We move.Kael plants himself at the mouth of the corridor and starts directing traffic in the world’s calmest evacuation—rookies to the left, vets to the right, no one loiters, we’re not available for questions.Atlas takes the opposite wall, broad and silent, not looking like a bouncer because he isn’t one—he’s a defenseman offering the simplest kind of defense there is: presence.
We pass the drawer.The phone buzzes again, buzz-buzz-buzz, a pattern I’ll hear in my sleep.Wren’s steps hitch and then even out.My thumb slides along her knuckles once.Not a shush.A here.
Her office is small and too bright.She hates it when it’s like that; says the fluorescents make everything feel interrogative.I cross and flick off the overhead, leave the lamp on, warm light pooling like we borrowed someone else’s living room for five minutes.
Kael stops at the door, back to the hallway.Atlas posts up on the far side of the frame.Neither of them intrudes, and somehow the space shrinks in a way that doesn’t scare her.
“Close?”I ask Wren.
“Half,” she says, and I pull the door until it kisses the jamb without latching.
She lowers onto the edge of the desk.I stay in front of her, not between her and the door—that would feel wrong—but close enough that if she needs to look at my chest and breathe, she can.
“You want to tell them?”I ask.No names.No lecture.Just the choice.
Her throat works.“I don’t want to make it real.”
“It’s real whether we name it or not,” I say, and hate myself for the truth.“Naming it just gives us better tools.”
She presses her lips together.“I told you last night,” she says to me, quiet like the confession has to sneak to make it out.“I’m not ready to tell them all of it.”
“All of it isn’t required,” Kael says from the doorway, voice calm water.“Only what helps you.”
Wren looks over my shoulder at him, and I see it happen—the exact second she realizes he’s not asking for control.He’s offering it back.
Atlas doesn’t speak.He doesn’t have to.Everything about his stance says: point and I’ll break whatever you’re pointing at.I love him and hate him for it in the same breath.
Wren inhales slow.“My ex,” she says, and the two words cost so much air she has to pause.“He...he doesn’t stop.”
Kael’s expression doesn’t change, but something behind his eyes sharpens to a blade.“Is he here,” he asks, “or is he trying to be here?”
“Messages,” she says.“Calls under new numbers.Gifts when he can find where I am.Sometimes he—” She cuts herself off and shakes her head.“He likes to remind me he exists.”
Atlas’s hands curl loose, then looser, because he promised me in a look to hold the line.
Kael nods once, slow.“Okay.Then we remind him you’re not alone.”
“I don’t want you to fight him,” she says, eyes cutting to Atlas before she can stop them, then to me because she knows I will absolutely get myself arrested with a smile on if someone dares breathe near her wrong.
“I won’t fight him,” Atlas says, and the sentence has gravel in it but holds.“Unless he touches you.”
“Atlas,” I warn.
He clamps his jaw.“I won’t fight him,” he repeats, like the words are a mouthguard he has to keep in place.
Kael slides his phone from his pocket.“We’ll do this by the book first.Security footage at the facility.Escort program.Police report if you want.If you don’t, we still log incidents.We get his numbers to IT, have them flagged.We change your route for a while, vary your schedule, and we pair you at all times off-ice—one of us at minimum.You choose who and when.”
Wren blinks like she didn’t expect someone else to have a plan that didn’t involve fists.
“You don’t have to carry it alone,” I say, because last night taught me that repetition can be a balm when everything else feels like an alarm.“We make the load smaller.That’s it.”
Her eyes go bright.She nods once, a frayed movement that still feels like courage.
“Okay,” she whispers.“Okay.”
“You want us to know the name?”Kael asks gently.
Her mouth opens, closes.She looks at me.I tell her without words that the decision is hers, now and later and always.
