Cost of redemption, p.1
Cost of Redemption, page 1
Copyright © 2025 by Hayden Hall
All rights reserved.
Paperback ISBN: 979-8-2811-0893-5
Hardcover ISBN: 979-8-2811-0913-0
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover photo by XramRagde
Cover model: Bruno Benetti
Cover design by Angela Haddon
Edited by Sandra at OneLoveEditing
Written by Hayden Hall
www.haydenhallwrites.com
Created with Vellum
CONTENTS
About the Book
Content Warning
Let’s Stay In Touch
Prologue
1. Elio
2. Jaxon
3. Elio
4. Jaxon
5. Elio
6. Jaxon
7. Elio
8. Jaxon
9. Elio
10. Jaxon
11. Elio
12. Jaxon
13. Elio
14. Elio
15. Jaxon
16. Elio
17. Jaxon
Epilogue
From Rules of Play
Author’s Note
Also by Hayden Hall
About Hayden Hall
ABOUT THE BOOK
He was my forbidden craving. My biggest regret. And now, he’s my only weakness.
Elio
Some mistakes you bury. Others crawl under your skin and never let go.
Jaxon Mercer was supposed to be my past. The stolen kiss. The fist that followed. The silence after.
But now? He’s here—cocky, dangerous, and looking at me like he already knows how this ends.
I should shut him out. I should forget the way he used to make me feel.
But when he’s this close, breathing is hard enough, let alone thinking straight.
Enemies. Ex-best friends. Rivals. Obsessions.
I don’t know what we are anymore.
But I know I want him.
Jaxon
He’s scared to want me. I want him desperate.
Elio Castelli pretends he has it all under control.
I know the desperate way he kissed me two years ago. I know the fear in his eyes when he shoved me away.
And now that I’m standing in front of him again, I know one thing for sure—he’s still mine, whether he admits it or not.
I’m done playing it safe. I’m done waiting.
I’ll have him.
Even if I have to break him first.
Cost of Redemption is the second novel in The Saints of Westmont U series. It is a largely standalone novel, but some threads continue from Edge of Temptation. Reading in order is not mandatory, but will enhance your enjoyment of the series. This is a college hockey romance depicting sexual awakening, toxic love, animosity, and has a guaranteed HEA. Content warnings are located inside the book.
CONTENT WARNING
This novel contains darker themes of toxic love. The characters depicted in Cost of Redemption struggle with self-acceptance and sexuality.
The novel contains descriptions of homophobia, internalized homophobia, violence, explicit sexual acts between consenting adults, explicit language, and mentions of drug use.
These issues are considered with great care and compassion, but some readers may find them challenging.
LET’S STAY IN TOUCH
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PROLOGUE
“Elio?” he called softly, his voice steady, easily rising above the chatter and the music that poured out of the speakers and flooded the room.
“Huh?” I blinked twice, looking over my shoulder at Jaxon. “Sorry. I wasn’t listening.”
Jaxon Mercer snort-chuckled and shook his head as he stepped closer. “I was telling you that Chicago is about four hundred and fifty miles from Pittsburgh,” he said.
My eyebrows twitched a little, not quite frowning. “Could I have that engraved?”
Jaxon punched my shoulder, sending a bolt of pain down my arm. “And guess what else is the same distance from here,” he said, his light brown eyes glimmering.
“If you make a circle around Pittsburgh that runs through Chicago, I imagine a lot of places would be the same distance,” I said, watching how long it would take him to roll his eyes.
Jaxon pinched the bridge of his perfect, straight nose and exhaled. “New Haven, Elio. I’m talking about New Haven.”
I suppressed a smile and shrugged like it was nothing. I knew that, though. I had known this fact for the better part of the summer. See, Pittsburgh sat in the middle, and it was the place Jaxon and I had called our home for as long as we knew what a home was. To the east, New Haven was about to hit it big; Jaxon Mercer was about to climb the ranks of the New Haven Storm football team. He would be the captain in no time, and he would give the Mercer name a new shot at glory. To the west, my new home awaited. Westmont University, Chicago, sat some twenty hours in the future.
Jaxon wasn’t happy with my reaction. He pulled on a little scowl and eyed me from under his eyebrows. “I thought it was interesting.”
“It’s a coincidence,” I said.
“It’s just so like us to move the exact same distance from home,” Jaxon said.
But in the opposite direction, I thought but didn’t say it. And it hadn’t been up to us. Chicago’s Westmont University was the only one that offered me a full scholarship. I’d applied to New Haven, but their hockey team was small and unimpressive, and their investments in the players were not so generous. Westmont provided housing, tuition fees, and even all my equipment. I would be a Steel Saint in just three days.
Jaxon had the luxury of choosing without having to worry about a scholarship. New Haven was both his parents’ alma mater, and as luck would have it, Ronan wasn’t their alumnus. I doubted Jaxon would have followed his older brother’s trajectory, so he succumbed to his parents’ wishes to study at their old university without the risk of shame over Ronan’s connections to the place.
“It’s a good party, Jax,” I said.
“Bullshit,” Jaxon said. “You hate parties.”
“Everyone else is having a good time,” I said. “I think that makes it an objectively good party even if I don’t like it.” And those were some harsh truths right there. Jaxon had insisted on throwing a goodbye party for both of us because he was leaving a week later, and having separate parties would have meant I wouldn’t come to his.
By default, the party was at Jaxon’s place. It was a big, modern house with a huge common room downstairs. Jaxon’s parents had hired extra help to prepare everything for the party—everything other than a single drop of alcohol—then picked up and left the house for the night. They were cool people if you didn’t step over the line.
Jaxon sent out invites to all our friends, letting me focus on a goodbye tour within my extended family. With the invites, he included a request for a bottle of alcohol from each guest. We were well supplied for the night, and there had only been one incident of puking so far. Lenny Crane had gotten sick from his second shot of vodka, but he made it to the bathroom in time to spare us all a terrible sight—and to spare Jaxon the thankless job of concealing the evidence before his parents returned.
I licked a splash of vodka, not seeing what all the rage was about, and tightened my hand around the glass. Somehow, the summer had gone by, and nothing had happened.
If you pressed me against the wall and put a knife under my throat, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what I’d expected.
But it felt real.
It felt like the entire summer was a missed opportunity. It felt like dense, humid days foretelling a terrible storm, except the storm never came, and the air only grew thicker.
Here I was, closing the longest chapter of my life, yet it felt unfinished.
Is this it? I wanted to ask the Big Guy. But they always told you that thing about mysterious ways and the bigger picture. I doubted he would have the time to get back to me on such short notice. I wondered if he was even there. My parents thought he was, but I was never so sure.
Besides, tomorrow was just another day for the remaining eight billion people on the planet. It was just my world that was getting turned upside down. New state, new city, new team.
New friends.
My heart clenched, and I blinked furiously against the stinging in my eyes. Had some of this terrible vodka gotten into them? I inhaled a steadying breath of air and avoided looking at Jaxon.
We’d known each other for four years, taking nearly all the identical classes in school. His parents had insisted on Jaxon going to a public school as a way to keep him on the ground. It would have been too easy to let Ronan Mercer’s wealth and fame inflate the young and impressionable Jaxon’s idea of who the Mercers were.
Of course, Jaxon’s life turned out to be hell halfway through that lesson. Ronan’s fame turned into infamy, and the students in our school showed J
I didn’t walk away from my friends.
Parting ways with Jaxon was something I had spent the entire summer ignoring. If I didn’t look into its eyes, it couldn’t look back at me. But here it was, the final day, the final hour. The party swelled and relaxed, people grouping, pranks being pulled off, Summer kissing Lane, April flirting with Franklin, young people being young people. Half of them were only setting out to be seniors now. Our class had scattered already, parted back in June, but enough of us remained for one last hurrah.
Smugly, Jaxon bumped his shoulder into mine. “Made you suffer a party one last time.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” I told him. I lifted my arm and rested my elbow on his shoulder. He hated it when I did that. At six feet tall, he was four inches shorter than me, and I never let him live it down. But he didn’t push me away with a scowl this time.
We stood in relative silence for a few moments before I let my arm drop from his shoulder. Jaxon was annoyed by something. His eyebrows were moving lower, and his eyes were darkening. He wouldn’t look at me. Well, if he picked tonight to be annoyed with me, that was just shitty timing.
Seeing him like that made my skin crawl. The muddled instincts to reach out and assure myself that we were good and to turn away and give him a taste of his own medicine pulled me left and right, and I ended up not doing either of those things.
“Ah, fuck it,” Jaxon said, his voice tightly controlled. “Come.” He gestured to the hallway leading to the right from the living area. His bedroom was there. We’d spent countless long nights playing Seeds of Soulless on his gaming console, a game we settled on because we could decide whether to play the NFL or the NHL—the story of our lives, I figured.
Jaxon walked away from me and the party he had thrown for us both, but I hesitated. It felt important. It felt like this big thing I had been waiting for the whole summer still had a small chance of coming true. But what was it? We were counting down the minutes until the departure, and whatever this thing was, it couldn’t just happen. How could it happen when I didn’t even know what it looked like?
I followed Jaxon, not particularly caring to watch Lane thrust his tongue down Summer’s throat. She’d flirted with me just a few months earlier, but something had put her off, and no amount of trying could spark her interest in me again. Not that I was trying very hard. I was leaving this place, and Summer was starting classes at a community college in the city, perfectly happy to remain precisely where she was.
Jaxon waited for me in his bedroom. Unlike mine, his was almost a little studio. A single bed lay along the far wall on the left side, a desk pressed just against the nightstand between the two, a fuzzy, white carpet covered the dark hardwood floor, and a sofa was turned to face the TV and the gaming set to the right of the door. All it lacked was a door to a private bathroom and a kitchenette before Jaxon could declare his independence.
My best friend paced across the bedroom. “This sucks,” he said. And then, when it wasn’t enough, he added, “I hate it, El.”
I didn’t reply. The tempest within me was too volatile to allow myself to speak. I intentionally pushed down the welling thoughts of despair. No, it shouldn’t have ended like this. Whatever he was planning for me, couldn’t he have let Jaxon be a part of it? But my concerns were irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. The fact that we were about to move the exact same distances in opposite directions was unimportant to the universe, even if it felt like ripping my heart in half.
“We’ll see each other this Christmas,” I said lamely.
Jaxon rubbed his eyebrows, turning away. “I know. Of course. But it sucks anyway. We were…” He shrugged and went silent for a time. “We were supposed to go to college together.”
A sliver of annoyance passed through me. Yeah? And who had the freedom of choice? But that wasn’t fair. Jaxon had to walk a thin line. “We’ll talk all the time, Jax,” I said.
He looked at me over his shoulder. His eyes glimmered, and he dragged the corners of his lips into a smile. “You bet your ass we will,” he said, his voice a little rough.
“I’ll bet my life,” I assured him.
Jaxon swallowed and balled his fists, turning to me. “And we’ll do another trip together,” he said, repeating the things we had already talked about in the last few weeks in the face of the looming departures. “Like we did in July.”
I nodded. We had gone to Still Water Cove at the start of July, just the two of us. It was a graduation gift from Jaxon’s parents. Not that they had just decided to send their son with a charity case to a lovely retreat. They had offered Jaxon a monthlong trip to Italy, but he picked Still Water Cove under the condition I could come with him. It was still way cheaper—not something the Mercers needed to think about the way I did—so they caved in.
We’d spent ten days in a log cabin, talking late into the night, swimming at the crack of dawn, competing mercilessly in who could stay underwater longer or whose nosedive was better. I hadn’t gotten many chances to go on a carefree break in my life, so those ten days felt like being close to Heaven.
Jaxon had loved every minute of it. I had never seen him so happy. The last couple of years had been rough, and Jaxon depended on me more than ever. It was almost a full-time job to keep Jaxon distracted from the relentless wave of destruction his brother’s fall from grace had unleashed. But he seemed to have forgotten all about it in Still Water Cove.
Jaxon shoved his hand into his pocket. “This is stupid and sentimental and dramatic, but I got you something.” He stomped over and thrust his fist at me. When he opened it, two bracelets of braided brown leather sat on his palm in a tangle, each with a little metal plate and an engravement. “Here.”
“There are two,” I said.
“One’s for me,” Jaxon said, rolling his eyes and probably regretting opening his fist. I had learned this a long time ago. Jaxon didn’t put himself in situations where someone could say no to him. He didn’t ask people for things, and he didn’t offer things that might be rejected. If he invited you to the movies and you said you couldn’t come, he would blush furiously and stammer that it was just a dumb idea and that it didn’t matter.
I took one bracelet and examined the engraving on the plate. “Are these coordinates?”
“Still Water Cove,” Jaxon said. He lifted his chin a little and pressed his lips into a tight line, anticipating my reaction. “I got them that day when you were too hungover to get out of bed until the afternoon.”
I knew the day. It was the only day I was hungover. We’d had a few beers by the firepit the night before, but they didn’t sit well with me. I’d woken up with a pounding headache and a rotten mood. It might have been the third or fourth day, and it was the only time we drank in Still Water Cove.
“Jax, this is…” I couldn’t find the right words.
“Silly,” Jaxon supplied. “I know. You don’t have to wear it.”
I snorted. “Stop downplaying it, dumbass. I love it.”
He was stunned for a moment. “You do?”
“Of course,” I said. “That was the best trip ever. And this…it’s so thoughtful. Help me put it on.” I handed him the bracelet and pulled the sleeve of my hoodie up to bare my wrist.
Jaxon’s fingers trembled slightly as he brought his hands to my bare wrist, tying the leather strings into a moving knot that secured the bracelet just right. “Now me,” he said, thrusting his hand out. He wore a short-sleeved T-shirt, and his arms were mostly bare and defined. He already had a golden bracelet his parents had gotten him for his eighteenth birthday, but he didn’t see an issue with combining the two, so I tied the bracelet around his wrist and smiled.
“I didn’t get you anything,” I said.
“Oh.”
