My Hockey Alpha novel Chapter 531

Nina

My breath caught in my throat as I pulled open the front door expecting to see excited party guests, only to be immediately met with the sight of Luke’s grim expression.

His brow was furrowed in a deep frown, his lips pressed into a tight line-clear signs that something was very wrong.

“Luke? Are you okay?” I searched his face with mounting trepidation as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

Rather than answering right away, he simply held out his hand, a rumpled photograph clutched between his fingers. My stomach knotted with a sense of dread as I tentatively accepted it from him.

The moment I processed what -or rather, who-was depicted in the grainy image, my knees very nearly buckled beneath me. There, frozen in time, were two figures striding side by side down what looked like a shadowy dock. One I recognized instantly in my bones: that familiar jawline, the shock of messy dark hair smattered with flecks of gray… Edward.

But it was the man keeping pace beside him that made the breath leave my lungs harshly, as though someone had just knocked the air clean out of me.

James.

My head swam as I stared, unblinking, at the photograph of the two men. James, the boy who had posed as my friend only to betray us all and nearly kill me, and Edward, the school counselor who…

Well, who also tried to kick me?

It didn’t make any sense. What could they possibly want with one another? Granted, James’s current whereabouts were something of a mystery to us after what had gone down a few months back; he had simply disappeared without a trace.

But to see him here now, with Edward? It felt as if the knife in my gut had been twisted.

Slowly, I raised my gaze to meet Luke’s pained expression, feeling the first tendrils of dread coiling in the pit of my stomach.

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