Penalty for Falling

by Maren Quinn

Heat 3 / 5Novella · 10 chapters24,851 words1h 48m read~2h 46m listen

Eleven o’clock at night, and Zara Maddox is already holding the tape strip when Colt Reeves limps through the door of the Northwood Civic Arena treatment room. She hasn’t touched the documentation log. She hasn’t decided anything. And then he tells her about the trade clause — the one that sends him out of Northwood the moment he hits the injured-reserve list — and the decision makes itself before she can stop it.

She places the tape. She closes the log. She says nothing.

What begins as a single act of silence becomes two weeks of midnight sessions, a shadow protocol running beneath the official one, and a proximity that neither of them has language for. Colt Reeves has been pushing against Zara’s rules since the day she arrived, and she has been refusing to bend — until now. Their antagonism doesn’t soften so much as catch fire. And underneath it, Zara carries a name she hasn’t let herself think in months: the player from the concussion incident, the form she signed, the phone call six days later.

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