The door to the locker room opens. A new smell cuts through sweat and disinfectant—sharp, expensive perfume that doesn’t belong anywhere near gear.
Beatrice.
The talking stutters. A couple guys glance up. I don’t. I stare at the tape and the floor and my own hands and pretend my spine didn’t just go rigid.
Her heels click once on the tile—an impatient, clipped staccato—and then stop. She’s blocked.
“Sorry, ma’am.” Adrian’s voice. Calm. Polite. A line of steel underneath. “You can’t be in here.”
I look up just long enough to catch his eye over the shoulders of the guys between us. He’s planted in the doorway, broad as a wall, one hand on the doorframe, the other on the knob, body angled so she can’t just slide around him.
He meets my gaze. Just a flick.You good?
I give the slightest shake of my head.Don’t.
Beatrice laughs. It’s the same sound she uses for donors who bore her. “I’m not just anyone,” she says. “I’m family.”
“Still locker room, still game time,” Adrian says. His tone doesn’t change. “Coach’s rules.”
She doesn’t like that. I can’t see her face, but I can hear it. The ice under the sugar. The small pause where she re-evaluates whether this fight is worth an audience.
“Fine.” Her voice sharpens. “Tell Declan I wanted to wish him luck.”
Then her perfume retreats, heels staccato-ing back up the concrete tunnel. The door shuts. The room exhales as a whole.
Someone snorts. Someone else mutters, “Damn.” Gio says, “Captain’s got bigger balls than the rest of us,” under his breath.
Adrian just pushes off the door and walks back to his stall, flopping down like nothing happened. The guys go back to their noise. It’s all normal again.
It isn’t.
My ritual is cracked. It shouldn’t matter that she tried to breach my space and was denied. It shouldn’t matter that for three seconds, my body tensed like I’d been called to heel.
I flex my taped hand. The adhesive bites my skin. This is supposed to bind the part of me that breaks. Right now it feels like a leash I put on myself.
Images flicker behind my eyes if I let them.
The gala. Her hand on my jaw. The camera flash. Talia’s face across the room going completely still, then closing like a shutter.
I swallow hard, jaw locking. I didn’t move, then. Didn’t shove Beatrice away. Didn’t wipe her lipstick off my face in front of the photographer. Didn’t go after the only person in that room who looked real.
Control it. Always control it.
My phone buzzes on the narrow wooden shelf by my hip. Short. Insistent. Not a call—just a text.
I don’t check it right away. I finish the last wrap over my knuckles, pressing the edge of the tape down with my thumb until it’s smooth. Then I pick up the phone.
One word.
Talia:In.
My lungs open like I’ve been underwater and just broke surface.
It doesn’t matter that I’m two hours away in a stranger’s rink, sweat already prickling under my undergear. It doesn’t matter that she’s furious with me, that the last thing she said to my face tasted like betrayal. She still texted. She still let that tether stay tied.
She’s safe. In her dorm. Behind a locked door. The path between the library and her building didn’t become a crime scene tonight.
She’s safe.
