace didn't cover it, IV taped to the inside of his wrist. He was built like something unbreakable on the ice — fast, loose-limbed, always laughing at guys twice his size. Here, he looked like something that could shatter if I breathed on him wrong.

My hand hovered an inch over his shoulder. I didn't let it land. Not yet.

I'd spent eight months watching him without him knowing it. Every shift he took, every time he peeled his jersey off after practice, every stupid grin he threw at Marcus like it cost him nothing. I knew the rhythm of his stride before he cut left. I knew the sound he made when he laughed for real versus when he was performing for the cameras. I'd hated every single hand that landed on him during a game, every check, every shove, every casual slap on the back from a teammate who got to touch him like it meant nothing.

None of them had ever earned it. I hadn't either. That had never stopped wanting.

His chest rose again, small and shallow, and something in me that had been coiled tight since the hit finally cracked open.

I let my thumb brush along his jaw, slow, deliberate. His skin was too cool. I didn't like that. I didn't like anything about tonight except that he was still breathing, still here, still mine to watch over whether he knew it or not.

I wrapped my fingers around his uninjured wrist, careful of the IV line, and held on. Not gentle. Firm. Anchoring. His pulse ticked steadily under my grip, faster than it should be at rest, and I felt something settle in my chest at the proof of it.

This wasn't kindness. I wasn't fooling myself about that. It was something older and uglier than care — a need to plant myself between him and the rest of the world and never move again. Nobody else got to stand this close. Nobody else got to touch him like this. I didn't care if he woke up and told me to let go. I wasn't going to.

The door slammed open.

I didn't jump. I turned, slow, deliberate, already sliding my body half in front of the bed before I'd consciously decided to do it.

Atlas Kane stood in the threshold, suit jacket gone, sleeves shoved up his forearms, tie loosened like he'd fought his way here through traffic and lost patience twenty minutes ago. His face was doing that thing it did — perfectly still, perfectly cold, which was somehow worse than if he'd been shouting.

My shoulders squared on instinct. My teeth wanted to bear themselves.

"You need to leave," I said. It wasn't a request.

Atlas didn't stop walking. He crossed the room like he owned the floor under his feet, eyes flicking once to my hand still wrapped around Cody's wrist, and something in his expression sharpened to a blade's edge.

"Take your hands off him, Conner," he said, voice cold and even. "You're not the one who gets to decide who stays."