The Enforcer's Wager, livre ebook

Cole Beckett was ten years old the night he stood with his nose against the glass, watching his brother score into a nearly empty rink. Number nineteen. Red and black. The fastest skater in Granite Falls.
Nate went down in a fight and did not get up. One punch, a skull cracked against the ice, a brain bleeding quietly behind it. That was eight years ago.
Cole is twenty-nine now, and he makes his living the way his brother died. He is the muscle for the Granite Falls Wild, paid to drop the gloves and give the crowd a reason to buy a beer. After a clean win over Des Moines in which he logged sixteen minutes and threw nothing, his coach leans across a creaking desk and tells him exactly what he is. *You're not a scorer, Beckett. You're not a playmaker. You're our muscle.*
But Cole has stopped wanting to hit people. The whole bench has noticed. Tate Kowalski has already taken it to his Instagram story.
Then the team's publicist hands him a profile: three interviews, a week of being shadowed, a warm piece about the human side of professional hockey. The journalist is Sylvie Marchetti, and before she has asked him one question she has already requested the 2015 game film.
Sylvie's father played left wing for the Wild from 2008 to 2015 and scouted afterward, and what killed him took his memory apart from the inside out, down to his daughter's name. In his things she found a single line in his handwriting: *Nate asked me to watch out for his brother.*
She did not come for a puff piece. She thinks the story is not one damaged man but the machine that damages him, and she has a note with a name in it.
What neither of them plans for is what Cole says in a bar, with the pool balls cracking and the neon buzzing and her recorder running. Four words he has not said aloud in eight years. Four words he cannot take back, that will cost him a roster spot, a reputation, and possibly her.
This is a contemporary hockey romance about grief, complicity and what it costs to tell the truth about your own sport, told in alternating first person from the locker room and from the notebook. The romance is closed-door.