Chapter 121: You Were Wrong

KNOX’S POV

The bell above the coffeehouse door stopped ringing, but the silence she left behind felt loud enough to rattle the glass.

I stared down at the polished wooden table.

My matte-black card sat untouched between a half-eaten breakfast sandwich and a cooling mug of hazelnut coffee. The words she’d thrown at me hung in the air like poison smoke.

A charity case. A trust-fund asshole.

My fingers curled into fists against the wood until my knuckles went stark white.

Buying her was the furthest thing from my mind. All I wanted was to keep her from collapsing on her feet after watching her hands tremble against that coffee mug, after seeing the hollow exhaustion carved beneath her eyes.

Snatching the black card off the table, I shoved it into my jacket and tossed a fifty-dollar bill beside the untouched plates before walking out into the freezing wind.

Heading back to the SinBin was out of the question... I had zero patience for video games or locker-room chatter. Instead, the truck engine fired to life, and I drove straight to Rink 1.

The arena was deserted between the morning varsity skate and the afternoon club practices. The massive overhead lights were dimmed to half-power, casting long, pale shadows across the empty sheet of ice.

The freezing air hit my lungs like a physical slap, cutting through the fury boiling in my ribs.

Skipping the pads entirely, I laced up my skates, pulled a Briar practice jersey over my henley, and dumped a five-gallon bucket of black pucks at the high slot before firing.

SLAP. CLANG.

SLAP. THUD.

Puck after puck exploded off the composite blade, slamming into the empty net and rattling off the iron posts with deafening violence.

I didn’t care about form or accuracy. I just skated into the rubber, driving all my weight, my frustration, and the sick knot in my gut into every shot until my shoulders screamed and sweat dripped off the tip of my nose onto the ice.

"If you break another crossbar, Brennan’s taking it out of our equipment budget."

A voice echoed from the player bench.

I paused, leaning over my stick with my chest heaving, wiping sweat from my forehead with the back of my glove.

Bear was leaning over the boards in a gray Briar Hockey hoodie, holding a skate-sharpening stone in one hand. He looked at the forty pucks scattered inside the net, then looked up at my face.

"You look like you’re ready to murder someone," Bear said calmly. "What happened?"

"Nothing," I barked, turning around to skate after a stray puck.

"Knox," Bear’s voice dropped, deep and steady. "You’ve been out here for forty minutes trying to put a hole through the boards in your street clothes. What happened with Nora?"

The name alone was enough to make my jaw tighten so hard my teeth ached.

I skated over to the bench, stopping in a spray of white ice shavings. "I tried to help her. That’s what happened."

Bear raised an eyebrow, leaning both forearms against the top of the dasher. "Help her how?"

"She worked until past ten at the diner last night, Bear. She’s running on three hours of sleep, her hands are shaking from caffeine, and she’s killing herself over a thirty-five-hundred-dollar honors stipend she might lose in ten days."

I threw my gloves onto the bench with a harsh breath. "I slid my black card across the table. I told her to quit the diner, pay her bills, and focus on her thesis so she didn’t end up in an emergency room."

Bear stared at me for three long seconds. The silence between us stretched until only the low hum of the refrigeration pipes filled the arena.

Then Bear let out a slow, quiet whistle. "Holy hell, Sheridan. You really did that?"

"What’s that supposed to mean?" I snapped defensively. "I have the money sitting there doing nothing. Why the hell should she break her back carrying dirty plates for twenty-dollar tips when I can solve it in two seconds?"

"Because she’s not your line item, man," Bear said softly.

"I didn’t treat her like a line item! I love her, Bear! I’m trying to protect her!"

"Knox, listen to me," Bear interrupted. "My old man worked sixty hours a week turning wrenches at the rail yard so my mother wouldn’t have to borrow twenty bucks from her brother. Working-class people don’t measure help the way you do."

I froze, the cold air settling around us.

"To you, that card is just paper and plastic," Bear continued, tapping his fingers against the dasher board. "It’s freedom. But to a girl who’s earned every single cent, every textbook, and every credit on her own since she was sixteen? You basically told her that her hard work is just a nuisance you can erase with your dad’s money."

The words hit me like a stick to the ribs, knocking the wind straight out of my lungs.

"You made her feel like a dependent," Bear added gently. "Like she was on your payroll. She didn’t snap because she hates you, Knox. She snapped because you terrified her."

I stood on the ice, staring at the scarred white boards, the anger in my blood completely draining away. In its place was a hollow wave of regret.

I wasn’t trying to buy you, I had told her.

But looking through her eyes, that was exactly what it looked like.

—

NORA’S POV

The clicking of thirty computer keyboards inside Hallstead Hall Room 204 sounded like a firing squad.

I sat staring at the glowing monitor in front of me, but the rows of empirical data tables and economic regression equations might as well have been written in hieroglyphics.

My cursor blinked uselessly on the screen.

Every time I tried to focus on standard error distributions, my mind dragged me straight back to the corner booth at The Roost.

I saw Knox’s face. The way his wide, protective warmth had shattered into stone. The wounded disbelief in his gray eyes when I threw his family’s wealth in his face.

Is that what you think of me? That I’m just a trust-fund asshole throwing money around because I don’t know any better?

A sick, cold tremor ran through my hands. I pushed my glasses up my nose, pressing the heels of my palms against my burning eyes to keep the tears from spilling over in front of thirty classmates.

The lab ended at one o’clock. I didn’t stay to ask the teaching assistant about my regression models. I packed my laptop in a haze, pulled my wool coat tight against the bitter November wind, and practically ran back to the dorm.

I pushed open the door to room 314, dropped my backpack on the floor, and sank onto the edge of my mattress with a shaky, ragged exhale.

Priya looked up from her desk, where she was highlighting tort law briefs. She took one look at my red-rimmed eyes, dropped her yellow highlighter, and rolled her chair around.

"Alright," Priya said, her voice dropping all teasing. "What happened? Did Hastings reject your proposal?"

"No," I choked out, wrapping my arms around my ribs. "I had breakfast with Knox."

Priya’s eyebrows shot up. "Breakfast? That was supposed to be a victory lap for him getting cleared. Why do you look like someone died?"

"We had a fight," I whispered, the words catching in my throat. "A really bad one."

I spilled the entire story. The late-night missed call. Knox ordering me breakfast. The confrontation over my diner shifts, the black card sliding across the table, and the awful, venomous words that had exploded out of my mouth before I walked out.

When I finished, the dorm room was completely silent.

Priya sat back in her chair, watching me with an expression that was a painful mixture of sympathy and disbelief.

"Nora," Priya began nin an unusually quiet voice. "You know I love you. You know I will defend you against anyone on this campus with a legal brief and a baseball bat."

"I know," I sniffled.

"Then hear me when I tell you this: you were completely out of line."

The blunt words felt like ice water splashed across my chest. "Priya, he offered me an unlimited black card! He told me to quit my job and let him pay my bills like I’m some kept..."

"Because he was terrified, you idiot!" Priya cut in sharply, leaning forward. "Knox Sheridan spent two weeks with a scrambled brain, lying in an emergency room, listening to his corporate billionaire father threaten to ruin his life. He watched you run yourself into the ground to protect him, and now he’s watching you pass out at two in the morning because you’re working eighty hours a week between school and the diner."

Priya stood up, crossing the room and sitting beside me on the mattress, resting a firm hand on my trembling shoulder.

"Knox grew up in a house where Garrison used money as a weapon of total control," Priya said softly. "Knox defied that man on national television. He risked his entire NHL draft future because he refuses to let money dictate his life. And you just sat in a public coffeehouse and told him he’s no different than his father."

A sob broke in my throat.

The weight of Priya’s words crashed down on me. She was right. In my exhaustion, in my fierce, stubborn terror of ever being dependent on anyone, I hadn’t seen the boy who loved me trying to pull me out of a drowning current.

I had only seen his father’s bank account.

"He wasn’t trying to buy you, Nora," Priya murmured, squeezing my arm. "He was trying to keep the girl he loves from breaking in half. And because he’s twenty-one and has never had to balance a checkbook, he used the only tool he had."

"I hurt him," I whispered, burying my face in my hands as the tears finally overflowed. "Priya, I looked him in the eye and called him a trust-fund asshole. I’ve never seen him look at me like that."

"Then fix it," Priya said firmly, handing me a tissue from her desk. "Wipe your face, Bennett. Swallowing your pride is free. Go find your captain."