The Hockey Alpha Rejected His Plus Sized Mate

Two Truths

Chapter Twelve: Two Truths

Nora's POV

I got to the rink before anyone else did, before the lights were even fully on, and I laid the document on the bench between us and waited.

Theo looked at it for a long moment before he looked at me. "You found it."

"My mother's basement. The last box."

"I wondered how long it would take you."

"You knew I'd find it eventually?"

"I knew you'd find everything eventually. That's the whole reason I brought you here in the first place."

"Then explain it to me. All of it. Now, Theo."

He sat down across from me, hands loose between his knees. "My father signed that agreement when I was fourteen. I didn't know it existed until I was twenty-six, the year I was made captain, the same year this team started losing in ways that didn't add up. I pulled old files. Old contracts. Old suspensions that never should have happened. That's when I found it."

"You recruited me because of my father."

"I recruited you because of what your father was building. Not to use you. To finish it. I had access you didn't have. You had the knowledge I never could have gotten on my own. I thought together we could take the whole thing down from the inside."

"You could have told me that on day one."

"If I'd told you on day one, you wouldn't have come."

"That was my choice to make. Not yours."

"I know. I made it wrong." He held my eyes while he said it. "I'm telling you the truth now because it's the truth. Not because I think it fixes anything."

"Does it fix anything?"

"No. I don't think it does."

I picked the document up and walked out onto the ice in my shoes, the cold coming through the soles, and stood looking at the empty net while the ventilation hummed overhead. I thought about my father at that kitchen table. My mother still kept exactly the way he'd left it, filling notebook after notebook with a fight he never got to finish. I thought about every hand I'd shaken in this building that I now understood differently.

I walked back.

"You have one chance to help me finish what he started," I said. "That's all you get."

"That's more than I deserve."

"I know." I made sure he heard it. "Don't waste it."

"I won't."

"You'd better not. I don't have a second version of this conversation in me."

Grayson found out about Theo's role that same afternoon, and I saw him cross the hall toward the film room with his jaw already set.

"Nora told you," Theo said, before Grayson could open his mouth.

"She didn't have to. I read the room the second I walked in." Grayson's voice stayed level, but there was nothing loose about the way he was standing. "You knew who she was before she ever coached a single practice."

"I knew who her father was. That's not the same thing."

"It's close enough that you built an entire recruitment around it and let her think it was luck."

"I let her think it was luck because the truth would have gotten her killed before she had the chance to be useful to anyone, including herself."

"You don't get to decide what she can handle."

"Neither do you," Theo said. "And yet here you are."

Grayson didn't answer that right away. When he did, his voice had dropped, quieter than before, which somehow made it land harder. "If anything happens to her because you kept her in the dark"

"It won't."

"You don't get to promise that."

"No," Theo said. "I don't. But I intend to keep it anyway."

I watched all of it through the glass window in the door, close enough to see, too far to hear every word, though I'd heard enough by then to fill in what I'd missed. Grayson's shoulders were set the way they used to be on the ice before a face-off he intended to win, and something in the set of them, in the way he refused to back down an inch for a man who could have been an ally or an enemy depending on the next five minutes, made my pulse do something I hadn't given it permission to do.

It wasn't the argument. It was him. The way he stood in that corridor like the outcome of it actually mattered to him, the same way he'd sat with my father's notebook that morning in my mother's kitchen, careful with something that wasn't his to be careful with.

I had spent months trying not to notice that about him.

I failed at it standing in that doorway, watching him fight for me without once raising his voice.

I found out about the locker at four in the afternoon.

"Coach." One of the equipment staff caught me on my way to the office, clipboard pressed to his chest. "Delacroix's stall is cleared out."

"Cleared out how?"

"Everything, Coach. Gear, skates, tape, all of it. Sometime between the morning skate and now."

"Did anyone see him leave?"

"Nobody saw anything. That's the part that's got us all spooked."

I walked down and checked the stall myself. Not a strap left behind, not a single loose lace, wiped as clean as the drive that had erased itself in my hands weeks earlier. I called the number on file for him. Disconnected. I called his emergency contact. Disconnected too.

Theo came and stood beside me. "No note?"

"Nothing."

"No argument with anyone on staff? No resignation?"

"Nothing, Theo. Just an empty stall and two dead phone numbers."

"That's not a man who left on his own."

"I know."

"Somebody made sure he couldn't talk before we got to him."

"Or somebody made sure we'd know exactly how fast they can make a person disappear if they decide to." I looked at the empty hooks. "They know we're close."

"How would they know that?"

"Because I asked the wrong question in the wrong meeting. Or Finn's line wasn't as clean as he thought. Or somebody in this building has been reporting every move we've made since the night that phone went missing from under my cabinet." I turned to him. "It doesn't matter how they know. What matters is what they do next."

I got my answer an hour later, in a calendar invitation I was never meant to see, forwarded by someone whose loyalty I still hadn't fully decided to trust. An ownership meeting, scheduled forty-eight hours from now.

"That's not the usual timeline," Theo said, reading it over my shoulder.

"No. It isn't."

"They moved it up."

"They moved it up because something we did made them nervous enough to hurry." I closed the laptop slowly. "Which means we're closer than I thought we were."

"Or we're about to find out exactly how far they're willing to go to make sure we don't get any closer than this."

I stood there with an empty locker stall in front of me and a countdown now running in the back of my mind, and understood, with a certainty that settled cold and clear in my chest, that whatever they were planning behind that closed door in two days, they had stopped being patient the moment they realized how close I actually was.