Blades & Burnout

Prologue - Decrease in Elevation

In. Out.

He didn't speak. He just held my hand trapped against his chest, his large fingers laced over mine, forcing my palm to rise and fall with the deliberate, deep expansion of his lungs. He was an unhinged, absolute anchor in the dark.

I don't know how long we sat on that dirty rubber floor. I don't know how many intervals of ninety seconds passed while my mind slowly quieted, the loud static fading until the only thing left in the universe was the steady, heavy beat beneath my fingers.

The heat of him was intoxicating. It was a physical shield that stood between me and the suffocating walls of the box. For the first time in months, the severe insomnia and the academic burnout didn't matter. I wasn't the coach's legacy daughter. I was just a body being pulled back to reality by a stranger who refused to let me break.

Then, with a deafening, industrial screech, the emergency lights flickered back to life, flooding the car with a harsh, blinding red glow.

The elevator jolted, the motor groaning as it began its slow decrease in elevation toward the basement level.

I blinked, the sudden light tearing at my vision. Before the spots could clear, the stranger let go of my hand, his massive frame instantly moving back into the far corner of the car.

I looked up through the red twilight, my breath catching in my throat.

He stood against the steel paneling, his arms crossed over his broad chest. He was the guy from my cast board—dark, messy curls casting heavy shadows over his forehead, thick intense eyebrows, and a sharp brooding jawline covered in a day's worth of dark stubble. His eyes—deep, dark, and completely unreadable—were fixed on my face, watching the way the color returned to my cheeks.

There was no smile. No arrogant jock smirk. Just an intense, unhinged fixation that made the hairs on my arms stand up.

The elevator doors slid open with a metallic chime, revealing the loud, brightly lit basement corridor of the athletic training center.

I scrambled to my feet, my nursing clogs squeaking against the floor as I grabbed my bag. I didn't say thank you. I didn't ask for his name. Panic—a different kind, cold and exposed—drove me out of the car, my feet moving fast as I fled down the hallway without looking back.

I thought I'd escaped the dark. I thought I'd left that heavy, protective pressure behind in the shaft.

I had no idea he had already memorized the exact rhythm of my breath.

〰︎〰︎

Reid

The emergency lights at the clinic were a violent, bloody red, casting a jagged silhouette of the girl sitting on the floor in front of me.

Aria Beckett.

I'd spent the last forty minutes holding her hand against my ribs, feeling the frantic, terrifying stutter of her heart slowly sync up to the heavy, steady pace of my own chest. She didn't know who I was. In the pitch black, I was just a massive anchor she was clutching onto like a lifeline. But the second the power kicked back on and the motor ground to a halt, she bolted out of that elevator car like I was the one who had been suffocating her.

I stayed back in the corner, my arms crossed tightly over my gray hoodie, watching her navy blue student scrubs vanish around the corner of the basement hallway.

The scent of her—that crisp linen, high-end espresso, and a faint, underlying trace of floral peach wash—was still heavy in the small elevator box. It hung in the air, thick and solid, mixing with the metallic heat of the building's backup generator. My chest felt hollow where her fingers had just been digging into my skin.

I stepped out into the bright fluorescent glare of the athletic corridor, my skates slung over my shoulder, the thick steel blades clinking softly against each other with every stride.

"Dawson!"

I didn't turn my head as Chase Fletcher came sliding down the hall, his varsity track jacket unzipped and flying behind him like a cape. He had a half-empty protein shaker in one hand and his phone in the other, his mouth moving a mile a minute.

"Bro, you missed it," Fletcher chirped, falling into step beside me as we headed toward the locker room. "Coach Beckett was looking for you in the video room. He's completely losing his mind over the housing assignments. Apparently, the varsity dorms had a massive pipe burst in the basement, and half the line is basically homeless until November. He's shifting people around to keep the chemistry tight."

"Yeah," I muttered, my voice a gravelly, low rumble that still felt rough from the dark elevator shaft. "I heard."

"He's sending Mason to the senior townhouses," Fletcher continued, taking a loud swig from his shaker. "But he mentioned he needs a place for you. Somewhere quiet. Away from the freshman noise so you can focus on those heavy transitions behind the net. He was talking about subletting Mason's old spot."

I stopped right in front of the heavy double doors of the varsity locker room. My hand gripped the cold metal handle, but my eyes didn't look at the wood. They traveled down the long, empty concrete hallway toward the exit doors where Aria had vanished five minutes ago.

Mason's old spot.

The townhouse on the northern edge of campus with the massive glass panels and the clean kitchen island. The space Mason shared with his sister.

I let out a slow, heavy breath, my jaw clenching as the image of her wide, terrified blue eyes under the red emergency lights flashed behind my eyelids. I'd watched her run herself into the concrete all semester—clocking twelve-hour clinical shifts, running baseline drills until her hands shook, and pretending she was a machine that didn't know how to break.

She thought she was invisible. She thought nobody noticed the dark, purplish bruises of exhaustion settling beneath her eyes or the way her shoulders went completely rigid whenever her dad walked into the athletic facilities.

But I'd read her system in the dark. I knew exactly how fragile her boundaries actually were.

"Dawson? You breathing over there, man?" Fletcher asked, his eyebrows furrowing as he shoved the locker room door open. "You look completely unhinged."

"Tell Coach I'll take the room," I said quietly, my dark eyes turning back to the locker room as a slow, deliberate wave of determination locked my spine into place.

Fletcher blinked, confused. "You haven't even seen the place yet."

"I don't need to," I muttered, stepping past him into the locker room, the metallic scent of skate guards and ice fog welcoming me back to reality. "Just tell him the lease is as good as signed."