All Chapters of The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits : Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

91 Chapters

Chapter 51: Six Months

POV: RayShe picked up on the first ring."Financial compliance office," I said. I was still standing on the steps. The cold had worked its way through both layers of my jacket and was sitting against my ribs. "Declan went in with a thin folder and came out with a thick one. Twenty minutes inside. Second floor directory lists Research Grant Oversight."Silence. The particular kind."You already knew," I said."I knew about the grants," she said carefully. "I didn't know Declan was moving today.""How long has the compliance office been investigating."A pause. Long enough to tell me the answer was something she had been sitting on."Six months," she said.I breathed out slowly. Six months. The semester was four months old. Which meant this investigation had been running before Riley arrived on campus, before Hartwell hired me, before any of us understood we were inside something that had been in motion far longer than we knew."You need to tell me everything," I said. "Right now. Not

Chapter 52: What I Heard And Didn't Know

POV: RileyThe address was two hours away and I needed forty minutes to think first.Ray watched me read the message. Naomi watched Ray watch me. The library hummed its quiet fluorescent hum around us and I sat with the phone face down on the table and let the weight of the last hour settle into something I could actually carry."Talk to me," Ray said. "Out loud. All of it.""He's corrupt," I said. "Not just afraid. Not just controlling. Corrupt." The word tasted different from the others I had been using. Harder. More permanent. "He stole graduate student research funding for eight years. Eight years of students who came to this university believing their work was going to be supported, who received approval letters and disbursement confirmations and sat across from my father in his office while he smiled at them and used their research grants to pay for the system he built around me.""Riley...""I'm not spiraling," I said. "I'm being accurate. There's a difference." I looked at him

Cheap 53: She Kept Everything

POV: RileyPreethi was in the digital archive room at eight-fifteen in the morning.I knew she would be because I had been paying attention since September in ways I had not understood were useful until now. She arrived before anyone else, stayed later than anyone else, and worked through her lunch hour on the days when the archive backlog was heavy. She was the kind of person who treated other people's work with more care than she treated her own comfort, and watching her do it from across the photography storage room back in September I had thought: I understand that. I had not understood yet that the system she was caring for had been partially funded by money stolen from her.I knocked on the archive room door at eight-twenty. She looked up from a monitor covered in thumbnail images and her face moved through something when she saw me... not suspicion exactly, more the careful stillness of someone who had learned not to open doors too quickly."Riley," she said. Neutral."Do you h

Chapter 54: The Full Picture

POV: RileyWe moved Preethi in eleven minutes.Not her belongings, not her life. Just the folder. The fourteen months of documentation she had been carrying in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet under archive equipment, waiting for the right person to ask the right question. I called Ray while Preethi put her coat on and he was outside the building in four minutes, which meant he had been close already, which meant he had been doing the same thing I had been doing — staying near rather than far, operating on instinct rather than plan."Fellowship paused," I told him the moment he appeared in the doorway. "Eight-seventeen this morning. Three minutes after I knocked on her door."His jaw tightened. "Someone is watching the archive room.""Someone is watching everything," Preethi said from behind me. Her voice was steady but her hands on the folder were not entirely still. "I assumed the archive role gave me cover. My work is archival, routine, completely unremarkable to anyone who do

Chapter 55: Both

POV: RileyHer voice was calm the way deep water is calm.Not still. Not shallow. The kind of calm that has pressure underneath it, that has been moving for a long time beneath a surface that does not show the current. I had been expecting something... urgency, relief, the particular brightness of a person who has been waiting a long time for a call that finally came. Instead Amara sounded like someone who had already done the waiting and come out the other side of it into something quieter and more resolved."I was wondering how long it would take you to call," she said."You knew I would.""I knew when Preethi's fellowship got flagged at eight-seventeen that you were already in that building," she said. "Which meant you were moving faster than I anticipated. Which meant I needed to be ready.""Are you on campus?""Coffee shop on Garfield. Off campus. Quieter.""Give me twenty minutes," I said."I'll be here."I looked at Ray. He was already picking up his jacket.Naomi stayed with P

Chapter 56: Eight Months

POV: RileyThe skating placement review notice sat on my phone screen for exactly ten seconds before I acted on it.Not with panic. With the specific cold efficiency of someone who has been managing a performance for three days and understands that every move the other side makes is information. I photographed the notification. Sent it to Naomi. Sent it to the woman on the phone. Then I set my phone face down on the coffee shop table and looked at Amara."He's moving through the skating program now," I said. "My placement is under review.""When was the notice sent," Amara asked.Ray checked his phone. "Eight forty-two.""Twenty-five minutes after Preethi's fellowship was flagged," Naomi said through the phone speaker between us. She had called in when the notification came through, her voice tight and precise. "He's not reacting to one thing. He's running a sequence.""A prepared sequence," Amara said. She said it quietly, the way you say something you have been dreading confirming.

Chapter 57: Technically Defensible

POV: RileyI read my own student file for the first time at nine-fifteen in the morning.Amara had obtained a partial copy through a source inside the registrar's office, the same junior auditor who had been building the parallel compliance record for four months. He had pulled it forty minutes after our meeting at the coffee shop, moved it through a channel that bypassed the senior officer entirely, and sent it to Amara's encrypted account in three scanned pages that landed on her laptop while we were still sitting at the table.She turned the screen toward me without commentary. That was the right call. Commentary would have softened it and softening it would have been its own kind of dishonesty.I read it the way I read everything that mattered. Completely. Without flinching.The file was careful. That was the first thing I noticed and the thing that made it worse rather than better. It was not crude or obviously malicious. It was the work of a person who understood institutional l

Chapter 58: What Liam Can Do

POV: RayLiam found me at the equipment room at noon.Not the service stairwell. The actual equipment room, where I had been sitting at the back table for forty minutes since I left the coffee shop, my laptop open to the graduate school application essay I still had not written, my eyes seeing none of it. My head was in the coffee shop. In the student file. In the specific cold of reading your own name described as a trusted senior student asked to provide informal peer support, watching something real and complicated reduced to language designed to make it disappear.Liam came in without knocking, which he never did without reason, and sat across from me with his training bag still on his shoulder and an expression I recognized from three years of friendship as the one he wore when he had heard something that required immediate conversation regardless of timing."Talk," I said."You first," he said. "Because whatever I'm about to say is going to land differently depending on what you

Chapter 59: Tonight

POV: RileyAmara called at two-fifteen.I was in Naomi's room with Preethi's folder still spread across the desk and Naomi beside me cross-referencing the disbursement anomalies against the compliance office's partial public record, the methodical work of two people turning evidence into something a legal team could move with. My phone buzzed once and I picked it up and Amara's voice came through without greeting, the way she communicated when something had changed and she needed me to catch up fast."The auditor can file tonight," she said. "His legal clearance came through an hour ago. He's been waiting for it for two weeks.""That's good," I said."It means the oversight board receives the parallel compliance record before nine tomorrow morning," she said. "Which means the faculty senate committee is legally required to suspend any presentation touching an active oversight investigation before it begins." A pause. "Hartwell walks into that room tomorrow and the floor he built his e

Chapter 60: The Letter

POV: RileyHe called at four-eighteen. The exact minute I clicked submit.I did not believe in coincidence anymore. I had stopped believing in it somewhere around the time Naomi found the secondary tracking file and I understood that what looked like coincidence in a monitored life was usually just the system working the way it was designed to work. My father had access to systems that could tell him when a document was submitted to an oversight board with his name on it. Carol Bishop had built those systems. Of course he knew the moment it happened.Of course he called.I looked at the missed call notification for a long time. The room was quiet around me. Preethi had gone home twenty minutes ago with a copy of the submission confirmation saved to three separate locations. Naomi was at her desk running one final check on the documentation timestamps. Ray was beside me and I could feel the specific warmth of him, close and steady, the warmth of someone who had decided to stay and mean

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