LOGINI stared at the glowing text in the pitch-black stadium.
Across the field, the emergency vehicle carted Jaxson Cole away, the sirens silent but the flashing red lights gave the only signal.Forty thousand people were still standing frozen in silence.
The press vans had already surrounded the stadium gates outside, satellite dishes unfolded too. The whole stadium was so noisy,that my head became too heavy.
I left with grief to the private telemetry lab, my hands were shaking so much ,I could barely input the door code.
I walked into the room,kaja was in there.All I did was stare and think.
"If you keep staring at the floor like you're waiting for it to swallow you, Sienna, your spine is going to lock in place."kaja said.
I flinched, snapping my head up.
Kaja stood near the coffee stand in the corner, holding two oversized cups,steam curling into the chilly air.
"Drink this," Kaja said, walking over and shoving one of the cups directly into my hand, "you look like a ghost that just got evicted from its own haunting."
"I can't drink coffee now, Kaja," I said.
I’m in a big mess now,Cole’s career is being ruined under my name.
Kaja stood up beside me,She took a slow sip from her own cup,while her bright blue eyes were tracking my direction.
“I know you didn't tamper with that brace. I’ve watched you spend seventy-two hours straight rebuilding a tackle’s torn meniscus just so he wouldn't lose his scholarship. You don't break athletes. You fix them. Someone is behind all this"
"But who?" I pulled my hand away slowly,
"The master encryption keys require two-factor hardware authorization. My physical keycard never left my pocket tonight. Except..."
My voice failed as Bronisław’s face flashed in my mind. His cold grey eyes. His demand for the live encryption keys right before play.
"Except your beloved uncle," Kaja finished quietly, "Uncles in high-stakes are bad news, Sienna. Money turns bloodlines into a blood hunt."
"He wouldn't destroy our own subsidiary's flagship medical gear," I argued.
"The Vance Legacy brace is worth millions in market evaluation. If the hardware fails, stock prices will go down by morning. Why ruin the family company?"
"Unless ruining the brace ruins you," Kaja pointed out clearly . She shifted her chair around to face the master server , tapping a blue-painted fingernail against the glass frame.
"Which brings me to why I stayed down here in the dark instead of joining the panic out the lobby."
I stopped pacing immediately. "What did you find out?"
"While you were on the sideline watching Cole’s medical crew panic, I went through the league feed and downloaded the raw, untouched telemetry cache from the stadium's local sensor before it was wiped.
"The surface scans showed Jaxson was clear to play. Standard bone density, green baseline."
"Right," I asked in curiosity , leaning over her shoulder as the blue light bathed our faces. "That's what cleared him through pre-game protocols."
"Yeah. Except when I ran the raw file through a high-contrast structural filter to isolate joint stress..." Kaja swiped her hand across the screen interface, expanding a translucent three-dimensional view of Jaxson Cole’s right knee.
The blue model shifted into a harsh, thermal grey.
My chest felt so heavy that i couldn't breath.
Kaja still continued screening deep into the subchondral bone were dozens of microscopic, jagged web lines,they pulsed on the display, in faint, angry red hues.
"Micro-fractures," I whispered, pressing my hand against the cool glass of the screen. "Dozens of them. Spreading straight through the primary load-bearing points of the joint."
"They aren't natural wear-and-tear stress lines, Sienna," Kaja said, "Look at the pattern. Human stress fractures follow kinetic movement; these are perfectly geometric. They are moving in concentric circles around the exact mounting points where the brace's internal sensors interface with the skin."
Oh no ,I said almost screaming,this is very dangerous
"These micro-fractures were caused by targeted, high-frequency mechanical vibrations," I realized,
"Someone didn't just sabotage his brace during the match tonight. Jaxson’s knee didn't fail because of Marek's tackle."
"No," Kaja said, looking up at me with dead-serious eyes. "His joint was intentionally degraded over days, maybe weeks, before he stepped onto that field.
"My digital signature didn't just authorize the match patch," I breathed, terror gripping my spine. "It authorized the baseline fitting parameters two weeks ago."
"Someone set you up to take the fall for ending the career of the biggest quarterback in the country," Kaja whispered.
Before I could process the whole nightmare wrapping around me, the heavy electronic lock on the lab door chimed.
The door slid open,it was Bronisław,he stepped across the threshold. Behind him stood two heavy bodied men in dark corporate suits, men I had never seen on our clinic's payroll.
"Uncle," I said, taking a step in front of Kaja’s console, shielding the holographic rendering behind my body. "We just found critical anomalies in Cole's pre-game diagnostic files "
"Quiet, Sienna," Bronisław said, his voice flat, dry, and entirely emotionally empty.
He didn't look at the screen. He didn't look at Kaja. He simply reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a thick document stamped with heavy red legal seals, and tossed it onto the glass desk between us.
"What is this?" I asked, my heartbeat pounding to my ears.
"That is a mandatory arbitration order," Bronisław said, "Jaxson Cole’s family estate has just exercised a nuclear buyout clause in our league agreement. They are seizing all medical assets, diagnostic logs, and primary care personnel associated with his treatment."
"They're suing us?"
Yes but there’s one more thing,he responded
"They agreed to suppress a formal criminal indictment against Vance Sports Legacy under one strict, non-negotiable condition."
He pointed a single, manicured finger directly at my chest.
"They have bought out your exclusive medical contract, Sienna. Effective immediately, your license belongs to the Cole family. You are being stripped of your position with the Kraków Eagles."
What ?"You're handing me over to them?"
The floorboards beneath us vibrated violently.Radek instantly drew his sidearm, stepping in front of us, his radio bursting into a storm of static and frantic shouts."Boss, they didn't just cut the power!" a guard’s voice screamed through the speaker over the heavy chatter of automatic gunfire. "The black vans smashed through the lower security barrier, they are on the driveway"The radio transmission cut into high-pitched static.Out in the snow-covered courtyard, right outside the library windows, a blinding spotlight ignited, pinning us in its beam.Outside, the ragged chatter of automatic gunfire echoed sharply against the frozen pine trees of the mountain pass. The Vance tactical units had breached the lower gates. They were inside the perimeter.Yet, inside the dim, smoke-scented air of the library, the loudest sound in the world was the heavy, rhythmic thrum of my own pulse.He bought my contract to keep me safe.The words spun through my mind like a centrifuge, tearing dow
My heart trooped as I waited for him talk"She didn't need to connect to your uncle's servers to send him the files," Radek said softly. "This chip has been broadcasting her exact real-time location, every keystroke she’s typed, and every diagnostic scan she’s performed directly to Bronisław’s private desk in Kraków... since the day she packed her bags to come here."The tiny black square on the exposed motherboard seemed to pulse under the glare of Radek’s penlight.A hardware bug. Soldered directly into my machine.My breath rattled in my throat as the cold reality swept over me. Every night I hunkered over this keyboard typing out detailed physical evaluations of Jaxson’s knee, mapping his joint range, recording the microscopic progress of his tissue recovery Bronisław had seen it all in real time.He hadn't been waiting for me to send reports. He was harvesting them."It’s an active mirror," Radek said, his tone flat and unyielding as he pointed the steel tip of his prying tool at
The emergency red strobe light spun across the dark mahogany shelves of the library, casting long, bleeding shadows over the floorboards. Out in the driveway, the muffled roar of diesel engines signaled the arrival of the Vance tactical convoy, but in my chest, the real violence was happening in complete silence.They were going to erase him.Bronisław was taking twenty-four years of Jaxson Cole’s sweat, fractured bones, and relentless obsession, and sweeping it into a corporate dustbin on live television. And he was doing it using my hand to hold the broom."Sienna," Jaxson’s voice came out low, a grounded rumble near my ear. His fingers remained braced on my shoulders, his grip so firm it kept my knees from buckling under the sheer weight of the lie. "Look at the screen. What’s the protocol?""He’s lying to the league board," I said. The trembling in my vocal cords vanished, replaced by an icy, dangerous calm that surprised even me. My blood didn't run hot; it turned to slush. "He’s
The taste of Jaxson Cole was still on my lips,The sound didn’t come from the heavy timber doors or the wind howling against the triple-paned glass facing the Tatra slopes. It came from my tablet, resting face-down on the leather ottoman beside the hearth. A sharp, continuous ping the high-priority frequency reserved exclusively for the Vance Sports Legacy board.I pulled back, my breath hitching in my throat. Jaxson’s hands were still resting on my waist, his thumbs pressing firmly through the soft cotton of my sweater. For three seconds, his steel-blue eyes held mine, dark with a heavy, unfiltered hunger that had nothing to do with football and everything to do with the way my fingers had just been tangled in his blonde hair."Don't," he muttered, his voice a low, and vibrated against my collarbone. "Let it ring, Sienna.""It’s the executive line," I whispered, though my voice sounded paper-thin. My skin felt flushed, every nerve ending firing from the sudden warmth of his body pr
We had taken refuge in the grand estate library. Floor-to-ceiling mahogany shelves lined with ancient leather-bound volumes enclosed the room, creating an intimate, insulated sanctuary against the blizzard raging beyond the stained-glass windows. On the central table, my laptop sat open beside Jaxson’s encrypted tablet, displaying real-time monitoring streams of Bronisław’s network activity and the fluctuating pre-market stock tickers. Jaxson stood near the hearth, staring down into the flickering amber embers. He had discarded his formal suit jacket and tie, leaving his white dress shirt unbuttoned at the collar, the sleeves rolled up to his forearms. Even with the physical exhaustion carved into his sharp features and the dull, lingering ache in his patellar tendon, his posture radiated an immovable, magnetic power. I sat on the edge of the leather sofa, watching him. My body was physically drained from the terror of the past few hours the setup, the threat of arrest, and the so
I stood paralyzed in the narrow stone corridor, my fingers clutching the metallic casing of the encrypted micro-drive so tightly my knuckles throbbed white. Beyond the heavy oak mechanism that had just sealed shut, the muted shouts of federal marshals echoed down the primary hallway, their heavy tactical boots rattling the floorboards. Jaxson was out there right now, holding off the agents, putting his body, his reputation, and his remaining freedom on the line to buy me time. My chest heaved in shallow, ragged gaps as a sudden, suffocating wave of realization crashed over my entire existence. Bronisław. My own uncle. The man who had hugged me at my father’s bedside, the man who had solemnly promised to protect our family’s legacy after my father fell ill—he was the puppet master who had orchestrating my ruin from the very beginning. Every contract, every debt notice, every tearful phone call from my relatives begging me to sign away my freedom to Jaxson Cole had been a calculat







