My Hockey Alpha Deadly Secret のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 141 - チャプター 150

Ember's POVHis hands were still over mine.The shaking had slowed. Not stopped — just quieter, the tremor moving further underneath the surface where it was still there but not visible anymore. I breathed and let the room be the room and let his hands be where they were and did not try to make anything happen faster than it was happening."I will protect you," he said.I looked at him."I know you will try," I said. "But Knox—" I stopped. I looked at the note on the desk. "How are you going to protect me when you are the one who is exposed? They sent that to your room. They put it under your door. They know where you live and they know what you are and they are telling you they are coming." I held his gaze. "You are the one in the most immediate danger. I am connected to you. How do you protect anyone if you cannot first protect yourself?"He looked at me for a moment.Then something shifted in his expression. Something small and unexpected."Are you worried about me?" he said.The w

Ember's POVCharlotte did not stay in the room.That was the thing — she had come in and said what she said and before I had fully formed a response she turned and went back into the corridor, and her voice did not go with her quietly. It went with her at full volume."She knew," Charlotte said, to the corridor. To anyone in it. To the doors that were still closed and the ones that were beginning to open. "She knew Knox and I had history and she went after him deliberately."I came to my door.The corridor had people in it already — early morning, students going to classes, students coming back from breakfast, the ordinary population of a dormitory floor at this hour who had not been expecting anything unusual and were now pausing because unusual had arrived.Charlotte was standing in the middle of the corridor with her coat on and her voice carrying and the expression of someone who had decided that the contained version of this situation was over."She is my stepsister," Charlotte s

Ember's POVI heard Rebecca sit down outside my door.Not a knock — just the sound of movement in the corridor and then the particular quality of silence that meant someone was there, present, not going anywhere. I knew it was her without asking because that was what Rebecca did when she had run out of things to say and had not run out of caring.I was on my bed.Not crying anymore — the first wave of it had come and gone in the first ten minutes and what was left was the specific exhaustion that came after, the hollow kind, where everything felt slightly too large for the space you were in.The ceiling was the same ceiling it always was.I looked at it.I thought about Charlotte's face in the corridor. The specific expression she had worn when she was saying the things she was saying — the performance of hurt wrapped around something that was not hurt at all, something colder and more organized. The way she had said my own stepsister like it was a wound she was showing people rather

Ember's POVKnox noticed.I had known he would notice. He noticed everything — it was one of the things I had learned about him over the months, the specific attentiveness he had to the people around him, the way nothing small moved in his peripheral vision without registering."Who was that?" he said."My dad," I said. "Just checking in." I said it smoothly, the way I said things when I had decided on a version and was committing to it. "I will reply later. I am not in the mood."Knox looked at me.Then he looked at the phone face down on the mattress."Okay," he said. He did not sound entirely convinced. But he went back to what he had been saying — something about the project timeline — and I breathed and kept my hand near the phone without touching it.Two minutes passed.Three.Then Knox, mid-sentence, reached out toward the phone.Not aggressive — the casual reach of someone going to check something, the movement of a person in a small shared space who has decided to see rather

Ember's POVIt happened without happening.That was the only way I could describe it afterward — not a moment of effort, not a sensation of exertion, just my hands on the base of the wardrobe and then the wardrobe was not on the floor anymore.It came up.Both feet, clean off the floorboards, the same way Knox had done it except that I kept going — past where he had lifted it, higher, the base of it a foot off the ground and then more, and it was not heavy. That was the part my brain could not process. It was not heavy. It was not light either — I could feel the mass of it, the reality of the thing in my hands, but the mass was not the obstacle it should have been. My hands simply held it and my arms simply held it and the wardrobe was in the air.I held it there.I looked at Knox over the top of it.He was on his feet.His arms were folded and his expression had done something I had not seen it do before — open, genuinely and completely open, the look of someone watching something th