23. Benched and Burning
Chapter twenty-three
Benched and Burning
Atticus POV
I read it twice. The words don't change the second time.
Suspended pending further conduct review. Effective immediately. A paragraph about optics and institutional integrity that I stop reading after the third sentence. Grant Calder's signature at the bottom.
I set my phone face-down on the kitchen counter and stand there in the quiet of the hotel room, in the city we're supposed to play tonight. A game I won't dress for.
I've taken penalties that cost us series wins. I've bled on the ice in front of fifty thousand people and skated it off and come back for the next shift. I've been called a monster in print, on television, by people who've never looked me in the eye.
This is different.
This has teeth.
I pick the phone back up and text Grant a single line: I'll be there when you need me. No argument. No defense. The worst thing I can do right now is give anyone more footage of me burning down.
Then I sit down and think about Sienna, still asleep in the next room, and try to figure out what I owe her this morning.
The locker room is the worst part.
Not the suspension itself. Not the league. The room.
I walk in at eight-fifteen, which I didn't have to do. Nothing requires me to be here. I could have stayed in the suite, ordered room service, let the day pass at a distance. But I've captained this team for four years. I'm not going to disappear without showing my face.
The conversation that was happening when I pushed the door open stops.
Not all at once. In pieces. Like a wave moving through the room, one man realizing and going quiet, then the next.
Jonah Pike is at his stall near the end of the row. He looks up, and his face does something complicated. He starts to speak.
Two of the veterans beat him to silence. Not with words. Just with the specific blankness you learn in locker rooms, the look that says not now, not here, stay out of it.
Jonah goes quiet.
I walk to my stall. Sit. Start going through my bag like I have somewhere to be.
The room divides the way I knew it would. Half of them giving me the silence that means they're not sure. The other half giving me the silence that means they've already decided. I can feel the line running through the middle of the room like a crack in ice. Not visible until you're already on it.
Razor Maddox doesn't look up from his phone.
He doesn't have to.
Delia calls at nine. I let it go to voicemail. She calls again. I pick up the second time because she'll keep going until I do.
"You need to be visible today," she says. No preamble. "Not in the arena. Somewhere controlled. Coffee shop. A walk. Something that lets us frame you as calm rather than hiding."
"I'm calm."
"I know you're calm. The cameras don't know you're calm. There's a difference."
I lean against the wall outside the facility, away from the door. The morning air is cold. It feels like something I earned. "What's the ask."
"Take Sienna somewhere. Keep it low-key, no comments, just let someone get a shot of you two. You look human. It helps."
I think about Sienna back at the suite. About the weight of her palm against my chest last night. The way she said okay like it cost something.
"I'll talk to her."
"Atticus—"
"I said I'll talk to her."
I hang up.
She's awake when I get back. Standing at the window in an oversized sleep shirt, coffee in both hands, looking out at the city with the particular stillness she gets when she's thinking hard and not ready to say it yet.
She turns when I come in. Reads my face.
"How bad is the room?" she asks.
Not how are you. Not are you okay. She already knows where to aim.
"Split," I say. "Maybe sixty-forty. Hard to call."
She nods. She's not surprised. I watch her file it away somewhere behind her eyes, in the part of her that keeps score on everyone who's ever underestimated her, and I think: she understands this life better than most people who actually play it.
"Delia wants a photo op," I say. "You and me. Somewhere public. Low pressure."
She raises an eyebrow. "Low pressure."
"Relatively."
"As opposed to the press conference and the hallway paparazzi and the staged cabin weekend."
"On the scale of things Delia has asked us to do," I say, "a cup of coffee in public is a four."
She's quiet for a moment. Her eyes hold something that isn't quite amusement. She looks at me the way she looks at things she's deciding, and I stay still, the way I've learned to stay still around her. Not pushing. Not filling the space. Just there.
"Okay," she says.
I start to turn.
"Atticus."
I stop.
She's looking at me from across the room, the city light cutting across her, and her voice is even when she says: "The locker room will come back. Not all of them. But the ones worth keeping."
I don't know what to do with that. With her saying it like she believes it more than I do. I stand there for a second too long.
"Yeah," I say.
I go find my jacket.
We walk two blocks to a place Sienna finds on her phone. A window table. Two black coffees. She sits across from me and we both know the point is to be seen and neither of us talks about it.
She wraps both hands around her cup. Her nails are short. Bare. Her knuckles are sharp. I've looked at her hands more times than I can account for.
"Stop staring," she says, without looking up.
"I'm not staring."
"You're doing the thing where you look at something and then look away before you think I'll notice."
"That's not staring. That's surveying."
She looks up. One corner of her mouth. "Surveying."
"Occupational habit."
"Occupational." She says it like she's checking to see if it's a real word. "Is that what this is. An occupation."
I look at her. She's already looking at me. Outside, someone's phone comes up, and I register it peripherally. A long lens, someone across the street. It runs through my mind for exactly one second before I put it down and look back at her.
"No," I say.
She holds my eyes. Whatever she finds in them she keeps to herself. She looks back down at her coffee.
Neither of us says anything else.
The moment settles anyway. Into something I don't have a word for.
When we're back at the facility, she tells me she's going to check in with the hospitality team. I tell her to stay out of the main arena corridor until I know where Razor is. She says of course the way she says it when she means I heard you and not I'll do it.
I watch her go.
I stand in the parking lot for a minute, trying to calculate the rest of the day, trying to find the clean line between what I can control and what I can't. I'm three items in when I hear footsteps behind me.
I know before I turn.
Mason stops six feet back. Hands in the pockets of his jacket. His shoulders are pulled in tight, the way they get when he's already been thinking about this for a while and is now going to say it.
Not loudly.
Mason's never loud when it counts.
"Did you actually report it?" he asks.
The air between us goes flat.
"Or did you let it happen," he continues, "and file a cover. After."
I look at him.
My brother. Who has believed in exactly one version of me for years. Not the captain, not the headline. The one he grew up beside. The one who's been carrying this for weeks and couldn't make himself ask until now.
I know the answer I'm going to give him. It's the truth. It costs nothing to say.
But I see his face. The fear underneath the flat voice, the fear that I'm going to confirm something he's been quietly dreading. I understand what this question actually is.
It isn't about the hazing.
It's about whether he was wrong about me.
Whether he was wrong about all of it.
I look at my brother in the parking lot of a facility that doesn't feel like mine right now, and I think about Sienna's hand against my chest last night, and I think about the list of things I have handled wrong and the one thing I need to get right.
"I reported it," I say. "Before the footage. Before Delia. Before any of it."
He stares at me.
"Sienna has the timestamps," I say. "Screenshots of the texts. The report submission. She pulled them herself."
Mason says nothing. Something moves behind his eyes. His hands stay in his pockets.
"I've got problems," I tell him. "Real ones. Razor's statement. The suspension. The room being cut in half." I hold his eye. "But this isn't one of them."
He's quiet for a long time.
I watch my brother work through something I can't fix for him. The years of holding a version of me up. The weight of having defended me to people who were already sure I wasn't worth defending. The specific exhaustion of loving someone like me.
When he speaks, his voice has shifted. Not soft. Just tired.
"I've been holding that question for three weeks," he says.
"I know."
"I couldn't ask Sienna. Didn't want to—" He stops. His throat moves. "If you'd done it, I needed to hear it from you."
"I know."
He looks out across the parking lot. Then back at me.
"The room will come back," he says.
I almost say: Sienna said the same thing.
I don't. I just nod.
Mason turns toward the door. He stops before he pulls it open.
"She told me she's not fake anymore," he says. He's not looking at me. "In the corridor. In front of everyone." A pause. "I was there."
He goes inside.
I stand in the parking lot in the cold and the quiet and I think about the particular weight of being believed by the people who know you well enough to know the difference.
Then I pull out my phone.
I need a lawyer. I need the timestamps. I need to figure out what her father is going to do next before he does it.
I go inside.