All Chapters of My Hockey Alpha Deadly Secret : Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Ember's POV I folded the note. One fold, then another, pressing the creases down hard the way you pressed something when you needed your hands to have something to do. I folded it until it was small enough to fit in my palm and then I closed my fingers around it and I walked. Not walked. Ran. Not the panicked kind — I was not going to run across campus in a way that made people turn and look, in a way that could be seen and reported and turned into another story spreading through group chats by afternoon. I ran the way you ran when you were trying to look like you were walking fast, the specific controlled movement of someone whose body was going faster than their composure could account for. The path from the boys dormitory to the girls took four minutes at a normal pace. I did it in two. The main door. The stairs. The second floor corridor. My own door, and I pushed it open and went inside and stood in the middle of the room and pressed the folded note against my chest and jus

Ember's POV We gave it an hour. Rebecca's idea — she said showing up immediately looked panicked and panicked made people less willing to talk. We needed to look like we had a reasonable purpose for being in the boys' dormitory and reasonable purposes took time to arrange. So we waited an hour. I spent it sitting on my bed staring at the wall, which was not useful, but it was what I had. Rebecca spent it on her phone doing something she did not explain, which probably meant she was running her own version of the search before we went in person. At half past twelve we walked back across campus. The boys' dormitory was busier at this hour — people moving between the main building and the cafeteria, coming back from morning classes, the general midday traffic of a school that was between its morning and afternoon sessions. Nobody stopped us at the door. Rebecca walked in like she had every right to be there and I followed and we started on the ground floor. Rebecca knocked on the f

Ember's POV I got five steps. Five full running steps down the corridor before Rebecca's wrist pulled in my grip and she yanked back hard enough to stop both of us mid-stride. I spun around with my heart going at a speed that was not sustainable and my bag swinging sideways and my eyes already braced for whatever was coming around that corner. Knox came around the corner. He had a set of metal tools in his hand — a wrench and something else, a bracket of some kind, the kind of things that lived in maintenance cupboards and got carried by people doing repairs. He was wearing a dark shirt with the sleeves rolled up and old jeans, the kind of clothes you wore when you were doing something that might get them dirty. He was looking down at the tools as he came around the corner, checking something, and he almost walked into us before he looked up. He stopped. Looked at me. Looked at Rebecca. Looked at the two of us standing in the middle of the corridor with our arms still connected

Ember's POV "I don't have a plan yet," I said. There it was. The honest answer, out in the open, with nowhere to hide behind it. Knox waited. "When something actually happens," I said, "when Ethan makes a physical move — not notes, not flowers, not delivered messages — I will go to school management with everything I have. Both notes, the bouquet, the student who delivered it, all of it. I will build a case and I will walk into that office and I will make them act on it." "And between now and then?" Knox said. "I stay aware. I stay with people. I do not go anywhere alone at odd hours." I looked at him steadily. "That is the plan." "That is a reactive plan," Knox said. "You are describing what you do after something happens. Not what you do to stop it happening." "I know that." "Ember—" "I know," I said. "I know it is not perfect. I know it has gaps. But it is what I have right now and I am not going to stand here and pretend it is more than it is." Knox looked at me for a lo

Ember's POV I had made it to the bottom of the stairs. The ground floor corridor was right there — the main door, the path back to the girls' dormitory, the rest of the day waiting to be gotten through. I had my hand on the door. Then I stopped. Not because Knox had called after me. He had not. He had let me go like he said he would, and I had gone, and the stairwell behind me was quiet. I stopped because the question he had asked was still sitting in my chest and I had answered half of it and left the other half on the landing and it felt unfinished in a way I could not walk away from cleanly. I turned around. Knox was at the top of the stairs. He had not moved. He was standing exactly where I had left him, tools in hand, looking down at me with the patient expression of someone who had expected this. "How?" I said. He looked at me. "You said give you a chance to prove it is different," I said. "I want to know what that actually looks like. How do you intend to do that?" Kn