Todos los capítulos de Hate On The Ice, Mine In The Dark: Capítulo 71 - Capítulo 80

_Nathan’s POV_ The rink still smelled like cold water and old boards, and for the first time in days that felt like a mercy. Home game. Local list. No bus, no travel authorization pending in the doorway of the night, no compliance officer waiting to see if a house signature would decide whether I got a seat. Just the building, the crowd starting to fill, and a visiting team in dark away colors that had beaten better rooms than ours on clean structure and patience. In the locker stall, I taped my stick the way I always did and ignored the way a couple of guys glanced over when they thought I wouldn’t notice. The dorm vacancy had become hallway knowledge. The family flags had become careful silence. Nobody asked directly before a home game. That kind of curiosity was for after, when the score already had a shape. Theo dropped onto the bench beside me and tightened a lace. “You look like you slept.” “I slept.” “You look like you slept in a war.” “That tracks.” He bumped his knee

_Nathan’s POV_ The building felt wrong without the noise of a travel day. Usually by midmorning there would be bags in the corridor, someone shouting for a missing charger, the low chaos of a team about to leave its own city. Today the main hallway outside the locker room was half-lit and almost polite. A maintenance cart stood where Jax usually dropped his stuff. The dry-erase board still had the away lineup in Coach’s hard printing, and my name was not on it. I trained anyway. An assistant put me through a maintenance block that looked, from a distance, like specialized work and felt, up close, like carefully managed exclusion. Footwork. Conditioning. Puck touches against the boards with no one angling me off them. When I finished, the rink was already being scraped clean for public skate, and the team bus was a hundred miles into a route I was not cleared to take. Miles was waiting in the lobby with his hands in his jacket pockets and no false brightness on his face. “How bad

_Miles’s POV_ I knew something was wrong before he said anything. Nathan had been quiet since the team left town, but quiet was not the same as this. This was him standing at the kitchen counter with a glass of water he was not drinking, eyes fixed on a point beyond the sink, shoulders locked so hard his whole upper body looked braced for a hit that had already landed and never stopped landing. “Nathan.” No response. I set my phone down and moved closer. “Hey. Look at me.” He blinked once, slow, like the request had to travel through bad weather. When he finally turned his head, his face was too blank for how tight his breathing had become. Short. Shallow. Measured against a panic he was clearly trying to manage by force. “I’m fine,” he said. “You’re not.” “I just need a minute.” “You’ve had a week of minutes.” I stopped in front of him and put two fingers under his jaw, not gripping, just guiding his face toward mine. His skin was clammy. “Talk to me.” He opened his mouth

_Nathan’s POV_ The first counter-move did not look like rebellion. It looked like forms. That was the part Miles hated most and the part Kane insisted on. If Elias was going to fight through process, then process had to stop being a one-way surface he alone could stand on. By late morning, Kane had a folder on the apartment table with printed advisories, housing withdrawal notices, the travel denial, and a clean timeline of dates. Seeing it all in one place made the week feel less like weather and more like a pattern. “This is the request,” Kane said, tapping the top sheet. “Departmental alternative pathway review. Not a complaint letter about your feelings. A factual account of house-linked authorization being used to restrict ordinary student-athlete movement after a private conflict.” Theo read over my shoulder. “Coach already knows enough to support load management. If he signs a note confirming ongoing external interference has begun affecting operational status, it get

_Nathan’s POV_ I woke up to the sound of Miles in the kitchen and, for a few seconds, could not remember which loss was supposed to hurt first. Not because any of them had disappeared. The dorm was still gone. The away list was still a closed door. My father’s shadow was still attached to ordinary systems in ways I could not fully inventory. But the apartment was warm, the light through the blind was ordinary late-morning gray, and Miles was making coffee like the day belonged to something smaller than war. I lay there and watched the ceiling until the shame of the panic attack flickered, then dulled. It didn’t vanish. It just stopped being the first thing in the room. “You’re awake,” Miles said without turning around. “How do you always know?” “You stop breathing like you’re asleep.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Come here.” I went. Bare feet on his floor. His shirt, stolen sometime in the night. The domesticity of it still felt surreal, as if we had skipped the soft version