“Then you have mine. I’ll pay. Whatever you need.”
She exhales a laugh with no laugh in it. “You can’t buy me out of this. And you shouldn’t try.” Her paper rustles, the sound she makes when she’s organizing her breath to walk into a room that wants something from her. “Just… keep your head down tonight.”
My phone buzzes—Julia: Distance from staff. Lay low. Smile for cameras. A second text chases it: Statement draft coming. I thumb back one word before I can overthink it: No.
“Jason,” Riley says, hearing the answer I didn’t give her. “Please.”
I lean into the wall until the cold eats some heat out of me. “Get some sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.”
She doesn’t say goodnight. Neither do I. The line clicks. I’m left with the hum of the stairwell and the ghost of her breath in my ear. I stare at the screen like it might tell me how to keep a promise I just made without breaking something we can’t fix.
I push off the wall, ready to find air that isn’t recycled through a thousand vents. The service stairwell breathes cold on my neck as I take two steps down.
My screen flares to life on its own—a push alert punching through Do Not Disturb like it paid for the privilege.
BREAKING: STAR’S SECRET TRAINER AFFAIR?
Segment goes live in 20 minutes.
Under the headline, a thumbnail blooms: a freeze-frame from last night’s tunnel. The camera caught the exact second my hand hovered at Riley’s elbow. Her profile is focused, professional; mine looks like a man about to say something that costs him. Behind us, the sponsor logo sits dead center, clean and gleeful.
The phone vibrates again—three more alerts stack like penalties: SportsPulse, ArenaWatch, CityNow. Secret romance? Trainer trouble? Is the franchise at risk?
My world narrows to the bright rectangle in my hand. The timer in my head starts counting backward from twenty. I don’t breathe for the first five seconds; when I do, it’s through my teeth.
Julia’s name flashes across the top of the screen, a call this time. I let it roll to voicemail because anything I say right now I’ll have to apologize for later. A text follows: We can still get ahead with a statement. Draft in your inbox.
I swipe it away. Another text—unknown number, probably a burner from a desk producer: Jason, comment? It’ll help shape the story. Attached is a cropped version of the same photo,tighter, meaner. They’ve sharpened the red REC light like it’s blood.
The hallway outside the stairwell thrums—distant laughter, a cart squeaking past, security radios coughing static. None of it touches me. My thumb hovers over Riley’s contact again, then pulls back like I’ve touched a coil on a stove.
Twenty minutes. They’ll turn our silence into confession and our words into kindling. My pulse hammers so hard my jaw pops again and I welcome the pain because it keeps me from moving before I think.
Options array themselves. Kick the door to media and burn it down on live TV. Post a picture of tape and stats and dare them to call competence scandal. Drive to her apartment and put my body between her and the storm I dragged toward us.
My phone buzzes once more—the calendar banner I never look at: Film hit: 19:12… 19:11… Someone coded the countdown into the app like a joke. It isn’t funny.
I thumb open the push alert despite myself. A loading wheel spins, then resolves to a splash page that eats the screen—screaming headline, the thumbnail enlarged, a chyron mock-up below it: SOURCE: TEAM INSIDER.
Team insider lands like a blade slid under the ribs—familiar, precise, meant to make me bleed slow.
I close the browser hard enough to feel it in my wrist and stare at the steel door of the stairwell as if force of will could keep twenty minutes from becoming zero.
“Not today,” I tell the air, and it blooms white in the draft like winter.
The phone vibrates with one more alert. The headline updates, brighter, bolder, promise sharpened to a point.
LIVE IN 19:59
Chapter 17
The Risk
Riley
The rink isa cathedral after hours. The lights hum like a choir holding a single note, and the air tastes like metal and mint—the ghost of sharpened steel and gum wrappers left behind. My breath makes a pale bloom in front of my mouth as I step through the gate, guards snug over my blades, soles clicking on the rubber mat before I edge onto ice that looks too perfect to touch.
Center ice waits like a confession booth. The logo under the glass is a saint I don’t pray to and still obey. Jason’s already there, gloves tucked into his armpits, hood up, that restless bounce in his knees he gets when standing still feels like punishment. The arena swallows him—one man under a roof built for twenty thousand—and still he fills it.
