PUCKED BY THE HOCKEY CAPTAIN I'M SUPPOSED TO TAME

REYNA’S POV

I zip the box.

The sound is final. Like a period at the end of a sentence I've been writing for two years.

"Are you sure about this, Reyna?"

Clarissa's voice came from the doorway, arms folded, eyes doing that thing where she's worried but trying not to show it. My partner had a terrible poker face.

"I have never been more sure." I sighed, nodding without looking up. "You know how long I fought for the reopening of this investigation."

"But why don't you let someone else handle it? You…"

"Clarissa." I finally looked at her. "This is the reason I came back to California. The reason I spent two years buried in one file." I straightened. "I finally got the opportunity. I won't let it slip."

The next words came quieter but they didn't shake.

"Zara was nineteen. My sister was young and she died and they stamped suicide on her case like she was nothing." I exhaled slowly. "The chief doesn't know about my connection to this case. So please, I really need your support in this. Aden Voss has to pay."

My voice went hard on that last part. No tears. I had spent the last two years crying. That season was over. Now it was time to act.

Clarissa was quiet for a moment. Then she crossed the room and pulled me into a hug, tight and brief, the way she always did when words weren't enough.

"Okay, Detective Reyna." She pulled back, holding my shoulders. "Three months. The chief gave you three months to uncover something solid or the investigation gets buried forever. Don't waste a single day."

"I won't." I reached for the ID card on the table.

My face stared back at me, same eyes, same jaw, just younger somehow without the weight I'd been carrying. Last name changed. Couldn't walk into Blackwell as Reyna Cole. The name on this card read Reyna Brook.

A chuckle broke from Clarissa's direction.

I arched a brow at her. "What?"

"Nothing." She pressed her lips together, clearly lying. "It's just — I can't believe it. The stoic Detective Reyna, going back to college." She gestured at me with a wave of her hand. "You'll be in class with spoilt rich brats. And your face right now, the new haircut, the glasses, that oversized hoodie…" She laughed, actually laughed. "You look like a nerd."

I rolled my eyes. "First of all, Claris, I'm twenty five. It's college, not high school. Most of them will be anywhere between nineteen and twenty three so I'm not exactly out of place." I tucked the ID into my jacket. "And these are my disguise, not a fashion statement."

"Yeah, yeah." She waved me off, still smiling. "Off you go. Your time is running."

I grabbed my bag, rolled it to the door, and didn't look back at the room. Nothing in it I needed anymore. Everything I needed was at Blackwell.

The Uber was already waiting when I stepped outside. I slid into the backseat, settled my bag between my feet, and pulled out the file before the car even pulled off.

The Hockey Team Captain.

Aden Voss. Twenty-three.

His photo was the first thing on the page. Sharp jaw, cold eyes, the kind of face that knew exactly what it did to people and felt nothing about it. The report beneath it painted the rest, cold, calculated, a known pattern of picking up women and dropping them before they could get comfortable. Kept to himself outside of the rink. Fiercely protected by the school's administration. Untouchable.

My fist clenched against the folder.

I didn't bother reading the rest of the report. Just looking at his face was enough to make something tighten in my chest, not fear. Not even grief. Something colder than both.

I pressed the folder shut.

First, get to the school.

Blackwell. Even the name sat heavy. Private institution, north of Los Angeles, practically invisible unless you had money or knew exactly where to look. It didn't advertise. It didn't need to. Old family names filled its roster every year legacies, trust funds, students who treated tuition fees the way most people treated coffee orders. Casual. Thoughtless.

It had taken the chief pulling strings with people above his pay grade just to get me a slot as a scholarship transfer student. A single slot in a school that barely opened its gates to outsiders. Three months to make it count.

I pulled off the glasses and turned them over in my hand.

Can't believe I have to do this for three months.

The drive stretched out highway bleeding into hills, city thinning into something quieter and more deliberate. Five hours of watching California scroll past the window while my thoughts ran the case over and over, looking for the angles I hadn't tried yet.

The Uber slowed as we approached the gate.

I leaned forward slightly and looked through the windshield.

The entrance was exactly what I expected tall iron gates framed in stone, the kind that didn't open for just anyone. And there, mounted above it in letters that caught the afternoon light like they were proud of themselves:

BLACKWELL ELITE COLLEGE.

Gold. Of course it was gold.

The car rolled to a stop and I stepped out, dragging my bag behind me. The driver pulled off almost immediately. I stood there for a moment, alone on the pavement, bag at my side, the gate still closed ahead of me.

The air was different here. Quieter. A silent that came from walls thick enough and grounds wide enough that the outside world simply didn't reach.

I drove past this school two years ago to identify my sister's body.

The memory landed without warning, the way it always did. A Tuesday. Early morning. The detective who called me had been professional, detached in the way they trained us to be. I hadn't been a detective yet … just a twenty-three-year-old girl driving ninety miles an hour because someone said her little sister wasn't breathing.

I had sat in the parking lot of the county morgue for forty minutes before I could go inside.

And when they told me it was suicide I had nodded slowly and said thank you and driven home and then spent the next two years dismantling that lie from the inside out.

Now I was walking through these gates with a fake name and a hidden badge.

The gate buzzed and swung open someone in the admin office had cleared my arrival. I picked up my bag and walked through.

The campus opened up ahead of me. Wide stone paths. Buildings that looked like they'd been standing since before California was a state. Students moving in clusters, dressed in a way that only happened when money was so normalized it stopped being a statement. A girl walked past me in heels at two in the afternoon. Two guys near the fountain were talking loudly about a flight to Aspen like it was a bus route.

I kept my head down. Glasses on. Hoodie pulled forward.

Scholarship transfer student. Quiet. Unremarkable. Easy to overlook.

That was the character. I had built her carefully, soft enough to be dismissed, forgettable enough to move through spaces without drawing attention. Reyna Cole would have walked through this campus with her badge energy radiating off her like heat. Reyna Brook would walk close to walls and avoid eye contact and let people assume she didn't belong here.

She didn't. But she was here anyway.

I was almost at the admin block when I saw him.

I wasn't looking for him, not yet, not today. But instinct was a hard thing to suppress and the moment my eyes caught movement near the side corridor that ran adjacent to the rink entrance, something in me went still.

He was walking with two other guys, jacket half-zipped, bag slung over one shoulder. Neither of them seemed to exist to him, they talked, he didn't. His eyes stayed ahead, jaw set, the kind of quiet that wasn't peace but something closer to indifference. He didn't look around. Didn't clock the new girl dragging a bag across the courtyard.

Aden Voss.

Same jaw. Same cold geometry as the photo. Taller than I'd registered from paper.

My stomach turned.

Not nerves. Not attraction. Something I recognized as hatred wearing a calm face.

You don't know what I'm here for yet. I thought, watching him disappear around the corner. Enjoy the last stretch of that.

I turned back toward the admin block and kept walking.

I found my dorm room an hour later, small, functional, different from other block, screaming scholarship without saying it out loud. I dropped my bag on the bed and didn't unpack beyond what I needed. A habit from fieldwork. Travel light. Stay ready to move.

I pulled out the one thing I hadn't packed in the box I zipped this morning.

A photograph.

Zara. Nineteen. Laughing at something offcamera, one shoulder raised, caught mid-sentence the way the best photos always were. I set it face-down on the nightstand. Not because I wanted to forget her, but because I couldn't afford to look at it every morning and feel what it made me feel. Not in here.

Not for three months.

I pressed my hand flat against the back of the photo.

I'm here, Zara.

I'll find your killer.

I promise.