All Chapters of My Hockey Alpha Deadly Secret : Chapter 271 - Chapter 280

Ember's POVJames moved.I did not see what he took from his jacket pocket because I was still looking at Selena and the movement came from the side — fast, the specific speed of someone who had been waiting for the right moment and had decided the moment had arrived.Something in the air changed.Not sound, not light — something underneath both of those. A frequency I felt before I understood it, in the bones first and then everywhere else, the specific wrongness of something that was designed to interfere with something the body was doing naturally.My legs went.Not the gradual way — immediately. The specific sudden failure of a body that has had its support removed without warning. I went down to the floor of my father's sitting room and my hands hit the carpet and I pressed them flat and tried to push myself back up and could not.The strength was gone.Not reduced — gone. The specific absence of something I had come to rely on, the wolf strength that had arrived over the summer

Ember's POVI held the phone.Knox's name on the screen.I had called him and the call had connected for one second and then I had ended it before it rang — the specific deliberate ending of someone who had reached for something and then pulled back.I stood at the window with the phone in my hand and thought about what Knox had said this morning.The game is in a week. Coach has us every morning this week.The biggest game of his hockey career. The one he had been building toward since before I met him. The one Coach Harlan had been constructing the entire semester around. The tournament that required Knox to be focused and present and not receiving a phone call from his girlfriend telling him that her sister and his trainer had just held a device against her in her father's sitting room and threatened to kill her if she did not agree to fight the human race.I put the phone down.I could not give him that this morning.Not today.Not with the game a week away and the training happen

Ember's POV "Please," I said. Marcus held his gaze on me with the specific stillness of someone who had made a decision and was not revisiting it. "I have nowhere to go," I said. "My father's house is not safe right now. There is a hunter — Ethan, the student from school, Richard Graves's son — he was outside my building this evening." I held Marcus's gaze. "I did not go home because I did not know if he had followed me or if he was going to come to the house." I held my hands flat on the table the way he was holding his. "I came here because it was the safest place I could think of." "It is not safe," Marcus said. "Not for you. Not here." "Because I am a hybrid," I said. "Yes," he said. "Your own son—" I started. "My son's choices are his to make," Marcus said. "What happens in this house is mine." He held my gaze. "I will not have a hybrid in this house. I said what I said and it stands." I looked at him. I thought about asking him why. I thought about the war and the thir

Ember's POV"Private training," he said. "That is what this week is. Not with the full team — just me and Coach and the specific work that needs to happen before the tournament." He held my gaze. "No public sessions. No campus exposure. Just the ice and the work.""So Ethan cannot track your schedule," I said."He can try," Knox said. "But private training means I am not in the places he expects. The team training schedule is posted on the campus board. Private sessions are not." He held my gaze. "Coach arranged it specifically because of the tournament — fewer variables, more focused preparation.""And during the tournament itself," I said."Public," he said. "Completely. The tournament runs across two days, multiple teams, the full school community present." He held my gaze. "Ethan is not going to move on me in a room full of students and cameras and school officials. His father's operation is built on discretion. Anything traceable, anything that draws official attention — it works

Knox's POV"We go and get him," Knox said.Marcus looked at him."We know the eastern boundary," Knox said. "We know the territory. We have James and we have the pack members who run that section and we have enough to mount a search if we move quickly." He held his father's gaze. "We go and get Daniel Holt back.""It is not that simple," Marcus said."It never is," Knox said. "We go anyway."Marcus held the file open on the desk and looked at it with the expression of someone who had been looking at the same information from multiple angles and had arrived at the same conclusion from every direction."Henry Graves does not keep his victims alive," he said.Knox held his gaze."That is his operational history," Marcus said. "Thirty years of it. Documented in every pack intelligence file we have from the period of the original war and everything James has compiled since." He held Knox's gaze. "When Henry Graves takes someone, it is not for information. Not primarily. He is methodical —