All Chapters of My Hockey Alpha Deadly Secret : Chapter 171 - Chapter 180

Ember's POVThe ambulance was faster than I expected.Four minutes from Claire's call to the gate. They came with the specific efficient urgency of people who did this regularly and had learned to move without drama. They assessed Rebecca where she was, got her onto the stretcher, asked us questions we answered as quickly and accurately as we could, and then she was in the ambulance and moving.Claire and I ran back to the school for a moment — grabbed bags, told the security officer at the gate what had happened, got the name of the hospital from the paramedic who stayed behind to take our details. Then we got a taxi and followed.The hospital was not far.The waiting room was the waiting room. Plastic chairs and fluorescent light and a desk where someone took our information and told us the doctor would update us when there was something to update. We sat down. Claire had her coat still on. I had one hand on my phone and one hand in my lap and I looked at the door that Rebecca had g

Ember's POVHe had not answered my question."How much do you already know," I said again. More directly this time. Because I needed to understand what I was walking into before I said anything further, and a doctor who had been thinking about a file for several weeks was a different conversation from a doctor who had simply recognized a name.He looked at me."Enough to know that what the young man told me about the hereditary condition was not false," he said. "And not complete." He leaned forward slightly. "The readings from your episode were unusual in very specific ways. Not random unusual — patterned unusual. The kind of unusual that points somewhere." He paused. "I have been looking into what it points to."I held his gaze."And what is it pointing to?" I said.He was quiet for a moment."Something I did not have a framework for when I trained," he said. "Something that is not in the standard medical literature." He held my gaze. "Something that appears in other literature. Old

Ember's POV"He does not have proof," Knox said.We were in the corridor just inside the main entrance, out of the car park cold, not yet back in the waiting room. He said it quietly and directly, the way he said things when he needed them to land without drama."He has a file," I said."He has readings he cannot explain," Knox said. "Numbers that are unusual. A story about a hereditary condition that he does not believe." He held my gaze. "None of that is proof of what we are. It is suggestive to someone who already suspects. To anyone else it is a patient with an unusual medical history." He paused. "He cannot do anything with what he has. Not yet.""Not yet," I said."Which is why we do not give him more," he said. "No more conversations, no more office visits, nothing that adds to the file." He looked at me. "Are you okay?"I thought about whether I was okay."No," I said honestly. "But I am functional. Which is what tonight needs."He nodded.We went back to the waiting room.---

Ember's POVThe field had been transformed.I did not know when he had done it or who had helped him do it — Knox was suspended and had limited campus access and had been spending most of his time at a hospital — but somehow between the training session with James and the text telling me to come here, the hockey field had become something else entirely.Roses. Red ones, arranged on the ground in the shape of a heart large enough to be visible from the edge of the field. Not dozens — hundreds, the kind of arrangement that required planning and time and the specific determination of someone who had decided to do something properly rather than halfway.Students had gathered at the edges.I did not know if Knox had told people or if the arrangement had drawn them the way arrangements like this always drew people — the specific gravitational pull of something romantic happening in a public space, the collective instinct to witness it.I saw Ethan at the far edge of the crowd before I saw K

Ember's POVRebecca was sitting up.Not the propped-against-pillows version from my imagination during the eight days — actually sitting up, back straight, the specific posture of someone who had decided they had been horizontal long enough and were done with it. The bruising on her face had faded significantly. The dressing above her eyebrow was smaller than it had been. She looked like herself in a way she had not looked for eight days because for eight days she had not looked like anything except a person waiting to come back.She looked at me when I came through the door."Finally," she said.I sat down.And then I talked.I do not know exactly when I decided to tell her everything — it was not a decision so much as an inevitability, the specific relief of a person who has been carrying too much finding that the person they most trusted was available again and opening without being able to stop.I told her about James and the training. About the wardrobe and the strength that had