Page 105 of Her Player

“Send it, Seth.”

The image came through thirty seconds later. I opened it with steady hands and made myself look.

It was a good photograph. That was the first thing I registered, and I hated myself for it. Whoever took it had caught us in the gray early morning light, the iron gate of my property framing the shot like something out of a magazine spread neither of us agreed to. Rhett was fully dressed, his jacket half zipped, one hand cupping my jaw. My head was tilted up toward his the way it always did when he got close enough that gravity just took over. My robe caught the light. My glasses sat crooked on my face. My hair was down and loose and completely untamed.

I looked nothing like Victoria Caldwell, owner of the Las Vegas Vipers, billionaire, woman who had not left the house without full armor in fourteen years.

I looked like a woman in love.

That was the second thing I registered.

And the third, the one that sat like a damn rock in the center of my chest while Seth breathed carefully on the other end of the line, was that we looked right together. Right in a way that made every reason I’d catalogued against it feel suddenly, deeply stupid. Like the fourteen year age gap and the ownership conflict and the PHL conduct policy and every single reason I’d catalogued for three years were completely invisible in the gray morning light.

The caption underneath read: Love on the Ice?

I locked my phone screen.

“And Seth — the PHL conduct clause. Walk me through the worst case.”

His pause was one beat too long. “Worst case is a forced divestment review. If they determine the relationship constitutes a conflict of interest that compromises competitive integrity, they can mandate you relinquish operational control of the franchise.”

The franchise Ryan built.

The franchise I rebuilt.

Seth called back eleven minutes later.

I was still standing at the kitchen counter. I hadn’t moved. My coffee had gone fully cold and I hadn’t touched it and outside the window Las Vegas was waking up in that slow golden way it did on weekday mornings when the city was pretending to be a normal place that normal people lived in instead of whatever it actually was.

“The PHL office called,” Seth said. “Commissioner Dalton’s office specifically.”

I closed my eyes for exactly one second. “How fast.”

“Forty minutes after the photos dropped. They were waiting for us to call them first and when we didn’t they moved.” He paused. “Victoria, I want to be honest with you about what we’re looking at.”

“Then be honest.”

He exhaled. “The PHL Governance Charter has a conflict of interest provision under Article Fourteen. It covers any relationship between a team owner and a player under that owner’s direct financial authority. It doesn’t prohibit the relationship outright — there’s no specific language banning it. But it triggers a mandatory review process.”

“Define mandatory.”

“You’ll need to appear before a three-person governance committee within thirty days. You’ll submit documentation — financial records, contract history, roster decisions, anything that touches Rhett’s employment with the Vipers going back to his signing. They’ll look for evidence that the relationship influenced any competitive or contractual decision.”

“It didn’t.”

“I know that,” Seth said. “But we have to prove it. And in the meantime—” He paused again in that careful way that meant the next part was the part he’d been building toward. “In the meantime the review stays open. Which means it’ll be public. Which means every sports outlet in the country will be running a countdown clock on it until it closes.”

I turned away from the window. “Through the championship.”

“Yes.”

I let that sit for a moment. The championship was in forty-eight hours. Forty-eight hours of every camera in that arena pointed not just at the game but at the owner’s box. At me. Every decision I made between now and the final buzzer viewed through the lens of a governance review that hadn’t existed yesterday morning.

“What about Rhett’s contract?” I asked.

“That’s actually your strongest argument,” Seth said, and I heard papers shuffling on his end. “His current contract was negotiated eighteen months ago by your general manager David Chu with independent legal counsel on both sides. You recused yourself entirely from those negotiations. I have the documentation. There’s a clear paper trail showing you had no involvement.”

I had done that damn deliberately. Not because I anticipated this exact situation, I hadn’t let myself imagine this exact situation eighteen months ago, but because I ran a clean organization and I always had.