Icing The Heart

Chapter 10 Rory's Pov

Evelyn’s silence was the answer. The nausea returned hard and fast. I stepped away from the table. “You tested him without telling him?”

“He was a minor.”

“He is not a minor now.”

“No,” she said. “He is a professional athlete with a public image, a violent temper and a long history of making destructive choices when emotions are involved.”

“My God.”

“God had very little to do with it.”

I looked at her then. Really looked. And suddenly I understood something about Jaxon Kane that made my chest ache despite everything.

This was the room he had been raised in. This woman had raised him. She had raised him with this cold, polished, suffocating control. This belief that love meant information withheld, lives arranged and choices made on behalf of people deemed too fragile to hold their own truth.

No wonder he commanded every room like surrender would kill him. No wonder.

He had been raised by someone who made affection feel like surveillance.

Could one really blame him? Oh God, was he really the bad person in all of this?

“You had no right,” I said to the older woman in front of me, as if I couldn't help defending Jaxon.

Evelyn’s eyes hardened in response. “Rights are a luxury people discuss when they are not responsible for containing damage.”

“He is your son.”

“He is my son,” she replied and for the first time, something almost like emotion entered her voice. It was not softness. It was possession. “Which is why I have spent thirty-one years keeping him alive, functional and protected from the worst parts of himself.”

“By lying to him.”

“By sparing him.”

“No. Do not dress it up.”

Her gaze turned glacial. “You are very young. You do not know many things.”

“And you are very cruel.”

There was silence even as the words landed with precision. For a moment, Evelyn Kane did not move.

Then she smiled. It was a small and terrible smile.

“Cruelty is a word children use for decisions they are too sentimental to make.”

I laughed softly.

There were no tears for me. Not yet. Maybe later. Alone. Where no one could convert them into evidence.

I spoke to her, “You think ten million dollars makes you practical.”

“I think ten million dollars gives you options.”

“No. It gives you ownership.”

“It gives your child safety.”

My hand tightened over my stomach.

My child.

The words should have terrified me.

They did.

But beneath the terror, something else moved. It was a strange, fierce heat that was birthed from a certain knowledge.

Mine.

Not Jaxon’s. Not Evelyn’s. Not the Titans’. Not the media’s.

Mine.

This secret. This choice. This small impossible life that had turned my world upside down before it was even large enough to show.

It was mine.

Evelyn looked at my hand again. “You cannot continue playing the way you have been playing.”

I gritted my teeth as I answered, “You do not know anything about the way I play.”

“I know enough to understand that a hockey rink is no place for a pregnant woman with a complicated future.”

My laugh came out sharp and hoarse. “There it is.”

Her brow lifted questioningly. “The thing everyone always means but waits three sentences to say.” My voice hardened. “The rink is no place for a woman. The locker room is no place for a woman. The league is no place for a woman. Now my own body is supposed to become the final argument against me.”

“This is not about feminism.”

“Funny how often people say that right before making it about exactly that.”

Evelyn stood just then. She was not tall, not like Jaxon but she carried herself with the kind of authority money mistook for gravity.

“You are emotional,” she said to me with a sense of aloofness.

I shook my head. “No. I am just awake.”

She shook her head as well. “You are pregnant, betrayed, alone and at the center of a scandal you do not yet fully understand.” Her voice lowered. “That makes you vulnerable. You should be making wise decisions, child.”

I froze just then.

Vulnerable.

It was one of the words from the file that had been used to describe me.

Vulnerability to perceived personal connection.

Bulshit.

I saw Evelyn observing me. She must have seen my reaction just now, I thought.

Of course she did. I wasn't really surprised. Everyone in Jaxon’s world studied wounds like maps.

“Get out,” I said suddenly.

But she did not move.

“If you keep this child,” she said, “you will eventually have to tell him. And when you tell him, you will either lie by omission or you will destroy him with a truth he has spent his life not knowing.”

I could barely breathe.

“You did that,” I whispered. “Not me.”

“And yet you will be the one holding the match.”

The words settled into the room and I hated the fact that she was not entirely wrong.

If I told Jaxon I was pregnant, how could I not tell him about the file? How could I carry knowledge about his own body and keep it from him when I had spent the last three weeks hating him for making choices around my life without my consent?

But if I told him everything, what would it do to him?

To us?

To the child?

No. Not us. There was no us.

There was only a contract, a lie, a night in the cabin and now a heartbeat that might someday exist because I had been too tired to keep every wall standing.

Evelyn picked up her gloves. “The offer expires in forty-eight hours.”

“I do not want your money.”

“You may not. But motherhood has a way of making pride seem expensive. Trust me, I know.”

I stepped closer and as I spoke, my voice dropped.

“Listen to me very carefully, Evelyn. I have been checked into boards by men twice my size. I have had reporters ask whether my body was built wrong for the game I love. I have sat in locker rooms where silence was more violent than anything said out loud. So do not mistake exhaustion for weakness. I will not be bought out of my career, my city or my child’s life because you learned how to weaponize a bank account.”

Her eyes held mine and for the first time since she arrived, something in her expression shifted. Recognition shone there as bright as day.

Maybe she finally saw why Jaxon had lost control.

Maybe she finally understood that I was not going to fold neatly into any plan she had prepared.

Then she drew closer and it was just enough for her perfume to fill my nostrils and remind me of three things: Cold florals. Money. Threat.

“If you force my hand,” she said quietly, “I will protect my son.”

A chill moved down my spine. “From me?”

“From anything that destroys him.”

Then she walked to the door. I followed because there was no way in hell I was letting Evelyn Kane show herself out with dignity.

At the threshold, she paused and looked back. “You should know one more thing.”

My stomach tightened. “What?”