16. Enemy Heat
Chapter sixteen
Enemy Heat
Sienna POV
The bar knows before I do.
That's the thing about O'Malley's on a weeknight. It's a living thing. It breathes. It carries information in the same current as the noise, and I've been tending it long enough to feel when the temperature changes before anyone opens their mouth.
Tonight the temperature is wrong.
I clock it in the way people sit. The extra lean-in at the corner table. The way Kevin from accounting keeps glancing at the TV above the taps like he's waiting for something to confirm.
I don't look at the screen.
I pour. I smile. I move.
It's Donna who says it first. Not to me, just loud enough that I can't pretend I didn't hear. She's three drinks deep, settled at the far end of the bar, and she says it to her friend like it's nothing, like it's just another piece of gossip she picked up between work and wine.
"That Razor Maddox came forward. Said Knox was behind all of it."
I set the bottle down. Quiet. Controlled.
"Witness statement," her friend says. "It's all over the league feed. Official."
I pick the bottle back up.
I keep moving.
By nine o'clock, the whole bar has the story. I know because I know how gossip moves in a room. It starts in clusters and then spreads horizontal, person to person, until everyone's drinking from the same version of events.
Atticus Knox, villain. Corroborated.
I pour seven drinks without looking at the TV once.
The group at the end of the bar is the loudest. Four guys, two pitchers in, sports-opinion voice fully activated. I know the type. I've been managing the type since I was nineteen.
"Captain of the team. Of course it was him. Guys like that, the whole captain thing is just cover."
"Leadership," the one in the blue jacket scoffs. "Right. Leadership for what?"
"Hazing a kid half his size."
"Should've pulled his C the second the footage dropped."
I'm filling a glass when the one in the blue jacket says it, and I don't stop moving, don't look up, don't give them the satisfaction of an audience.
But my hands are wrong.
Still on the outside. Completely wrong on the inside.
I set the glass down in front of the woman waiting for it and I take two seconds before I open my mouth. Two seconds to sound like I'm just making conversation. Casual. Light.
"Maddox has had a personal issue with Knox for three seasons," I say. "His witness statement is one guy with an axe to grind. That's not corroboration, that's a grudge."
Silence.
Blue Jacket looks at me.
"You know him?"
"I know the difference between evidence and someone looking for an exit."
I move to the next customer.
I don't look back. I don't need to.
What I do is stand at the far end of the bar thirty seconds later with my back to the room and my hands braced against the sink and breathe through the realization that I just defended him on instinct, without thinking, without performance. It felt personal because it is personal now.
I hate that.
I hate how personal it felt.
He shows up at ten forty-five.
No text. No call ahead. He just walks through the door in his practice gear. No tie, no PR armor, none of the performance of it. I know the second I see his face that the investigators took his phone today and handed him something worse in return.
He doesn't sit down. He stands at the bar like he owns the space without needing to prove it, hands loose at his sides, and he looks at me with eyes that are steady on the surface and exhausted underneath.
"I need you at community service tomorrow," he says.
His voice is even. Controlled. Everything about him is controlled.
But there's a stillness to him that isn't calm. The kind I've learned to read. The kind that means he's been holding something since before he walked in here.
"What happened?"
"Razor filed a statement. League investigators came in today. They took my phone."
I keep my face still. "I heard."
"I need you there tomorrow." He pauses. "Today. Could you leave now?"
I'm already untying my apron.
Marco takes the rest of the shift without me having to ask twice. He reads the room the same way I do. It's why I hired him. All it takes is one look at Atticus standing at the bar and one look at me with my apron in my hand for him to take the full station without a word.
I grab my jacket from the back.
We don't talk on the way out. The night air hits cold off the street and I fall into step beside him without discussing it, and his stride shortens to match mine. There's a version of that I could explain away as courtesy.
I don't try.
The parking lot is mostly empty. His car is the only one under the east light, and he stops beside it but doesn't move toward the door. He stands there with his hands in his pockets and looks at the middle distance. Past the lot, past the street, somewhere none of it is.
I wait.
Atticus Knox is not a man who speaks before he's ready, and I've learned that pushing him before he gets there only costs time.
"Razor's been feeding the league a narrative since the investigation opened." He says it to the air in front of him. Quiet. Flat. "I stopped the hazing. I reported it. And Razor filed a statement calling me the architect." A pause. "Because I made his life difficult when he started it."
I don't say anything.
"The league already wanted a villain. He handed them one with documentation."
The word documentation lands the way it's meant to. Specifically. Deliberately. Like he knows exactly how it reads against him.
I look at the side of his face. The way his shoulders drop exactly one degree and don't come back up. The way the control is just barely enough.
"Is there anything on your phone that helps you?"
"Everything on my phone helps me."
"Then they'll find it."
He doesn't answer.
I step closer. Not reaching for him, just closing the distance until I'm within his peripheral vision and he has to register me instead of staring through the dark.
"You didn't do it, Atticus."
"I know that."
"Then say it like you believe it."
He finally looks at me. Full eye contact, the kind that always feels like too much and not enough at the same time, and there's something in there I'm not ready to catalog but can't stop looking at anyway.
"The league thinks I'm a monster." His voice drops to something low and private. "I need them to see what you see."
A beat.
Then, quieter: "I'm not sure I know what that is anymore."
It catches me off guard. The honesty of it. The admission. This is not a man who says things like that. This is a man who leads with I have this handled and never lets you see what he paid for it.
He's letting me see it now.
I hold his gaze and I don't look away and I say what's true because it's the only thing that seems useful right now.
"It's someone who stopped the hazing when he could've looked the other way. It's someone who drove me home years ago and walked me to my door and told me I was safe." I hold steady. "It's someone who sat in a parking lot for forty minutes to make sure my father left."
Something moves across his face. Too fast to read.
"That's what I see," I say. "Someone who shows up."
He doesn't say anything.
He doesn't have to.
We stand there in the parking lot in the cold with the bar light spilling orange out onto the pavement, and the pull between us is a physical thing now.
Not subtle. Not something I can pretend is just proximity and stress and circumstances.
It lives in the six inches between us and I feel it the same way I feel a room about to go loud. In the chest, before anything happens.
I should step back.
I don't.
He drops his eyes to my mouth for exactly one second before he looks away.
"Seven," he says. "I'll pick you up out front." His voice comes out a shade rougher than before.
I nod once. Turn toward the door.
"Sienna."
I stop.
"Thank you." A pause. "For earlier. In the bar."
I glance back over my shoulder. "I don't know what you're talking about."
The corner of his mouth shifts. Not quite a smile. Something quieter than that.
"Sure," he says. "See you at seven."
I walk back inside with my pulse three beats too fast and my chest tight from how hard I've been holding it together, and I tie my apron back on and step behind my bar and don't look at the door.
I don't need to.
I already know he's still standing in the parking lot.
I already know he doesn't leave until I'm inside.