The Hockey Alpha Rejected His Plus Sized Mate

What The Bond Remembers

Chapter Seven: What the Bond Remembers

Nora's POV

I woke at three in the morning with pine and snow on my skin, like something that happened in the room instead of only in my head.

I sat on the edge of the bed until my hands stopped shaking, then called Kenzie. She picked up on the second ring.

"You're awake," I said.

"You're not the only one who can't sleep in this town." A pause. "The bond again?"

"I don't know what else to call it."

"Call it what it is. It doesn't break clean. It frays. That's not a metaphor, that's biology. It just sits there, quiet, until something ordinary cracks it open."

"I didn't ask it to crack open tonight."

"Nobody asks. Fated bonds don't check your calendar first."

"I rejected the idea of following it back to him. I made that decision the night he humiliated me in front of forty thousand people."

"You made a decision," Kenzie said. "The bond didn't get the memo. It's still looking for him. That's not your fault."

"I know what it is. That doesn't mean I have to follow it."

"No. It just means you'll keep feeling it pull until one of you makes a real decision. A permanent one. You haven't made one yet. Neither has he."

"I rejected him back. That's permanent."

"Is it? Because you're calling me at three a.m. talking about snow that isn't there."

I didn't have an answer for that, so I let the silence sit until she filled it herself.

"Get some sleep," she said. "Or don't, and call me again at four. I'm not going anywhere."

"Kenzie."

"Yeah."

"Thank you for answering."

"Thank you for calling instead of driving to his house. Go to sleep, Nora."

The package showed up at the rink a little after two the next afternoon, sitting on my desk like it had always been there. No sender. No return label. Just a padded envelope, a USB drive, and a folded sheet of white paper.

You're not the only one they've done this to. Watch it alone.

No name. No signature.

I locked my office door before I plugged it in.

The footage wasn't the broadcast version nor the polished feed the whole country replayed for a year. It was raw, handheld, shot from a corridor angle that shouldn't have existed twenty minutes before the ceremony. Grayson's father stood over him, flanked by two men I recognized from the sponsor boxes. The audio cut in and out, muffled, like the recorder had been running under a jacket.

"can't let this become" his father's voice, gone under static, then back. "not with the deal signing tomorrow."

"She's my mate." Grayson. Smaller than I remembered him sounding. The word mate came through clean even where everything around it didn't.

Static. A shape that might have been a name of mine, maybe, or maybe not swallowed before it finished.

"choose, Grayson. Now. Not after."

I couldn't reconstruct the whole conversation. I didn't need to. I watched his face fold in on itself in real time, watched something leave it before he ever walked to that podium, and I hated that I understood exactly what I was looking at even now.

Theo came in to lock up and found me still staring at the frozen final frame.

He didn't ask what I was watching. He pulled a chair around to my side of the desk and sat close enough that his forearm nearly touched mine, and waited.

"They cornered him," I said, not looking away from the screen. "His father. Two sponsors. I couldn't hear all of it. I heard enough."

"Enough for what?"

"Enough to know it wasn't a suggestion."

"You believe it's real?"

"I believe I know his father's voice too well to think somebody faked it."

"Who sent it?"

"No name. No sender."

"Somebody who wants you to trust him again."

"Or somebody who wants me looking at Grayson instead of looking inside this building." I finally turned to him. "You went quiet on the phone last night. About the drive under the cabinet. You still haven't told me how you knew which one I meant before I said it."

"I know."

"That's not an answer, Theo."

"No. It isn't."

"Then give me one."

He looked at the screen instead of me for a second. "Not with that footage still open. Ask me tomorrow."

"I'm asking now."

"You're tired now."

"I can hold more than you think I can."

"Didn't say you couldn't." His forearm stayed where it was, close enough to feel, not close enough to mean anything either of us had to name. "Copy the file tonight. Not tomorrow. Get it somewhere that the drive can't reach."

"I'm doing it now."

"Now, Nora. Not after I leave."

"Grayson didn't have a choice that night," I said. "Not really."

"Everybody has a choice. He made his fast, in a hallway, with people counting on him to make the wrong one."

"You almost sound like you feel sorry for him."

"I feel sorry for the kid in that footage. I don't feel a thing for the man who let a hallway conversation cost you a career." He stood. "Copy it. Tonight."

He let himself out, leaving the door open a crack behind him, like he wasn't ready to close it all the way either.

I plugged the drive into my laptop the second his footsteps cleared the hallway.

The transfer bar is loaded. Ten percent. Twenty.

Then the screen went black.

Drive not recognized. Insert media.

I pulled it and reinserted it. Nothing. I tried a second laptop from the equipment room. Nothing. The drive read blank, unformatted, like it had never held a single frame of footage in its life.

Wiped, on the second access. Built that way on purpose, by somebody who knew exactly how long to let me watch before erasing it long enough to plant the doubt, not long enough to leave me proof.

I sat in an empty office with a dead drive in my hand and a memory of a hallway conversation no recorder in the world could confirm I'd ever seen.

Which meant the only person who could tell me I wasn't losing my mind was somebody who already knew things about a missing phone he still hadn't explained and I had no idea anymore whether that made him the one man in this building I could trust, or the reason I shouldn't trust anyone at all.