My Hockey Alpha Deadly Secret 의 모든 챕터: 챕터 11 - 챕터 20

Knox's POVNeither of us moved for a long moment after Ethan disappeared around the corner.I stood in the doorway and listened to his footsteps fade. They were unhurried — that was the thing that bothered me. A man walking away from something he had lost walked faster, wanted distance. Ethan's footsteps were calm and even all the way to the end of the corridor. He was not retreating. He was repositioning.Ember stood beside me with her arms pressed against her sides, looking at the empty space where he had been. She was very still — the kind of still that comes right after something big has passed through and your body is still deciding whether it is over.I looked at her.I did not quite have words for what had just happened. I had watched a lot of confrontations — on the ice, in locker rooms, in hallways at two in the morning when someone had made a decision they were about to regret. I thought I had a reasonable measure of what composed looked like under pressure.I had not seen a

Knox's POVI had been wrong before. Not often, but it had happened, and I was adult enough to acknowledge it when it did.By the third day of the plan I was ready to acknowledge it.The campus had not gotten bored. It had gotten more interested. Everywhere Ember and I were seen together — the dining hall, the main corridor, the quad — people stopped their conversations to look. Two girls followed us for half a block on Tuesday before Ember noticed and shot them a look that finally made them peel off. Someone had taken the rink videos and the hallway pictures and stitched them into a compilation that now had several thousand views. There was a group chat, apparently, where people voted daily on whether we were real.My teammate Darius delivered all of this information at practice on Wednesday morning with the energy of someone who had been waiting to say it. Most talked about person on campus, he said. People were voting daily. He skated off grinning before I could tell him to mind his

Knox's POVPractice was running clean. Good energy, tight lines, everyone hitting their marks. It was the kind of session I usually lived for — nothing in my head except the next drill, the next play, the next call I had to make. For forty minutes the ice was the only world that existed and I needed that more than I had realized when I laced up.Then my phone went off on the boards.I ignored it. Mid-drill was mid-drill.It went off again.Rebecca.She was the only one who sent two texts in a row when something was wrong. One text was information. Two texts was urgency. I had picked that up about her the same way I had been picking up small things about the people in Ember's life without fully deciding to — just absorbing them, storing them, the way the wolf in me catalogued details about the people it considered worth paying attention to.I called a water break, went to the boards, and picked up my phone.First text: ethan is at embers room.Second text: knox he wont leave.I did not

Knox's POVHer hand was on my arm.That was the thing that reached me. Ember's hand wrapped around my arm and holding on, steady and certain, like she had decided she was not letting go.I came back.The red at the edges of my vision pulled back first, slow and reluctant,then the sound — there had been a roaring in my ears that I had not fully registered until it went quiet, and the quiet was almost as disorienting as the noise had been. Then the cold, sharp instinct that had been running everything stood down, folded back into the place I kept it, and left me standing in a corridor with my arm raised and Ember's hand wrapped around it.I lowered my arm.I blinked once and the corridor came back into proper focus.The corridor came back into focus. Ember in front of me, eyes on mine, not flinching. Rebecca in the doorway behind her, one hand on the frame. Ethan on the floor, one arm braced under him, looking up at me with an expression I had not seen on his face before.I looked at Eth

Knox's POVI had spoken to Rebecca on Tuesday evening, shortly after everything with Ethan settled down.I had kept it simple — told her I needed to know if she had mentioned the fake relationship to anyone after Ember told her. Not an accusation. Just a question. Rebecca had said no, clearly, and offered to go through her entire message history with me if that would help. I had told her I believed her and thanked her and ended the call.I had texted Claire the same question an hour later. Her reply came back in under two minutes, two sentences, no punctuation: absolutely not and why would I. Brief enough that it would have seemed defensive if I did not already know that was just how Claire texted.Neither of them had told.I had turned that over for most of the night in between texts with Ember, and by the time I walked into the chemistry lab the next morning I had not arrived at a satisfying answer — only a direction. And the direction pointed somewhere I was not ready to say out lo