All Chapters of The NHL Captain's Fake Girlfriend : Chapter 51 - Chapter 54

ELARA.“I’ve come with an offer,” Kyle’s father said.The hallway held the sentence like it had weight. Nobody moved. Iris’s arms were still crossed. Noah and June had gone quiet in the archway behind us. Jessica stood half a step behind Richard Stevens. The paused show still glowed uselessly in the living room, two episodes deep into a night that was supposed to belong to us.Richard’s gaze shifted to me, and the attention landed with precision, the way a man looked at a problem he had already priced out.“This whole thing,” he said, almost gently, “the back and forth with the school, the noise, the public mess. It has been too much on you. I can tell.”Kyle’s voice cut in before the sympathy could settle. “Skip the fake concern and tell us what you want.”Richard did not look at him right away. He kept his eyes on me, as if Kyle were an interruption in a negotiation already underway. “I can make all of this go away. The conduct pressure, the institutional complications. The social

KYLE.I woke up feeling like I had lost a fight with the mattress and the mattress had called in reinforcements.Everything was sore. Not the clean burn of a hard practice, the deep, stubborn ache that lived in bruised ribs and overused muscle and a body still arguing with the week behind it. For a second I lay still and let the ceiling come into focus, cataloguing damage the way I did after a rough period. side, shoulder, the dull residual pound at the edge of a concussion that had mostly settled but had not forgotten me. Today was match day. Friendly or not, Chicago would not care about my inventory of complaints. As captain, the job was the same. Show up, set the tone, drag the room with you if you had to. Lead them to a win even when the calendar itself had been weaponized by a man with my last name.My phone was already losing its mind on the nightstand.The screen lit, darkened, lit again, a continuous stack of notifications hard enough to make the device buzz against the woo