Iced Out

Chapter 15: The Call

COLE

The call came between the second and third periods of a Wednesday afternoon practice.

I was sitting on the bench in the tunnel, helmet off, towel draped over my neck, drinking water and watching the rookies run power-play drills through the plexiglass cutout. My shoulder was a low, smoldering ache that I had gotten very good at pretending didn’t exist. Coach Brentwood had given me two periods off to rest, which meant he was suspicious, which meant I needed to skate harder when I went back out.

My phone buzzed in the pocket of my track pants.

I pulled it out. Unknown number. Chicago area code.

My stomach dropped straight through the concrete floor.

I knew the number. Not because it was saved in my contacts. I had deleted it six times. But the digits had burned themselves into the back of my skull the way trauma always did, persistent and uninvited. It was the collection line. The one they called from when the monthly transfer was late or short or when they simply felt like reminding me that I was not a person to them. *I was an open account.*

I stood up and walked fifteen feet down the tunnel, away from the bench, away from the equipment staff loading sticks into the rack. I pressed my back against the cold cinder-block wall and answered.

“Yeah.”

“Mr. Harrington.” The voice on the other end was calm and polite in the way that people who had never needed to raise their voice to hurt someone were calm and polite. No accent. No inflection. Just the smooth, measured tone of a man conducting business. “We noticed your January transfer was twelve thousand under the agreed amount.”

“I’m aware,” I said. I kept my voice low and flat. The tunnel had good acoustics. Sound traveled. “I had an unexpected tax obligation. The balance will be covered by the fifteenth.”

“The terms of the arrangement don’t accommodate delays, Mr. Harrington. Your brother understood that.”

The mention of Marcus hit me like a cross-check to the ribs. I closed my eyes. The fluorescent lights above me buzzed. Somewhere on the ice, a whistle blew.

“My brother is dead,” I said quietly. “So whatever he understood is between him and the ground. You’re talking to me now. And I’m telling you the balance will be covered by the fifteenth.”

A pause. The kind of pause that was designed to let you sit in the silence and imagine all the things that could fill it.

“We appreciate your reliability, Mr. Harrington. It’s the reason this relationship has remained cordial. But I want to be transparent with you. There are people above me who are becoming impatient with the remaining balance. Your brother’s original obligation was substantial, and while your payments have been consistent, the timeline is beginning to concern them.”

“How much is left?” I asked. I already knew. I checked the number every night the way a man with a terminal diagnosis checks the calendar.

“Including interest accrued since the last adjustment? Four hundred and eighteen thousand.”

I let my head fall back against the cinder block. *Four hundred and eighteen thousand dollars.* That number should have been zero by now. Marcus had been dead for five years, but the syndicate hadn’t come knocking until two years after the funeral. When they’d finally shown up at my door with a ledger and a smile, the original number had been four point five million. I had paid over four million in three years, bleeding money through offshore transfers small enough to avoid triggering IRS flags, liquidating investments my financial advisor thought were going toward a vacation property in Montana. Four million dollars, moved in careful increments so nobody in my life would notice that the captain of the Chicago Glaciers was quietly going broke. By any honest accounting, I should have been done months ago. But the accounting was never honest. Every time I got close to clearing the balance, the number shifted. Compounding interest. Late penalties on payments that had arrived on time. Administrative fees for services nobody could explain. I’d paid off the debt twice over in real dollars, and they still had me on the hook for four hundred and eighteen thousand. The debt wasn’t a loan. *It was a leash.* And the people holding it had no intention of ever letting go.

“You’ll have it,” I said. “End of the season. Frost-Lyte renews my individual deal in March. That covers the remainder.”

“We’re aware of the Frost-Lyte arrangement.” The voice paused again. Meaningfully. “We’re also aware that sponsorship renewals are contingent on public image. And your public image has been somewhat turbulent lately.”

My jaw locked. The casino photos. They knew about the casino photos. Of course they knew. The woman at the Onyx who had leaned into my booth, the one the tabloids had turned into a scandal, had been their runner. The entire circus was connected. It always was.

“My image is being managed,” I said through my teeth.

“We’ve seen. The new girlfriend. The psychologist.” A beat. “She seems lovely.”

Every nerve in my body went rigid. The words were delivered with the same pleasant, professional tone as everything else, but the subtext was a razor wrapped in silk. They knew about Nova. They had been watching closely enough to know about the PR arrangement, or at the very least, the public version of it.

“She has nothing to do with this,” I said. My voice came out harder than I intended. Louder. I caught myself and dropped it back to a murmur. “This is between me and you. Nobody else.”

“Of course, Mr. Harrington. We have no interest in complicating your personal life. We simply want what’s owed.” The voice softened into something almost fatherly. Almost kind. It made my skin crawl. “The fifteenth. Twelve thousand. And then we’ll discuss a revised timeline for the remainder. Enjoy your practice.”

The line went dead.

I stood in the tunnel for a long time. My phone screen went dark in my hand. The cinder block was freezing against my back. I could hear the muffled crack of pucks hitting the boards, the shout of a coach, the scrape of steel on ice. The sounds of a sport I had loved since I was five years old, a sport that was supposed to be the purest thing in my life, now underwritten by blood money I couldn’t stop paying.

*Marcus.* My jaw ached from clenching. Five years dead, and they were still collecting. I’d given them over four million dollars of my own money, more than the original debt itself, and the balance kept regenerating like a wound that refused to close. They’d come to me two years after the funeral, polite and patient and utterly merciless, and I’d been hemorrhaging ever since. *What did you do, brother? What did you get into that was so deep it outlived you and swallowed me whole?*

I knew the broad strokes. Marcus had gambled. Not recreationally, not the way half the league threw down on poker nights and fantasy pools. He had gambled compulsively, desperately, in amounts that made my own considerable salary look like pocket change. By the time the debts had metastasized into something he couldn’t contain, he was already in too deep to surface. He’d borrowed from people who didn’t advertise on billboards. People who collected with interest rates that would make a loan shark blush.

And then he’d driven through a guardrail on a straight highway at three in the morning and left me holding the tab.

I loved my brother. I loved him more than I loved the game, more than I loved this city, more than I loved the version of myself the world saw in the jersey and the press conferences. And I hated him. I hated him for dying with his mess still warm, for leaving me to clean up something I couldn’t even tell our mother about, for making me carry a weight that was slowly grinding my bones to powder.

I slid the phone back into my pocket and pushed off the wall. I rolled my left shoulder twice, feeling the torn tissue shift and complain. Then I grabbed my helmet, pulled it on, and walked back toward the ice.

Nova was there.

She was standing at the mouth of the tunnel, maybe ten feet from where I’d been leaning. She wore her standard facility outfit, the crisp blazer and tailored slacks, her hair in that punishing knot, a tablet tucked under one arm. She was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read, which was unusual, because I was getting dangerously good at reading her.

She hadn’t been there when the call started. I was certain of that. But she was here now, and the question of how long she’d been standing there, how much she’d heard, and what those sharp green eyes had seen on my face hit me like a wall of cold air.

“Doc,” I said. My voice was flat. Controlled. *The captain’s mask, back in place.*

“Cole.” She tilted her head a fraction of an inch. “Everything alright?”

“Fine. Just a call from my financial advisor. Tax stuff.” The lie came out clean and automatic. I had been telling it for three years.

Nova’s eyes moved over my face with that slow, clinical precision that made me feel like I was standing under a surgical light. She didn’t challenge the lie. She didn’t press. She just looked at me the way she had looked at my shoulder through the glass box on her first day, cataloguing what she saw, storing it, waiting.

“Tax stuff,” she repeated. The two words were perfectly neutral. Not a question. Not a contradiction. Just an echo that somehow made the lie sound flimsy even to my own ears.

“Yeah.” I held her gaze for a beat longer than was comfortable. “I should get back on the ice.”

I brushed past her, close enough that my shoulder nearly grazed hers, close enough that I caught a trace of that clean, sharp perfume she wore. I stepped onto the ice and didn’t look back.

But I could feel her watching me. That steady, clinical attention that saw the shoulder, that saw the weight shift, that saw the fist I’d made at my side during the phone call without even realizing it.

She hadn’t heard the words. I was almost sure of that.

But she had seen my face. And Nova Calloway was the kind of woman who could read a face the way I read a defensive formation. Instinctively. Completely. Without mercy.

*She seems lovely.*

The syndicate’s words coiled in my gut like something venomous. I drove my skate into the ice and pushed off hard, letting the speed and the cold burn everything else away.

I had to end this. I had to pay off the debt and cut the cord and bury Marcus’s shame so deep that it never touched the people around me. Because the people around me now included a woman who was too smart, too observant, and standing too close to the blast radius.

*And the voice on the phone had said her name like a man writing it down.*