Because I knew her. Knew her tells. Knew her fears.
And I knew the way she looked at me last night wasn’t pretend.
She could ghost me all she wanted.
But Daphne Sommers just made the worst mistake of her life.
She made me want her—and now I wasn’t going to stop until she admitted she wanted me back.
I packed in silence.
Shoved each shirt into my duffel like it had done something wrong. The zipper caught halfway, but I yanked it shut, anyway. My knuckles were scraped from yesterday. Not from the game. From Theo.
He had it coming.
He ran his mouth one too many times—said her name like it was some joke, like she hadn’t just been in my bed, in my head, wrecking me from the inside out.
And now she was gone.
I left the hotel room like it was still burning behind me. It might as well have been.
Downstairs, the team was already gathered for breakfast. Noise greeted me before I even crossed the threshold—forks clinking, plates scraping, that steady rhythm of guys talking shit over coffee and pancakes.
But the second I walked in, it all… shifted.
Not quiet. But not the same.
Caleb gave me a nod from across the room, like nothing was off. Griffin was deep in a debate about syrup with Beckett. Adam was scrolling on his phone, not even pretending to listen.
Theo wasn’t there.
Good. I didn’t want to look at him.
“Yo, Kieren,” Derek called. “You eatin’ or just brooding like a villain all morning?”
I gave him a tight smirk. “Haven’t decided.”
He snorted and tossed me a protein bar. “Start with that. You look like hell.”
I caught it and sat at the end of the table, just far enough to keep space. Just close enough that they knew I wasn’t hiding.
No one said her name. Not once. But it was everywhere.
It was in the way Griffin side-eyed me when someone mentioned PR.
It was in the half-second pause when a waiter brought out extra coffee, then realized she wasn’t with me.
It was in the bruise blooming on my jaw from where Theo got one lucky shot before I put him down.
She’d made a mark on all of us—some more visible than others.
“Long night?” Adam asked, voice low.
I didn’t answer.
He went back to eating like he understood. Like he’d been there. Maybe he had.
I took a bite of the bar. It tasted like chalk.
