I meet my father’s eyes. “I asked them not to run it.”
Beatrice inhales sharply.
“You did what?” my father says softly.
“I know the photo desk,” I say. My voice is steady. It surprises me. “I made a request. It’s not that deep.”
There’s a tiny, almost imperceptible flinch at the edge of his mouth. He hates that phrase.Not that deep.It’s what people say when things are out of his control.
“We discussed the optics,” he says, the threat vibrating under the calm. “You understood your role. You understood what you owe this family.”
“I also understand I don’t want pictures of people I hate kissing me on the front page,” I say. My voice is too calm. It scares me a little, how easy it is to say. “So I stopped it.”
Silence stretches, thin and brittle.
Alistair glances toward the door where Maya and Cole exited. He won’t make a scene here. Not now. He’s too calculated for that.
“We’ll talk later,” he says. “Privately.”
He turns, hand already closing around Beatrice’s elbow to steer her away. She goes with him, but her eyes stay on me, burning.
I don’t watch them leave. I turn back to the locker room.
For the first time in a long time, I walked away from my father in a hallway and didn’t feel like I left pieces of myself scattered on the floor.
The locker room smells like half-washed gear and victory when I get back inside. I shower fast, letting the hot water beat into the knots in my shoulders, then shove my clothes on.
By the time I sling my bag over my shoulder and duck out into the hall, most of the team is headed toward the bus.
Of course he’s waiting.
Alistair stands near the arena’s side exit. Beatrice is gone—sent to the car, probably. This is just him.
“Declan.” He doesn’t raise his voice. “We’re parked out back. You’ll ride home with us.”
There it is. Not a request. A summons.
I stop a few feet away. The cold from the open door behind him creeps in.
“I’m riding with the team,” I say.
He tilts his head a fraction. “That wasn’t a question.”
The old script moves through my body on instinct—step forward, adjust, obey. My weight shifts toward him before I catch myself.
Talia’s face flashes through my mind. The way she looked up at me on the path, furious and hurt.
You don’t get to stalk my walk home when you’re letting someone else kiss you in front of cameras.
If she saw me now, folding myself back into the role he wrote for me, she wouldn’t be wrong about me. She’d just be done.
“I’m riding with the team,” I repeat, voice flatter. “Coach expects me on the bus.”
Alistair takes a step closer. “You’re behaving like a child,” he says quietly. “You embarrassed us tonight. You embarrassed Beatrice. You’ve already cost this program enough.”
“By keeping a photo out of the paper?”
“By making me look like I can’t control my own son,” he snarls, the veneer cracking for half a second.
