8. Away Games
Chapter eight
Away Games
Sienna POV
I did my homework.
Three days before the team introduction, I sat at the bar after close with my laptop and a glass of wine I didn't drink and went through the Tridents roster like I was cramming for a final exam. Stats, history, reputation. The internet tells you more about a man than he ever will.
Marcus Holt, defenseman. Two misconduct charges in two seasons. Not for fighting. For mouthing off at female officials. The kind of man who thinks a title makes him untouchable.
Derek Voss, left wing. Three separate viral clips, three different versions of the same behavior: making women feel small in public, grinning when he gets caught, like getting caught is just part of the game.
Then there's Razor Maddox. I spent the most time on him.
Everything about his public profile is careful.
The interviews, the charity appearances, the way he stands at the edge of team photos like he knows where the camera will be.
Men who work that hard at careful are usually hiding something worth hiding.
The rest of the roster is a spread. A few seem decent. Most are unknowns. And Jonah Pike, the rookie at the center of all of this, looks like a kid who hasn't figured out yet that he's allowed to take up space.
I walk into the Tridents' practice facility on Tuesday morning knowing exactly what I'm walking into.
Prepared is the only way I know how to walk into anything.
The introduction happens in a glass-walled conference room off the main corridor.
Twenty players. Half of the coaching staff. Delia standing near the back like a stage manager who doesn't trust her actors.
And Atticus.
He's already in the room when I arrive, standing near the window with his arms loose at his sides, jacket on, looking like a man who got there early and claimed the room without making a production of it. His eyes find me the second I step through the door.
Not a greeting. Not a performance. Just a lock, quick and certain, before he looks away.
I take my position at the front.
I don't need him to introduce me. That was one of my terms, and he agreed without argument, which told me more about him than anything Delia had said in the preceding week.
"Sienna Hart." I let my voice carry without raising it.
Twenty men, two dozen chairs, one woman at the front of the room.
I've worked rooms harder than this. "I'll be coordinating hospitality for sponsor appearances through the rest of the season.
You'll see me at events. I handle logistics, manage guest experience, and run interference when something's about to become a problem.
" I pause just long enough. "Think of me as the person making sure nobody embarrasses the organization in front of the people writing the checks. "
A few of them laugh. The easy ones. The ones already treating this like something normal, already deciding I'm fine.
I clock the ones who don't.
Marcus Holt is in the second row with his arms crossed and a smile that hasn't reached his eyes once since I started talking. He's doing the thing men like him always do: a slow, deliberate scan that starts at my face and makes its way south like he's pricing something.
He's not subtle. He doesn't want to be.
"Hospitality," he says, drawing it out like it tastes interesting. "That's a lot of syllables for—"
He lets it hang there. Smiling. Waiting to see what I do with it.
I know what he's doing. He wants me to finish it for him, or flinch, or get professional and tight-lipped so he can tell himself I can't take a joke.
I open my mouth.
Atticus speaks first.
He doesn't stand up. Doesn't raise his voice. Doesn't even turn his head all the way toward Holt. He just says four words in a register so flat and final it doesn't leave room for interpretation.
"Finish that sentence, Marcus."
The room doesn't explode. It doesn't need to.
It just—shifts. Shoulders pull back. Eyes drop.
Someone near the window suddenly develops a consuming interest in his phone.
Holt's smile holds for exactly two seconds before it doesn't anymore, and he uncrosses his arms and sits back in his chair like a man who has just remembered something important.
"Just saying welcome," Holt says.
"Appreciated," I say.
My voice comes out even. Unbothered. I am good at unbothered.
What I don't do is look at Atticus. Not yet. Because I know if I look at him right now my face will do something I'm not ready to explain.
I make it through the rest of the introduction on autopilot.
Logistics, event calendar, point of contact protocols.
I field two genuine questions from players who seem to actually care about the sponsor circuit and one passive-aggressive comment from a veteran I've already mentally categorized as Derek Voss's spiritual twin.
When it breaks up, I stay.
Delia catches Atticus for a schedule question near the door.
Players filter out in clusters, some nodding at me on the way by, some not.
Razor Maddox walks past without looking at me at all.
Not rudely. Just with the focused absence of someone who has already assessed the room and filed everything into its place.
I file him right back.
Jonah Pike is the last one out.
He's pulling on his jacket with his eyes down, the body language of someone who has learned to take up as little space as possible.
His jacket is too big across the shoulders, the kind of fit that happens when someone buys clothes for the player they're going to become, not the one they are yet.
I've seen that specific posture before, usually on people who've had it trained into them by someone they couldn't afford to disappoint.
"Pike."
He stops. Looks up. He's young — younger than I expected — and he's got the kind of face that still shows everything.
"You're allowed to just say hi," I tell him.
Something in him loosens.
"Hi," he says.
"Hi." I give him the easy smile. The one I use at the bar for regulars who've been coming in for three years and still get nervous ordering. Like there's nowhere I'd rather be. "You'll see me around."
He nods. Zips his jacket. Goes.
I watch him go and think: that's the one they tried to break.
It doesn't make me feel good. It just makes the whole thing more concrete.
The room empties. Delia follows the last assistant out and closes the door.
It's just us.
Me at the end of the conference table. Atticus at the window, the city gray behind him, morning light catching the angles of his face and the flat set of his shoulders.
He's still watching me.
That's the thing I keep coming back to. He's been watching me since the moment I walked in.
Not the way Holt was watching me. Nothing like that.
Steady, unbroken, like he positioned himself before I arrived and has been quietly running threat assessments ever since.
I noticed it when I took my place at the front of the room.
I noticed it when Holt started talking. I noticed it in the half-second before Atticus spoke, because there was a beat.
Brief, controlled. Like he waited to see if I needed it or if he should stay out of it.
He didn't wait long. But he waited.
I don't know what to do with that.
"Holt's going to be a problem," I say.
"He already was." Atticus says it the way you'd say the weather is cold. Factual. Unsurprised.
"I had it."
"I know."
Two words. No debate in them, no qualifier. Just acknowledgment, clean and immediate.
I pick up my folder. The leather is warm from where I've been holding it and I focus on that for a second, just so I have somewhere to put my attention that isn't him.
"Then why—"
"Because you shouldn't have to." His voice doesn't change. Still quiet. Still even. "You handled him fine. You were going to keep handling him. But you shouldn't have to spend the next six months managing Marcus Holt's ego on top of everything else you're already carrying."
I look at him then. I can't help it.
He's not performing it. That's the part that keeps throwing me. There's no look on his face that wants credit for it, no expectation of gratitude, nothing that says he's waiting for me to be impressed. He's just standing there like he said something obvious.
"I've been managing men like him since before I had a liquor license," I say.
"I know that too."
"It's not a hardship."
"Doesn't mean it should be yours to carry alone."
The thing about Atticus Knox is that he doesn't argue the way I expect him to.
I came into this arrangement braced for someone who would confuse protecting me with managing me.
Someone who would make calls and explain them later, who would put himself between me and everything and call it care.
Mason warned me about it. I warned myself about it.
But Atticus isn't explaining himself. He's not asking for anything back.
He just looked at something that was happening to me and decided it was going to stop.
I clear my throat. "Delia wants a logistics run-through before five."
"I'll be there."
I head for the door. My heels are quiet on the conference room floor and the city hums faintly through the glass and everything feels manageable, contained, fine.
Then my phone buzzes.
Not a call. A notification. The security app my landlord installed last year after a break-in three buildings down.
I slow without stopping. Tap it.
Visitor check-in — 9:14 AM.
My building has a digital sign-in system. Residents only. No walk-ups without a resident escort.
I read the name once. Then again, as if the second time will change it.
Hart, Calvin.
A second line beneath it, auto-generated by the system: Resident unavailable. Visitor logged and departed.
My stomach doesn't drop. I am past the age where he can do that to me with just a name on a screen.
But my hands. I notice them before I can stop myself. Not entirely steady.
He came. He was turned away. He left.
For now.
I slide the phone back into my pocket. Smooth. Easy. The way I've learned to absorb things in public without showing the landing.
I don't look back at Atticus.
Because if I look back at him right now, with his eyes already on me and that unbroken attention he's been running all morning, he'll see it before I can stop him.
And I'm not ready for him to see it.
Not yet.