Chapter 2

"Sit," she ordered, pointing to the high examination table.

August stripped off his sodden, sweat-soaked gloves, letting them thump onto the floor tiles. The smell of cold sweat and leather bloomed between them. He unlaced his skates with blunt, methodic tugs, his movements surprisingly efficient despite the split skin over his knuckles. When he hopped up onto the table, the paper covering crinkled sharply under his weight.

Fallon hauled the rolling cart over, setting down a basin of warm saline, chlorhexidine wash, a suture kit, and a penlight.

"Follow the beam with your eyes. Only your eyes."

She brought the light close to his face. Up close, August’s features were an uneven map of old athletics and new violence: a faint scar running through his left eyebrow, a slightly crooked nose that had been reset at least twice before he joined the team, a square jaw currently darkening with blue-black bruising. Yet behind the rough exterior, his eyes were startlingly clear.

She tracked the light left, right, up, down.

"No nystagmus," she muttered, partly to herself. "Pupils equal and reactive. Do you feel dizzy?"

"No."

"Nauseous? Sensitivity to the lights?"

"No."

"Did you lose consciousness when you hit the boards?"

"Never went out."

"You're lucky," she said through gritted teeth, setting the penlight down with a sharp *clack*. "Vance didn't take the hit cleanly. He turned at the last split-second. If you’d caught his helmet with your chin, you’d be sleeping on an ambulance stretcher right now."

August said nothing. He simply reached out and held out his hands, palms down.

The skin across his right knuckles was torn open in three jagged, weeping splits. The knuckles themselves were swollen, the tissue purpling fast around the joint capsules. It was the classic, ugly hand of a goon, an enforcer whose only utility was intimidation.

It made Fallon’s chest ache with a furious, suffocating pity.

"Why do you do this?" she asked, her voice cracking slightly despite her best efforts to keep it locked behind her clinician’s mask. She took his wrist, her thumbs pressing gently along his carpal tunnel to assess the swelling. "You have hands like silk on the power play, August. You can thread a backhand pass through two pairs of skates from forty feet away. You could be an All-Star. You could lead this franchise to a cup."

She dipped a piece of sterile cotton into the saline, dabbing at the raw edges of his skin.

"Instead, you throw yourself into the meat grinder twice a week," she continued, her strokes deliberate, cleaning the grime and blood from his torn flesh. "You take runs at players twice your age who can barely skate backwards anymore. You fight guys who weigh thirty pounds more than you just to prove you can take a beating. It’s not hockey. It’s suicide on an installment plan."

August didn’t flinch as the disinfectant bit into the raw tissue. His large, calloused hand rested entirely slack in her grip, trusting her completely. It was always like this between them: in the tunnel, on the training table, on the late-night flights when she made him wear compression sleeves on his elbows. He was impossible for the coaches to control, unmanageable for the front office, a storm of bad press—but with her, he became weightless.

"Vance isn't an All-Star," August said flatly.

"That's not the point!" She threw the bloody cotton into the hazard bin. "The point is *you*. The league is already running out of patience. Coach Miller looked like he was going to have an aneurysm on the bench. If the Department of Player Safety gives you five games, the owner might just void the remainder of your extension under the conduct clause."

August looked down at where her scarred fingers encircled his wrist. Her skin was paler than his, crisscrossed with the silvery, jagged reminders of three reconstructive surgeries.

"They won't void it," he said.

"You don't know that!"

"They need me."

"Nobody needs a liability who spends a third of the season suspended!" Fallon snatched a local anesthetic syringe, checking the barrel for bubbles. She had stitched him up too many times to count, but each time felt like an indictment of her own failure. Her job was to prevent injuries, to keep these men whole. But August treated his own body like an expendable weapon, a club meant to be smashed against concrete until it shattered into dust. "I took this job because I wanted to save players from what happened to me. I thought... I thought if I worked with you, if I got your conditioning right, if I helped you manage the anger, you’d see what you’re throwing away."

She paused, the needle hovering over his swollen knuckle. Her hands were shaking slightly. It was barely perceptible, a micro-tremor that only occurred when the cold metal pins deep inside her metacarpals flared with exhaustion.

August noticed immediately.

Before she could sink the needle into the skin, his left hand came up. His long, thick fingers closed over hers—not with the bone-crushing force he used against opponents on the boards, but with an exquisite, heartbreaking delicacy. He supported the weight of her trembling wrist against his own knee, steadying her without a single word of pity.

"Take a second," he whispered.

The air in the small clinic grew thick, sweet and heavy. Fallon swallowed hard, feeling the heat of his bare skin through her thin glove. His thumb stroked once, a slow, grounding pressure over the dorsal tendon of her thumb—the exact spot where her physical therapist used to massage the post-op scar tissue years ago.

How did he know that spot?

She had never told him which tendon had taken the brunt of the damage. She had never shown him her old surgical notes.

"August," she whispered, her voice losing its edge, replaced by an exhaustion that reached all the way to her bones. "Please. I can't keep putting you back together if you keep deliberately taking yourself apart."

He didn't answer. His gaze was anchored to her face, searching the tired hollows under her eyes, the crease between her brows. For a terrifying, suspended second, she thought he was going to lean down from the table and press his bruised mouth against her forehead. The air between them hummed with a strange, magnetic gravity that had nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with the long, silent hours they spent in empty training rooms while the rest of the team slept.

Instead, he slowly relaxed his grip, leaving his torn hand resting flat on the towel, perfectly steady for her.

"Do the stitches, Fallon," he said softly. "I'm fine. I'll always be fine."

She drew a ragged breath, blinking back the sudden, ridiculous sting behind her eyelids. She was a professional. She was a healer. She was not going to let this stubborn, self-immolating brute see that his reckless survival instincts were slowly breaking her heart.

"You're not fine," she muttered, positioning the needle. "You're a disaster. But I'm going to fix this anyway."

"I know," August said, his voice dropping into a register so gentle it seemed to belong to an entirely different man. "That's why you're here."

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