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I only knew I couldn’t remain inside a celebration built by people who’d decided I was the one person who couldn’t be trusted with my own life.
I opened the wardrobe and grabbed the first armful of clothes. Nothing was folded. Dresses, shirts, underwear, and shoes landed inside the suitcase in tangled piles while grief and fury fought for every breath.
Lance’s investigator followed each movement. Ryan’s foster records. His parents. His fights. Photographs from Flint. The bruise on my wrist. My body after it had fallen apart. A conference room in Milwaukee filled with strangers examining every piece of us Lance had rearranged into a lie.
Ryan had protected me through all of it.
Now I understood why he would never trust me enough to try again.
The realization hurt worse than losing him the first time because hope had survived that ending. It had lived inside treatment, every letter, every Inferno game I watched from my apartment, and every moment this weekend when Ryan’s hands remembered they belonged on me.
Lance had followed him into the future I once imagined sharing and tried to destroy that too.
Bliss and Aura had known.
I shoved another dress into the suitcase, packing fast enough to outrun the footsteps I knew would eventually stop outside my door.
16
Ryan
Charm disappears while Briggs is explaining to a former Devils executive that Cade’s wedding has become an elaborate hostage situation.
I lose sight of her near the staircase, find her again when she reaches the first landing, then watch strawberry-blond hair vanish beyond the railing. She doesn’t look back. I wait for her to reappear because Charm has spent the entire weekend moving between obligations with a clipboard in one hand and enough determination to make every employee inside the castle fear disappointing her.
She doesn’t.
The conversation surrounding me continues without requiring my participation. Cade stands near the bar beside one of his former coaches while Easton answers questions about the Fury’s upcoming season. Rider has somehow convinced three retired players that his newest contract includes a private jet. They’re studying him with enough interest that I can’t tell whether they believe him or want to purchase the same fictional clause.
Briggs remains beside me with a plate piled high enough to violate the structural limitations of porcelain.
“You’re staring at the stairs,” he says.
“I’m watching the room.”
“The room is behind you.”
“I’m multidirectional.”
He bites into something wrapped in bacon. “Your dick was directional during the scavenger hunt.”
Rider abandons the contract conversation immediately. “It repeatedly pointed Charm toward the correct route.”
“I was helping our team.”
“You pinned your teammate against a door,” Briggs says. “That feels contrary to the collaborative spirit.”
“We found the clue.”
“With your dick?”
“The clue wasn’t in her pants.”
“Did you check?”
I take Briggs’s drink and finish it.
He looks at the empty glass in my hand. “That belonged to me.”
