All Chapters of My Hockey Alpha Deadly Secret : Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

Ember's POV "No," I said. "Ember—" "I said no." I sat back on the bed and pulled my knees up and looked at the wall. "I am not going to Knox. I am not going to have a conversation with him about feelings or non-feelings or any of it. I am going to do what I said I was going to do, which is keep my distance until the whole thing settles and he moves on." Rebecca looked at me. "And how long is that going to take?" "However long it takes." "That is not a plan." "It is a plan. It is a simple plan. People stop having feelings for other people when those people consistently give them nothing to hold onto. Knox is not the kind of person who is going to keep going after someone who has made it clear she is not interested. He has too much self-respect for that." I looked at the window. "I give it two weeks. Maybe three. He will move on and everything will go back to normal and we will finish the chemistry project and that will be the end of it." Rebecca was quiet for a moment. I could h

Knox's POV They were already there when I arrived. Rebecca had taken a table at the back of the library, away from the main study area, in the corner section that most people walked past without stopping because the shelving units on either side made it feel enclosed. She had chosen it deliberately. That told me something before either of them had said a word. Claire was beside her, laptop closed for once, which also told me something. I sat down across from them and put my bag on the empty chair beside me. "Thank you for coming," Rebecca said. "You said it was about Ember," I said. "Tell me what happened." Rebecca and Claire looked at each other briefly — the look of two people who had agreed on an order and were confirming it. Then Rebecca reached into her bag and put something on the table between us. A note. Small, folded, the kind that came inside a flower arrangement. I looked at it. I did not pick it up yet. "A bouquet was delivered to Ember's room yesterday evening,"

Ember's POV The path encounter had lasted approximately thirty seconds. Knox had been walking in the opposite direction and we had seen each other and there had been a brief, loaded moment of eye contact and then Rebecca had said something about needing to keep moving if the supermarket was going to close and I had used that gratefully and we had walked past and that had been it. I told myself it was fine. It was a campus. People walked the same paths. It meant nothing. Rebecca did not say anything about it, which was suspicious in its own way, but I let it go. Grove Street was a ten-minute walk from campus. The supermarket was small and well-lit and smelled like bread and cleaning products and the specific combination of everything that made a convenience store feel like a convenience store. Rebecca had her list in her hand — an actual written list, which she always made, because Rebecca approached grocery shopping the way most people approached a project brief. "Shampoo first,"

Ember's POV Knox looked at me like I had asked the question in a language he had not been expecting. "I didn't do anything to Charlotte," he said. "You just told me you found information she could not afford to have public and used it to make her drop a false complaint." "That is not the same as doing something to her." "It sounds like leverage," I said. "It sounds like you found something and held it over her head until she gave you what you wanted." "She made a choice," Knox said. "I did not force her to do anything. I presented her with a situation and she decided what to do about it." "Based on information you were threatening to use against her." "Based on information that was true," he said. "I did not invent anything. I did not create a situation. I found something that already existed and I gave her the option of handling it cleanly." I looked at him. He looked back. There was something not quite lining up in the way he was framing it. Not a lie — I had learned Knox'

Ember's POV "Ember." Rebecca's voice came from the direction of the automatic doors, sharp and immediate, the voice she used when she had walked into something and made a decision about it in under two seconds. She was through the doors before I had fully turned my head toward the sound. "Let her go," she said to Knox. Knox looked at Rebecca. Then he looked at me. Then he released my wrist, slowly, the way you put something down carefully rather than dropped it. Rebecca was beside me in three steps. She grabbed my other hand — not gently, with the firm grip of someone who was removing a person from a situation — and pulled me with her toward the pavement away from the building entrance. "Rebecca—" Knox started. "Not right now," she said. She did not look back. She kept moving, her hand around mine, steering us along the pavement in the direction we had come from. I went with her. I did not have the energy not to. Behind us I heard nothing. Knox did not follow. He did not call