End Game (New York Stars Book 1)

𝅘𝅥𝅮 𝄠 Goodbye My Lover – James Blunt

I NEVER THOUGHT I’d die before I hit the big three-oh.

I really didn’t.

I’m rich, I’m successful, and I’m healthy.

Moreover, I’m a hockey player.

A good one.

Hell, some might even say a great one.

I didn’t think I’d die in a godawful basement that stinks of piss and shit.

I didn’t think I’d die of sepsis.

I didn’t think—

God, that’s just it.

I didn’t think.

If I had, I wouldn’t be here because I was snatched from some nightclub. I would have gone to a skate park and done some tricks before I got taken—fuck my contract. In fact, no. Screw skate-boarding. I’d just have called Gracie.

The kid next to me, a fellow hostage, whimpers in his sleep.

Who can blame him?

These assholes not only took a child, but we’ve been here for too long.

We haven’t seen our kidnappers’ faces, so the situation isn’t that dire yet, but the fact we’re still here has my anxiety spiking.

Something has to be wrong.

My absence must have hit the news.

I mean, I’ve already missed a couple games by this point. Though the Mounties are a solid team without me, there’s no way the press hasn’t realized that the captain has gone missing.

I live in Montréal—we jack off to hockey there.

My fellow Quebeckers somehow worked out I visit my favorite coffee shop on Tuesdays, but they don’t recognize my absence on the ice?

I don’t buy it.

Digging my fingers into my eyes, I try to understand why my ransom hasn’t been paid.

Even if the Mounties couldn’t shell out because of years of mismanagement, my personal accounts would—

“Shit,” I whisper.

Now that Mom’s gone, no one aside from me has access to my money.

I went a little crazy and built up my own trust fund so that my father couldn’t get his hands on my assets. The markets haven’t been as stable either, so whatever they’re asking, I might not even be able to cover—

I scrape a hand over my head, ignoring the blunt, throbbing pain from my injuries.

“Why did you have to buy that new house?” I ask myself.

And why didn’t I just mortgage it like everyone advised?

Paranoid… that’s me. Especially when it comes to my father.

Padraig has a habit of sniffing around when he’s run out of cash, which is always.

It’s like water to him, and it easily slips through his fingers.

How ironic that being tight-fisted with him will bite me in the ass in the short run because I don’t have the funds to cover my ransom.

The Bukowskis and my billet brothers might be able to pitch in, but that I’m still in Lucifer’s idea of a vacation hotspot doesn’t give me much hope.

“I’m going to die here,” I rasp, closing my eyes to quell the stinging from pointless tears.

Maybe that belief is why I see her.

Not my whole billet family who took me in and made me one of their own. Who sheltered me from the age of sixteen and who, after Mom died, drew me deeper into the fold.

No, I just see Gracie.

She’s the only girl in the Bukowski family.

She’s a nag.

She’s got a loud mouth.

She’s… magnificent.

Smart and unafraid, strong and ebullient.

Fuck, when was the last time I even saw her?

She moved to New York, what, two years ago?

She hasn’t come to Thanksgiving for a while, and though I tried to pay for her flight back for the holidays, as have the rest of her brothers, she always claims that she needs the overtime…

She’s been saying that for years.

We used to be close.

What went wrong?

Did the fame get to my head? Did she think I was an asshole hockey fuckboi like Kow and stopped wanting to hang out with me?

I know the game’s changed me. How could it not? Sex and money on tap—aside from when I need to pay off a ransom apparently—and I’m supposed to be living my dream.

God, if I make it out of this then I need to be a better person. Someone who Gracie actually likes.

The kid screams something in Mandarin as a nightmare awakens him. The abrupt shout jerks me from my thoughts as he scrabbles into the corner where his camping bed nestles against the wall.

“Hey, it’s okay,” I try to soothe, but it doesn’t stop his sobbing.

He’s too petrified for comfort from me to do anything other than scare him further.

I rub the side of my head where my ear used to be—they cut it off to send with the ransom demand. Ever since then, he’s looked at me like I’m a monster, and I’m starting to feel as if I am one.

Blood has dried down the side of my cheek where it escaped the bandage they placed there after I passed out. The itch has started. Infection’s set in and the pain is bad. Really bad. I have a high tolerance after years on the ice, but it’s starting to be something I can’t shove aside, a solid fifteen on a scale of one to five.

“How do you get yourself into these situations?”

I can almost hear Gracie chiding me while she simultaneously gifts me her patented finger wag.

I wish I told her that my feelings for her were never brotherly.

I wish she knew she meant more to me than just my best friend’s sister.

I wish I’d gotten to kiss her.

Fuck, I wish for so many things that’ll never happen now.

God, I miss her.

And, I guess, I always will.