32. Evidence
Chapter thirty-two
Evidence
Sienna POV
My apartment is quiet in a way the bar never is.
Atticus notices. I watch him clock it when we come through the door.
The stillness of it, the particular smallness of a space that belongs to one person and knows it.
He doesn't say anything. He just sets his keys on the counter beside mine like it's something he's done before, and the sight of them there, together, does something low and certain in my gut.
"Drink?" I ask.
"No."
I don't want one either. I just needed something to do with my hands.
He crosses the room and I let him come. His hands find my face the way they did at the bar, careful and certain, and he looks at me for a long moment in the dark of my apartment like he's checking that I'm still real.
"Hey," he says quietly.
"Hey," I say back.
He kisses me once, slow, with none of the urgency from earlier. Just warmth. Just him. Then he pulls me in and I put my face against his chest and we stand there in my kitchen in the dark and I think about the text that came through at the bar.
8am. League office. Not optional.
He'd shown me without being asked. No spin, no management. Just the screen tilted toward me and his eyes reading my face.
"Tonight's still ours," he'd said.
It was.
We don't sleep much.
Not because of anything urgent. Just because the dark is quiet and we're in it together and there are things that feel easier to say when you can't see each other's faces clearly.
He tells me about his father. Not everything.
Enough. I tell him about the version of myself that existed before O'Malley's, the girl who thought survival and strength were the same thing.
He listens the way he does everything. Completely.
At some point I fall asleep against his shoulder and wake up to grey light coming through the curtains and the particular stillness of a space where someone has recently been.
His side of the bed is cool.
On the nightstand: his watch, which he forgot, and a note torn from the small pad I keep in the kitchen drawer.
Back by noon. Don't do anything I wouldn't do.
I read it twice. The second time I'm almost smiling.
I should go back to sleep.
I don't.
I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling and let the night come back in pieces.
The bar floor. The way he laughed when we slid off the desk and ended up on the floor and he didn't stop reaching for me when we landed.
The quiet after, his hand pressing mine flat against his chest, his voice saying things he'd never said out loud to anyone.
I've never let anyone see me like this.
I'd told him I saw him.
I meant it. That's the part I keep circling back to. Not the heat of it, not the wanting, though both of those are present and accounted for. The part that sits heaviest is how much I meant it. How clearly I saw him. How clearly he looked back.
My chest does something I don't have a clean name for.
I've been careful my whole life. Careful about who gets close, who gets the real version of me, who earns the parts I don't perform. The bar trained me to read people fast and trust them slow and I built a life around that principle and it has served me fine.
Atticus Knox is not fine.
Atticus Knox is a problem I walked into with my eyes open and a list of rules neither of us kept, and he is at a league meeting right now with his career on a knife's edge and his jacket is on my bedroom floor and I am lying in my own bed at seven-thirty in the morning thinking about a man for the first time in my life without the back exit already mapped.
That's new.
I'm still deciding how I feel about it when my phone lights up on the nightstand.
Dad.
I almost don't pick up.
I watch it pulse in the grey morning light and I think about Margot Chen's voice, steady and precise. Both are usable. I think about Atticus in the parking structure, phone raised, recording everything without flinching.
I pick up.
"Sienna." Warm. Careful. The voice he uses when he's already decided what he wants and is working backward from there. "I've been thinking about you."
I say nothing.
"I know last night was a lot." A pause designed to read as concern. "I know how you get when someone makes you feel safe. I understand it." Another pause, softer. "But you know what men like him do when the pressure gets real. When there's something more important than you on the line."
I keep my eyes on the ceiling.
"He'll choose the game," my father says. "The team, the captaincy, whatever they offer him to make this go away. They always do." His voice drops, gentle and certain. "You know that, sweetheart. You've always known that."
He sounds so reasonable.
He has always sounded so reasonable.
This is the speech he's been giving me my whole life in different rooms with different words.
Don't trust. Don't reach. Don't let anyone get close enough to leave you holding it.
From the man who taught me that softness was a liability, that armor was survival, who then spent fifteen years using every unguarded thing I'd given him as leverage.
I know this speech. I know every beat of it.
"I know what you're doing," I say.
A small silence.
"Sienna—"
"You're out of time." I sit up. The sheet falls and the morning air is cool and I am very, very awake.
"The legal extension was denied. Margot Chen's name is on the response and you know exactly what that means.
" I swing my legs over the side of the bed.
My feet find the floor. "You're calling me at seven-thirty in the morning because you're scared and you think I'm still the person who picks up and folds. "
Nothing.
"I'm not," I say. "I haven't been for a long time."
I hang up.
I sit on the edge of my bed in the quiet.
Atticus's jacket is on the floor where it landed last night. His watch is on my nightstand. His handwriting is on a torn piece of paper that I have apparently already decided I'm keeping.
I pick up my phone and call my father back.
He picks up fast. Surprised. Good.
"I'm filing a harassment report," I say.
"Today. I have your texts, your voicemails, the recording from my building, and the recording from the arena parking structure.
My lawyer has reviewed all of it." I keep my voice even.
"If you contact me, Mason, Atticus, or anyone connected to the Tridents, it goes to the police. Directly."
Silence.
Real silence. Not the practiced kind, not the pause he uses to make me second-guess myself. The silence of a man who has run every angle and come up empty.
"You won't," he says finally. Quiet now. The warmth completely gone. "You know what comes out if this goes public. What they'll print. What people will say about you."
"I know." I do. I've known for years. I've been afraid of it for years. I am sitting on the edge of my bed in the grey morning light with the man I love's jacket on my floor and I am, with some surprise, not afraid. "I've decided I can live with it."
The silence stretches.
Then his voice comes through, soft and precise, sharpened down to the last thing he has left.
"Then I'll tell Mason every detail of what you did for me," he says. "All of it."
The line goes dead.
I sit with it for a moment.
The grey light. The quiet apartment. The watch on my nightstand that he's going to need back.
I think about Mason at his kitchen table, forgiving me in the way of someone who does it without making you ask twice.
I think about Atticus at a league meeting right now, standing in front of people who want a reason to take something from him, because he chose to stand next to me.
I pick up my phone.
I call Mason.
He picks up on the first ring. Not sleeping. Already waiting.
"Hey," I say.
"Hey." Careful. Alert. He knows my voice.
"Dad just called." I pull Atticus's jacket off the floor and fold it across my lap. The leather is cool and it smells like him and I hold it there. "He's going to call you next. I need you to hear it from me first."
A beat.
"Okay," Mason says. "Tell me."
And I do.