She didn't come to Ashford for the job. She came for him.
Three years ago, Nora Cahill watched from the stands as a single hit on the ice ended her brother Conor's hockey career - and his ability to walk. The league cleared the player in six hours. One paragraph. Case closed. The world moved on. Nora didn't.
Armed with a sports analytics degree, eighteen months of archived footage, and a plan she's rehearsed a thousand times, Nora takes a position as video analyst for the Ashford Wolves - the AHL team that employs the man responsible. Her mission is surgical: embed herself in the organization, build an airtight case documenting a pattern of dangerous play, and make Nikolai Voronov's name synonymous with the worst thing he ever did.
Nikolai Voronov is the Wolves' captain, a Russian-born defenseman who plays with a precision that borders on restraint. He hasn't thrown a full-force hit since the night Conor Cahill didn't get up. He trains alone at dawn, runs a bridge over the river in the dark, and carries the guilt of a legal hit that produced an illegal outcome - a man in a wheelchair, a career erased, a silence that no league ruling can fill. He recognizes Nora almost immediately. He says nothing. He lets her come.
What follows is not a love story built on forgiveness. It's a collision between two people who have organized their entire identities around the same violent moment - one seeking accountability, the other seeking punishment - and the slow, dangerous discovery that proximity reveals truths that distance never could.
Nora watches Voronov's restraint on film, frame by frame, and it doesn't fit the narrative she built on a corkboard in Worcester. Nik watches her watching him, and her scrutiny becomes the first honest reckoning he's faced in three years. As the season grinds forward, the line between the investigation and the intimacy dissolves - late nights in empty arenas, conversations held in silence, a gravitational pull neither of them can justify and neither is willing to break.
When an opportunistic front-office executive tries to weaponize Nora's research for his own agenda, she's forced to choose: let her work become someone else's leverage, or own the reckoning she started and face what it's become.
SPLINTER is a dual-POV dark romance set in the world of minor league hockey. It's a story about guilt that masquerades as discipline, revenge that disguises itself as justice, and the terrifying act of letting someone see you - all of you - and choosing to stay.
