All Chapters of PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

RHYS’ POVThe empty dark is worse than the angry kind.Angry I can work with. Angry has edges – walls I can hit, a body I can throw into a drill until the feeling burns off. The empty dark doesn't have edges. It opens up underneath you and you fall into it and there's nothing to grab onto, nothing to fight, just a silence so complete you can't tell if you're drowning or if you drowned hours ago and haven't noticed yet.Elena's letter cracked open something I sealed shut when I was twelve years old. And now it was flooding. Nine years of concrete and she put a crack in it with two pages of cream paper and the word proud and now everything I'd buried was pouring through and I didn't have enough hands to stop it.I'd been sitting on my couch for hours. The letter was on the kitchen counter where I'd left it and I could feel it pulling at me from across the room like a second gravity. The word proud sitting in my apartment like something alive. She's proud of me.From whatever city she d

The email came at 7 AM on a Thursday and I almost missed it because I was arguing with Rhys about whether oat milk counted as real milk."It's not milk, Naomi. It's oat water with marketing.""It has calcium.""Water has calcium if you believe hard enough.""That's not how calcium works.""That's not how milk works either and yet here we are, drinking oats."My phone buzzed. I glanced at it mid-argument, ready to dismiss it, and then I wasn't arguing anymore. I was standing in his kitchen with my coffee going cold and my mouth slightly open and the words on my screen rearranging the shape of my morning.Dear Ms. Ellis, We're pleased to inform you that your feature essay "The Women Who Love in Silence" has been selected for our spring spotlight. The piece will run in our April issue, both print and digital...The literary magazine. Not the campus one – the real one. The regional publication with actual subscribers and actual distribution and an editorial board that had rejected three o

I could see him unraveling.Not all at once – Rhys didn't unravel like that. He came apart in increments. A harder check at practice. A longer silence at dinner. The way his hands gripped the steering wheel like he was choking something when he drove me home. The way he'd started sleeping with his jaw clenched, grinding his teeth through dreams he wouldn't tell me about. Elena's letter on the counter. Richard's calls going to voicemail. Miles not texting back. Caleb's name in my brother's phone like a splinter I couldn't reach. The championship two weeks out and the pressure building behind his eyes like something with a timer.He was losing control. Every area, every direction. The ice, his family, his anger, the invisible war being waged against us by a man patient enough to use a thirteen-year-old as a weapon. Rhys was white-knuckling his way through every day and I could see the moment approaching.So I took it.He was sitting on his bed. Still in practice clothes. Staring at the

I caught him at his car."What happened in there?"He was unlocking the door. Not looking at me. The parking lot half-empty, the distant noise of the rink still carrying through the cold air – the aftermath of a win that should have been ours to enjoy together."You touched him.""I touched his SHOULDER, Rhys. For half a second. While saying good game. The same thing you'd say to any player after a–""I know what I saw.""Then you saw basic human decency. That's it. That's the whole thing."He turned around. His face in the parking lot light – controlled, the jaw working the way it did when he was managing something volatile behind his teeth. Still in the afterglow of four goals and a future forming in a press box and the best night of his career, and all of it overshadowed by my hand on another man's shoulder for less time than it took to blink."You touched the guy who's been systematically destroying our lives. In a corridor full of people. After a game where every scout in the bui

The notebook had seventeen pages now.I spread it across my bed on a Tuesday afternoon while Sienna was at Cole's and the dorm was quiet and the light through the window was the flat, grey kind that made everything look like evidence. Seventeen pages of dates, incidents, connections. Lines drawn between events that looked random until you laid them side by side and watched the architecture emerge.Every public Naomi-and-Rhys moment followed by a crisis within forty-eight hours. Every crisis serving the same three purposes – destabilize the relationship, damage Rhys's reputation, position Caleb as the reliable alternative. Every escalation slightly bigger than the last, calibrated to the size of the stage. The pattern was undeniable. Consistent. Almost elegant in its precision.But pattern wasn't proof.Zara had said it and she was right. A timeline of coincidences, no matter how damning, wasn't evidence. I couldn't take seventeen pages of dates and arrows to anyone and say look, he's