22. The Past with Teeth
Chapter twenty-two
The Past with Teeth
Sienna POV
Atticus hands me his phone without a word.
His face tells me enough. Whatever is on the screen, it already landed on him like a fist.
I watch the video twice.
The first time, I don't breathe.
It's me at seventeen. No, eighteen, barely.
Sitting in a gray plastic chair in a room that smelled like recycled air and bad decisions.
My hair is pulled back. My hands are folded on the table in front of me like I rehearsed it.
I probably did. My father was very careful about how I should hold my hands.
The audio is tinny through the phone speaker but the words are clear enough.
The incident occurred on the fourteenth. My father was home with me that evening.
A lie. Clean and practiced and completely mine.
The timestamp in the corner of the screen reads the date I have spent seven years trying to forget.
I lower the phone.
Atticus is still. He hasn't moved since he handed it to me. He's sitting on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees and his eyes on my face, and he's doing the thing he does. Reading me without asking. Clocking everything I'm not saying.
"How old is this footage?" he asks. Quiet. Careful.
"Seven years." My voice comes out flat. "Give or take."
He doesn't say anything. He just waits.
That's the thing about Atticus Knox that no one tells you. Everyone expects the arrogance, the short fuse, the captain's authority that fills a room. What they don't expect is the patience. The patient, terrible quality of a man who has decided you're worth waiting for.
It makes it harder to lie to him.
I set the phone on the nightstand face-down.
"My father was investigated for fraud." I keep my eyes on the wall. "Wire fraud, tax evasion, a few other things with long names that all added up to the same conclusion: he'd been stealing from his business partners for four years." I pause. "He was going to prison. He knew it. So he came to me."
I can still feel it. The weight of him sitting across from me at the kitchen table.
The way he'd looked tired instead of guilty, like the inconvenient part wasn't what he'd done but that he'd gotten caught.
The way he'd reached across and covered my hand with his and said I need you, baby girl in the voice he only used when he needed something.
"He needed someone to adjust his timeline. Shift one evening by a few hours. Said the investigators had the wrong date and all I had to do was correct it." I finally look at Atticus. "He made it sound like a clerical error."
"But it wasn't."
"No." The word lands like a stone. "It wasn't."
Something hardens behind his eyes. Not at me. I've gotten good enough at reading him to know the difference.
"I was eighteen and scared and I didn't have a lawyer or a plan and my father was the only parent I had left. And I—" I stop. Press my lips together. "I gave the statement. Exactly the way he wrote it. And it worked. The charges got complicated enough that most of them were dropped."
The room is so quiet I can hear the fire still breathing in the other room.
"He went home," I say. "And I went back to school. And I told myself it was done."
Atticus hasn't moved. His eyes are on mine and they're not soft. He doesn't do soft the way other people do. But they're not cold either. They're the eyes of a man who is listening so hard it almost hurts to watch.
"How long has he been holding it?" he asks.
"Since I turned twenty-two and stopped taking his calls." A beat. "He sent me a copy of the footage on my birthday. No note. Just: here's what I have. Stay available."
Something moves through Atticus's face. Gone fast, but I catch it. Not pity. Fury. The contained, quiet kind that settles behind the eyes and doesn't move until it's ready.
"Sienna."
"Don't." I hold up a hand. "Don't apologize for him. Don't tell me it's not my fault. I know what it was. I've had seven years to work out what it was."
"I wasn't going to apologize for him."
I look at him.
"I was going to say you were eighteen and alone and he knew exactly what he was doing." His voice is even. Measured. "That's not a gray area."
I don't answer.
The thing is, I've said those words to myself before. In the mirror, in the dark, in the three a.m. hour when the bar is closed and the silence gets heavy. I've said you were a kid and he used you and sometimes I even believe it.
Hearing it from him is different.
I don't know what to do with different right now.
"He's going to release it," I say. "If we don't pay him. He said by morning."
"Then we don't pay him."
I stare at him. "Atticus—"
"We don't pay him." He says it again, same tone, like the repetition makes it simpler.
He stands up from the bed and he's not pacing.
He never paces. He just reconfigures. Something in the set of his shoulders has shifted into the same stillness I watched him carry into the penalty box after he dropped his gloves for Jonah.
"Paying him doesn't end it. You know that. "
"I know that." My voice comes out quieter than I want it to. "But releasing it does."
He looks at me.
"My name," I say. "On a fraudulent statement. That's not a thing that goes away, Atticus. That follows me. The bar, my license, everything I built."
He doesn't hesitate. "Then we get ahead of it."
He's not bluffing. The statute ran out years ago — my father has no legal exposure left. Releasing that footage costs him exactly nothing. He could hand it to every outlet in the city before sunrise and walk away clean. That's always been the point.
"Controlled disclosure." He crosses the room. Stops two feet from me. Close enough that I have to tip my chin up. "Your lawyer, the team's legal team, the league if we have to. We choose the framing before he does."
"We."
"Yes." No hesitation. "We."
I look at his face. The scar through his brow. The permanent furrow between his eyes that looks like anger but I'm starting to understand is just the way he concentrates. The mouth that kissed me an hour ago like I was something he'd been waiting years to say out loud.
"You'd do that," I say slowly. "Take this on. On top of everything already happening with the investigation, with Razor's statement."
"Yes."
"Atticus." I say his name differently than I mean to. "This could blow back on you. The league is already looking for reasons."
"I know."
"You could lose the captaincy."
"I know." He says it like it's already calculated. Already accepted. Like the math came out a certain way and he's made his peace with the answer.
The steadiness I've been maintaining since he handed me the phone splinters, quietly, where he can't see it.
I have spent my entire adult life making sure I didn't need anyone.
Not because I'm fearless. Because I know what it feels like to need someone and have them turn that need into a weapon.
I know what it feels like when the person who's supposed to protect you is the one deciding how much leverage you're worth.
Atticus has every reason to cut me loose right now.
His captaincy is hanging by a thread. A league investigation has his phone.
His best veteran just handed investigators a villain narrative with his name on it.
And I am standing in a cabin in the middle of nowhere with a seven-year-old fraud statement and a father who doesn't care who he burns.
He should walk.
He's not walking.
"Why?" My voice comes out rougher than I intend.
He looks at me for a long moment. The fire crackles in the other room. Outside, the wind moves through the pines.
"Because you were alone then," he says finally. "And you don't have to be now."
The words hit somewhere I don't have a name for and stay there.
I don't cry. I am not going to cry. I have not cried in front of another person in four years and I am absolutely not starting in a PR sponsor cabin at one in the morning.
But my hands aren't entirely steady when I reach out and press my palm flat against his chest. Just to feel it. The solid, certain thud of his heart under my hand.
His eyes drop to where I'm touching him.
"Okay," I say.
Something in his face loosens. Just slightly. Just enough.
"Okay," he says back.
He covers my hand with his. Not gripping, just warm, just there. We stand in the quiet of the cabin while the fire burns down and the clock moves and neither of us rushes away from the weight of what just happened.
Then his phone lights up on the nightstand.
He glances at it. His expression doesn't change.
I look.
The email preview reads:
FROM: NHL LEAGUE OFFICE — PRIORITY RE: Atticus Knox — Conduct Review — Suspension Pending
The blood drains from my face.
He picks up the phone. Reads the full email. Sets it down.
Every muscle in his face goes still. His voice, when he speaks, is completely even.
"Well," he says. "There it is."
I stare at him. At the man who just promised to take on my disaster on top of his own, who just had his suspension landed in the same minute he made that promise, who is standing here in a cabin with his hand still warm over mine and his face utterly, infuriatingly calm.
"Atticus—"
"We handle it." His eyes find mine. "Remember?"
I do.
I just didn't know how much it would cost him when he said it.