The Devil on Ice

Four

Aurora's POV

The next morning, I was back in my office as usual, but I couldn't let go of what I'd heard in that hallway. Vale situation. I turned the phrase over so many times it stopped sounding like words.

I was still turning it over when my door burst open with a bang, making me jump. I snapped my gaze up.

Killian.

He wasn't wearing his usual tailored clothes. His hair was disheveled, his blue eyes lit with something sharper than anger, closer to panic wearing anger's clothes, locked directly onto mine.

"What is this?" I managed, my tone cold. "Why would you come into my office like this?"

"Oh, Aurora, you're such a good actor," he said, walking deeper into my office before slamming the door shut. "You know exactly why I'm here."

Staring at his furious face, I forced myself to lean back and cross my arms as he approached.

"I have no idea what you're talking about, Killian. You don't have an appointment today. Leave."

"Don't play dumb with me, Doctor." He crossed the distance in two long strides, slammed both hands onto the edge of my desk, and leaned over, eyes boring into mine.

The impact knocked my pen holder off the edge of the desk. It hit the floor and rolled toward him. He bent down and caught it without thinking, like it was pure instinct, then placed it back on the desk before he seemed to remember he was supposed to be angry. Neither of us said a word about it.

His hands were inches from mine on the desk. I noticed that before I noticed the threat in his voice. There was something absurd about it, the most dangerous man in this city, and the thing my body chose to fixate on was the distance between his fingers and mine.

"I still don't know what you're talking about. Don't think your size scares me," I said, dragging my eyes back to his before they could betray me further.

"You were at the game last night. You were stalking me. You thought you'd get away clean, but I saw you slipping off after I talked with the executives."

My stomach dropped, but I kept my expression unyielding.

"I went to use the restroom, Mr. Hayes. I didn't realize the hallway was a restricted zone reserved for men with sufficiently important friends."

"You saw us." His eyes pinned me. "Brian. The others. You heard every word."

"Tell me what you think you heard, Aurora." My name in his mouth landed differently than before lower, rougher, like he hadn't meant to use it and couldn't take it back. "Because if you repeat a single syllable of that conversation to anyone, I will personally see your license stripped and your career buried before the sun sets."

The words came out flat, almost rehearsed, like he was repeating a threat someone else had given him instead of one he truly meant. But his eyes told a different story. There was no satisfaction in them, no sign that he enjoyed being cruel. Just a tired, trapped look, like he hated hearing those words come out of his own mouth.

I let the silence stretch a beat longer than was comfortable for either of us.

"Are you done?" I asked, my voice dangerously calm.

He blinked, thrown aback.

"Because if you're finished playing the big bad monster, let's look at reality." I leaned forward until our faces were inches apart, close enough to feel the heat off him, close enough to smell rain and sweat and something underneath that was just him. "You come in here barking threats because you're terrified of whatever's actually going on. You're not dangerous because you're violent, Killian. You're dangerous because you're a cornered animal biting anyone who gets too close to the cage."

For a second I thought he might actually hit something. Instead he froze, air leaving his lungs in a sharp, broken sound.

"Watch your mouth," he said, jaw clenched, but the edge was gone from his voice. It came out closer to a plea than a warning.

"No, you watch me." I held my ground. "I watched Brian in that hallway. He didn't look like an employer talking to an athlete. He looked like a man standing next to something that might go off."

I paused, and then, because some reckless part of me needed to know, I said the word out loud. "Vale. That's what the other man called it. The Vale situation. Before the board meets Thursday. What is that, Killian?"

Everything about him went still.

It wasn't the stillness from the desk, the locked jaw, the tremor he fought to hide. It was different, a full-body stop, like something behind his eyes had just rearranged itself.

"Say that again," he said, very quietly.

"Vale. Is that supposed to mean something to me?"

"It's your name." His voice had lost every trace of the threat from thirty seconds ago. "Vale is your name."

Something cold moved through me, watching him work it out in real time, watching the exact moment he connected the two facts he'd apparently never put together, the therapist assigned to fix him, and whatever the executives had been calling the Vale situation since before I ever walked into this building.

"Say her name," I said, barely above a whisper. "If you know it's my name, then you know I have a sister. Say it."

He didn't answer. He looked at me like I'd just handed him something he didn't want and couldn't hand back, his jaw working, his hands curling into fists at his sides, not at me, I realized. At himself.

"Killian."

"I need you to stop asking me questions you don't want the real answer to," he said, low, almost gentle, like he was warning me for my own sake instead of his. "Not because of what I'll do. Because of what happens to people who get close enough to matter to me."

He stepped back, putting more distance between us than the room required, like he didn't trust what would happen if he stayed close. Something flickered across his face in the half-second before he turned, not anger. Something closer to horror at himself, at how much he'd just let slip.

"Stay away from me." He was already moving for the door. "Stay out of my business, Aurora. Stay out of my head."

He grabbed the handle and yanked the door open, and even after it closed behind him, I stood there staring at the space he'd just occupied like it still held the shape of him.

I fell back into my chair, heart hammering as the adrenaline drained, leaving something quieter and far more dangerous in its place.

My eyes dropped to the edge of the desk where his hands had rested. A small smear of blood marked the wood, his knuckles, still raw from something harder than a punching bag.

He knew the name before I said it out loud. He'd known it the whole time.

That thought stayed heavy in my chest as I drifted through the rest of the day. I was only half-focused during my next two sessions, jumping every time the door opened, hoping and dreading that it would be him again. It wasn't.

By the time I got home, the rain had started, and I was soaked through by the time I locked the door behind me. I didn't bother with dry clothes first. I went straight for my laptop, sat on the edge of the bed, and typed my sister's name into the search bar with hands that wouldn't quite stay still.

I already knew the shape of the story, I'd built the file myself, months ago, out of grief and a stubborn refusal to let the case go cold.

What I needed now wasn't the story. Whatever the board was rushing to bury before then, it was tied to Iris, and I had days, maybe less, to find out what.

I pulled up the timeline I'd built the last time I'd let myself do this, fourteen months back, a game misconduct call on Killian, and, less than a day later, a fraud investigation into a sports betting firm quietly vanishing under a warehouse fire.

Eight months back, a three-game suspension, and within forty-eight hours, an auditor looking into the league's offshore accounts reported missing, his car found abandoned on a highway shoulder.

Every time Killian lost control on the ice, the story of his downfall ate all the headlines' oxygen, and something else slipped by underneath it, unnoticed.

Was he the storm, or was he being used to cover one?

I scrolled to the date from three months before the preseason game that had put him in my care in the first place, and clicked through to the article that had run that same week.

Iris Vale, missing. Last seen near the harbor district.

Harbor?? The word from the hallway rang in my ears.

Cold dread flooded my veins. This was too precise for coincidence. If Killian wasn't the danger himself, if he was a piece being moved on someone else's board, the way Brian's fear in that hallway suggested, then what exactly was Thursday supposed to bury?

And what did it mean that some small, treacherous part of me still wanted him to be the second thing, and not the first?

Before I could process the thought any further, a loud knock sounded at my door.