Chapter 7
The paramedics arrived, their heavy boots thudding against the ice.
"BP is falling, 90 over 60," one of them shouted over the roar of the arena, slapping a monitor cuff around August's bicep. "Trachea is midline, but breath sounds are severely diminished on the left base. We have a suspected hemothorax and an acute cranial contusion. Get the backboard down. Now!"
August’s fingers slipped from her jacket as four sets of hands rolled him onto the rigid orange board. He let out a low, guttural groan of pure agony as his fractured ribs shifted, the sound tearing through Fallon like a serrated blade.
She stood back, her hands covered in his blood, her chest heaving as if she were the one suffocating.
Above them, the giant jumbotron replayed the hit in gruesome high definition. The commentators' voices piped through the arena speakers in breathless outrage:
*"A completely predatory, unprovoked assault away from the puck... Bennett left his feet... the league will have no choice but to throw the book at him... this could be a season-ending, if not career-ending, suspension..."*
On the other side of the ice, Grier was being loaded onto a second gurney, his neck immobilized.
Fallon watched the paramedics wheel August toward the Zamboni tunnel. His eyes were half-closed, his face waxen beneath the crimson wash of blood. He looked broken. Destroyed. A generational talent who had deliberately, joyfully walked into a meat grinder and pulled the lever himself.
*You lied to me,* she thought, the bitter taste of bile rising in her throat. *You sat in that room, you held my hands, you pretended to let me heal you... and you were just waiting for your chance to tear everything down.*
***
The home locker room was dead silent when she walked back inside, save for the muffled television broadcast and the low, furious rumble of Coach Miller screaming into his cell phone in the adjacent coach's office.
"I don't give a shit what the commissioner says on the preliminary call, David!" Miller roared, slamming his fist onto a metal desk. "He crossed the red line to decapitate a player! We're looking at twenty games minimum! The owner wants his contract terminated for gross misconduct, and frankly, I won't stop him! The kid is unhinged! He's a goddamn animal!"
Fallon stood in the center of the empty dressing room.
The floor was littered with discarded black tape, empty sports drink bottles, and wet towels. The heavy stench of sweat, damp padding, and ice shavings hung in the stagnant air.
Her hands were still stained with August’s blood. She had scrubbed them at the tunnel sink, but the dried rust remained wedged beneath her fingernails, outlining the pale, uneven scars across her knuckles.
The arena paramedics had already transported August to the University of Alberta Hospital’s trauma bay under emergency sirens. They had called for a thoracic surgeon to drain the pleural effusion and a neurological team to assess the cranial bleed.
The head athletic trainer, Kelly, poked his head out of the equipment bay, his face pale and haggard.
"Fallon," Kelly said, his voice flat with exhaustion. "You need to pack Bennett’s personal bag. The front office wants his locker cleared before the press gets access to the room. Take his wallet, his medical records, his insurance cards, and meet the ambulance liaison at the hospital. Miller wants an update on the CT scan before the post-game press conference."
"I'm not his babysitter, Kelly," she said, her voice trembling with a mixture of cold rage and unshed tears.
"You're the team PT," Kelly replied softly, not unkindly. "And right now, you're the only person in this building who doesn't look like they want to execute him in the parking lot. Just pack his things, Fallon. Please."
Kelly vanished down the hall, leaving her alone in the cavernous, fluorescent-lit room.
Fallon walked slowly toward locker stall number 88.
It was impossibly neat. While the other defensemen had their stalls overflowing with unwashed base layers, half-eaten protein bars, and tangled rolls of shin tape, August’s space was military in its order. His navy suit hung inside a breathable garment bag. His dress shoes were aligned side-by-side beneath the wooden bench. His duplicate skates were hung by their steel blades from two stainless-steel hooks, sharpened and polished.
On the upper shelf sat a heavy black duffel bag and a small leather travel kit.
Fallon reached up, her stiff fingers hooking into the zipper of the travel kit. Her hand gave that familiar, hollow ache—a phantom signal from the titanium screws inside her bones.
"Why?" she whispered to the empty stall, tears finally spilling over her eyelashes and cutting clean tracks through the chalky dust on her cheeks. "Why would you throw it all away for Grier? He wasn't even in the play. He was nothing."
She unzipped the travel kit to find his insurance card and identification for the hospital admission desk. Inside were the expected items: travel-sized shaving cream, a razor, a tube of dental paste, his passport, and a provincial health card.
Beneath the toiletry kit, tucked into the far corner of the wooden shelf, sat the black leather-bound notebook he had carried in the film room.
Fallon stared at it.
She remembered seeing him write in it during the Minnesota game. She had thought he was taking tactical notes. She had convinced herself that he was channeling his volatile aggression into strategy, that her discipline protocols were taking root in his reckless mind.
*A violent brawler,* she thought bitterly. *Just another goon with an anger management problem scribbling down his grudges.*
She reached out and picked it up.
The leather was heavy, supple, and worn at the corners. It didn't look like team-issued stationary; it looked years old. The spine was cracked from frequent opening, the pages thick and slightly yellowed.
A dark, morbid curiosity pulled at her chest. She wanted to see his rage in black and white. She wanted proof that she had been a fool—that every gentle moment they had shared in hotel rooms, every time he had warmed her aching hands with his own calloused palms, had been nothing more than the temporary docile trance of a wild animal biding its time.
"Let's see what kind of monster you really are, August," she muttered under her breath.
She untucked the leather strap and opened the cover.
Fallon’s breath stopped.
The air vanished from her lungs as if she had been hit by a blindside check at center ice. Her knees buckled, and she had to throw her scarred right hand against the wooden partition of the stall to keep from collapsing onto the rubber floor.
There were no hockey drills.
There were no coaching notes, no diagrams of neutral zone traps, no angry rants about referee bias.
Taped neatly to the first page was an official police report from the Duluth Police Department, dated seven years ago—November 14th.
Beneath the faded blue municipal seal were the case numbers she had memorized during the darkest, most agonizing months of her youth: *CASE NO. 2017-CR-08942. COMPLAINANT: FALLON REID. INCIDENT: AGGRAVATED ASSAULT / DESTRUCTION OF ATHLETIC ELIGIBILITY.*
Fallon’s fingers began to shudder violently. The room seemed to tilt on its axis, the fluorescent lights humming at a frequency that pierced straight through her skull.
