CHAPTER 16 — SPONSORS DONT BLEED #3
“You're shaking and pissed.”
The intercom responded with bureaucratic calm—technical failure, crew en route, a few minutes' wait.
A few minutes in that space with Damon felt like a more intimate threat than the entire meeting.
I leaned against the opposite wall, arms crossed, trying to create distance.
The elevator was too small for that. His reflection multiplied every movement, every breath.
The scent of his subtle cologne, mixed with the fabric of his jacket and skin I knew better than I should, flooded the air too fast.
“Julian knows,” Damon said.
I closed my eyes for a second. “Julian knows a lot of things.”
“About us.”
I opened my eyes. Damon's reflection stared back at me. No accusation there. Just concern—and that left me more vulnerable than I wanted. “He suspects. Maybe that's enough. He wields suspicion like proof when it suits him.”
“He threatened to tell the team who you really are. What does that mean?”
The question came without cruelty, but my body still closed off.
I stared at the dead numbers on the panel, at the seam of the door, at anything that wasn't Damon.
The old urge to stay silent rose on reflex.
Protect your father. Protect Damon. Protect yourself if there's room left.
But the stuck elevator felt suspended outside the institution, outside the meeting, outside all the versions everyone had rehearsed.
And Damon had defended me in front of Julian.
Not enough to undo four years. Enough to earn a more honest piece of the fear.
“It means he can say I manipulated documents, that I tried to take down his father to protect mine, that I came back to use you as a way into the program,” I said. “He can make everything I've done look calculated. The internship, your recovery, the forced cohabitation.”
“And the truth?”
“The truth is too messy for a headline.”
“Give it to me anyway.”
I looked at him. Damon was too close, and the tension in his face wasn't just from his shoulder.
He wanted to touch—I knew. So did I. The elevator, the shock, the meeting, the adrenaline—all of it made proximity feel like a physical need.
But this time, desire didn't erase the question.
It sat beside it, hot and insistent, waiting for me to choose to stay.
“I'm not just protecting myself,” I said slowly.
“My father knew part of what was happening.
He tried to act—too late. He took a deal to get me out of the center and keep other players' scholarships while the official investigation went after your father.
That doesn't make him innocent. It also doesn't make him the monster Julian can sell if I speak without solid proof.
I spent four years carrying that guilt because if I screamed the wrong way, my father would go down, you'd go down again, and Julian would stay polished enough to call it all Bennett instability.”
Damon went still. The confession wasn't everything, but it was more than I'd ever said.
He stared at the elevator floor for a few seconds, visibly working through the pieces.
I waited for the accusation. Waited for the “so you lied.” Waited for the anger to swing back my way because that was the path we knew.
“Your father was involved,” he said.
“Yes.”
“But Julian used that to keep you quiet.”
“Yes.”
“And I used your silence as proof against you.”
The words caught me off guard. Coming from him like that, unadorned, they felt more intimate than the kiss we weren't having. I nodded once, because my throat wouldn't work.
Damon stepped toward me. I didn't back away.
The elevator felt even smaller. He raised his good hand and touched my face—just the edge of my jaw—with a carefulness I still didn't know how to accept without it hurting.
I closed my eyes for a second, and that was a mistake, because in the dark, the memory of his body came back whole.
When I opened them, he was looking at me like he finally understood that desire was the least complicated part of us.
“I want to kiss you right now,” he said.
My heart skipped a beat. “Terrible idea.”
“I know.”
“We're stuck in an elevator in the admin building right after a meeting about reputational risk.”
“I know that too.”
“If that door opens and someone from legal is on the other side, I'm throwing you in front of me as a distraction.”
“Fair.”
His mouth almost smiled. Mine did too, against all logic.
That small gesture eased something between us—not all the weight, but enough for me to breathe.
Damon didn't move forward. He waited. That waiting became more dangerous than any impulse.
I raised my hand and held his wrist, keeping his touch on my face for one more second before pulling away.
“No,” I said, and the word cost more than it should have. “Not because I don't want to.”
“Because you want it too much at the wrong time.”
“Because if we start using fear and panic as an excuse to grab onto each other, Julian wins even when he's not in the room.”
Damon nodded slowly. Frustration showed on his face, but also respect.
That respect was new enough to unsettle me more than a kiss would have.
The lights flickered, the elevator gave a small jolt, and resumed its descent.
We stepped half a pace apart before the doors opened on the ground floor.
Outside, two maintenance workers and an administrative assistant waited, looking concerned.
I stepped out first, heart racing, with the sensation of having left something unfinished inside that metal box.
In the main hallway, Damon got a message. He looked at the screen, and his face changed. Not to immediate anger. To resolve. That scared me more.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Julian just rescheduled a call with me for after lunch,” he said, putting his phone away. “Said he wants to talk as family, without any Bennetts around.”
“Damon, don't.”
“I'm not going to talk to him.”
“Then what are you going to do?”
He looked down the hallway, toward the old wing of the administrative building.
I only knew that path from campus maps, but Damon seemed to have slipped into a physical memory.
The wing where old archives were stored, offices of former administrators, and spaces Northaven no longer used but also never renovated—because tradition was a pretty word for dust with donors.
“My father had an office here,” Damon said. “After the investigation, Julian had almost everything cleared out, but some things stayed because nobody touches dead files without a reason. If there's a version Julian didn't control, it might be there.”
“This is a terrible idea.”
“You said I needed a strategy. This is one.”
“Breaking into an old office isn't strategy. It's a crime with good lighting.”
“Then stay here.”
The words hit me as both challenge and protection.
He wanted me to stay away from the risk, but he also knew I wouldn't. I looked at the hallway, at the glass exit door, at the building full of people who preferred organized versions.
Then I looked at Damon, at his injured shoulder, at the anger now aimed at the right surname. I took a deep breath.
“If you get caught, I'm denying I know you.”
“Too late for that, Bennett.”
We made our way through the old wing without speaking.
The hallway had dark carpet, dim lighting, and metal plaques with names of departments that no longer seemed to exist. Damon knew a side door, an old lock that opened with a card he still carried—perhaps by privilege, perhaps by administrative oversight.
His father's office had plastic sheets draped over some of the furniture, stacked boxes, and the smell of stagnant paper.
The window looked out onto the side of the arena, and for a second I understood what it meant to grow up under that gaze: the ice always visible, always demanding.
Damon went straight to a low cabinet behind the desk. He tried to pull a drawer with his left hand and sucked in a breath of pain before switching sides. I moved closer without thinking and grabbed the drawer.
“Let me,” I said. “Before your strategy lands you in the ER.”
He didn't argue. That told me how focused he was.
We dug through old folders, season reports, team photographs, sponsor letters, calendars, useless documents.
Then Damon stopped in front of a smaller box, hidden behind a loose panel at the back of the cabinet.
The name on the label made me forget to breathe.
BENNETT.
Damon looked at me before touching it. For the first time, there was no accusation on his face when he saw my surname in a Blackwood file. There was fear of what he'd find, and perhaps an even greater fear of confirming he'd spent years looking at the wrong person.
He opened the box.
Inside were copies of printed emails, marked medical reports, administrative notes, and a thin folder with my full name on the cover: Noah Elias Bennett. At the top of the first page, in the cold typeface of an internal memo, was a phrase underlined in red.
“Contain Henry Bennett's son before he delivers the attachments to athlete Damon Blackwood.”
Damon read it. Then read it again. His hand tightened on the edge of the paper, and for the first time since I'd returned to Northaven, the anger on his face didn't search for me.
She defended me.