Chapter 26 Wren
Atlas walks away like the hallway is a cliff edge, and the only way to keep from falling is to turn his back on me.
Finn exhales behind me, a careful sound. Kael doesn’t say anything at all. His presence is a steady pressure at my right shoulder—permission to stay, permission to go, permission to breathe. None of it is enough.
“I’ll be right back,” I say, though nobody asked me to explain.
I follow Atlas.
The light changes around the corner, humming bulbs strobing faintly where the corridor narrows.
The concrete smells like cold and rubber and the faint sweetness of the detergent the custodians use after games.
Atlas stops halfway down the hall, both palms braced against painted cinderblock, head bowed.
His back rises and falls too fast. His shoulders look like they’re holding a building up.
I slow. I don’t touch him.
“Atlas?”
He lifts his head sharply, the motion too controlled to be casual. For a split second, I see all of it—anger, yes, but buried under something else. Hurt. A strange, flayed kind of hurt that doesn’t have anywhere to live in a man like him.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he says, voice low and wrecked.
“You walked away,” I answer, softer than I mean to. “I thought you might need—”
“Don’t say help.” His mouth twists. “I don’t know what to do with help.”
The honesty hits hard. “Okay,” I whisper. “Then I’ll just... be.”
He huffs out a humorless breath, pushes off the wall, and turns. He’s too big for this hallway. He makes the air thinner by standing in it. But the look in his eyes isn’t a threat. It’s a warning—for me or for himself, I can’t tell.
“I don’t want to scare you,” he says.
“You don’t,” I tell him.
A flicker of something passes over his face—disbelief, hope, both, neither. He starts to shake his head, then stops. His hands flex, curl, uncurl, like he needs a fight and there isn’t one to have.
“What did I do wrong?” I ask, and it comes out before I can pull it back. “Because it felt like I did something wrong back there.”
His stare goes sharp. “You didn’t.”
“Then why are you looking at me like that?”
He swallows. The tendon in his neck jumps. “Because I...” He drags a hand down his face. “It’s not you.”
I wait. The silence between us stretches, a wire that could snap if either of us pulls too hard.
Finally, quiet, almost shameful: “I saw something this morning I didn’t want to see.”
My pulse stumbles. My mind sprints in a dozen directions—Adrian, my phone, the bar, the way I left my blinds open a few inches like an idiot. “What did you see?”
He shakes his head, jaw clenching. “Doesn’t matter. Wasn’t my business.” A breath. “I’m not asking questions. I’m not... I don’t get to ask.”
I take a step closer, then another, slow enough he can stop me if he needs to. He doesn’t move.
“You can ask,” I say. “Maybe I won’t answer. But you can ask.”
He laughs once, soft and broken. “That’s worse.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to put something on your back you already can’t carry.”
The corridor is too bright. The world is too loud.
I am suddenly and acutely aware of the way my heart has learned to beat around fear, around men who taught it to panic.
Atlas isn’t panic. He is danger, yes, but not the kind that turns rooms into traps.
He’s the kind that throws himself between you and the trap and tears it apart with his hands.
“Atlas,” I say, “if this is about me... you’re allowed to care.”
He goes very still.
“Don’t,” he says after a moment, voice roughened to sand. “Don’t use that word like it isn’t gasoline.”
“You’re the one who keeps setting matches,” I answer, and it’s not brave so much as it is tired.
He exhales, almost a laugh, almost a groan. “I’m trying not to.”
“Then tell me what to do,” I say. “Because I’m standing here trying not to shake, and you’re standing here trying not to explode, and neither one of us looks fine.”
His eyes close. When he opens them, the anger has banked to an ember. What burns now is something else. “Be safe,” he says quietly. “Just—be safe.”
The words make my throat ache. It’s not an answer and it’s everything.
He saw something. Not specific, not named, not an accusation—just enough to scratch up all his edges.
I think of Finn’s careful softness last night, the way he put his shoulder under my weight and didn’t ask me to explain the heaviness; of Kael’s pen on my clipboard, IF YOU WANT scrawled under a practical note; of Atlas throwing himself into drills like the only language he trusts is impact.
Three men trying to hold me up without knowing where the cracks are.
“I’m trying,” I whisper.
His gaze flickers to my pocket like he can sense the ghost of a buzz there. “You don’t have to tell me who,” he adds, softer still. “But if someone is putting that look in your eyes—” His jaw works. “I don’t care if I’m the last person you want to call. Call me. I’ll answer.”
The floor tilts. Not with fear this time. With something like relief.
“I don’t want you to get in trouble,” I say.
“I’m not worried about me.”
“I am,” I say, and the honesty makes heat rise under my skin. “I’m worried about all of you.”
He flinches. “Why?”
“Because you keep throwing yourselves at a thing you can’t see yet.”
He studies me for a long time, trying to map the space between what I’m willing to say and what I can’t. He steps closer, then checks himself, stopping with inches to spare. It feels like a cliff edge for both of us.
“Wren,” he says, and my name in his mouth is too big for this hallway. “Tell me how not to make it worse.”
“Don’t fight Finn,” I say first, because that one is easiest. “Don’t fight anyone. Not for me.”
The muscle in his cheek jumps. “No promises.”
“Atlas.”
His eyes lift. I hold them.
“Please,” I add, and the word cracks down the middle.
He looks away, like the sound hurt. “Fine. I won’t fight him.”
“Or Kael.”
“Jesus,” he mutters, a ghost of a smile, shaking his head. “I’m not suicidal.”
“Or the players who say dumb things in the locker room,” I push, because the picture of him exploding at some rookie who jokes about the trainer he’s clearly protective of makes my stomach roll.
His mouth flattens. “They won’t.”
He says it like a threat to the air, and somehow that helps.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I admit. “Any of it.”
“Me neither.”
We stand there with our failure between us and it feels, for the first time all morning, like something we’re surviving instead of something that’s going to swallow us whole.
“I’m sorry I looked at you the way I did yesterday,” he says quietly. “Like I was the problem. I hate that I put that in your body. I hate that you felt—” He breaks off, knuckles whitening where his fist should be. He unclenches them. “I hate it.”
“You didn’t,” I say. “You didn’t put it there.”
He searches my face, and I don’t look away. If he’s going to see anything, let it be the truth and not the shadow of it.
He nods once, accepting the answer without making me hand over the name it came from.
“Okay,” he whispers. “Okay.”
There’s a crack in his voice now that wasn’t there before. It makes me brave in tiny, foolish increments.
“Can I—” I start, then stop. “Can I touch you?”
He freezes, eyes going darker, softer. “You never have to ask me that,” he says, and the way he says never is a vow.
“I want to,” I say, because the asking is part of the healing too.
He swallows. “Yeah.”
I reach for his wrist, the same place I touched yesterday, the place where his pulse beats hot and insistent beneath skin. My fingers land lightly. His breath stutters. His hands stay loose at his sides, open, honest.
“See?” I whisper. “Not afraid.”
He closes his eyes and lets out a breath that trembles all the way down. When he opens them again, the storm has moved off the horizon a little.
“You’re shaking,” he says, and there’s no judgment in it. Only notice.
“I’m trying to stop,” I answer, half-smile, half-grimace.
He looks at my hand on his wrist, then at my face. “You don’t have to. You can shake and I’ll still stand here.”
Something tight gives under my ribs. I don’t know whether to thank him or cry, so I do neither. I just keep breathing.
“Tell me what you need right now,” he says. “Not forever. Right now.”
Right now is easier than always. Right now I need to feel like the ground is real. Right now I need to know he won’t walk away because I’m messy and late to trust. Right now I need to believe someone will catch me if I tip too far toward the past.
“Walk me back,” I say. “But slow.”
He nods immediately, like he was only waiting to be told.
He doesn’t take my hand. He turns his body toward the corner and keeps the distance I set, matching his stride to mine so precisely we must look choreographed.
At the end of the corridor, where the brighter light starts again, he stops without me asking and checks my face.
“You good?” he asks.
“No,” I say. “But I’m better.”
He accepts that like it’s a win. “Better counts.”
We turn the corner. The hallway widens. The noise of the rink filters back in—the scrape of blades, a burst of laughter from a rookie trying to imitate Finn’s deke, a whistle that could only be Kael’s.
We’re almost to the mouth of the main corridor when Atlas slows, like there’s one more thing he hasn’t decided whether to say.
“If he—” He stops, jaw flexing. “If whoever it is texts you during practice again...”
My stomach dips. He noticed. Of course he noticed.
“I can’t stop them,” I say. “Not yet.”
“No,” he agrees. “But I can stand where you can see me.”
I look up at him, and the offer lands with a surprising amount of grace for how blunt it is. Not fixing. Not prying. Not demanding. Standing.
“Okay,” I say.
His mouth tips, barely. “Okay.”
We step back into the main hall. Finn is there, close but not crowding, a question in his eyes he doesn’t voice. Kael leans against the end of the bench, pretending to read a chart, attention cast like a net that misses nothing.
I feel a pull toward each of them in three directions at once. It should tear me. It doesn’t. It makes the ground steadier, oddly. Three anchors, three warnings, three chances.
Atlas shifts, the tension in him not gone so much as contained. He tilts his head toward the rink. “You want me where you can see me or where you can’t?”
“Where I can,” I say before the past can choose for me.
He nods like I gave him an assignment he intends to ace, then steps onto the rubber mat that leads to the gate. He doesn’t look back. He doesn’t have to. I feel him settle into the space he promised like a big, breathing, stubborn lighthouse.
Finn moves first, handing me a water bottle, eyes asking Are you okay without making me prove it.
“Better,” I say, and the corner of his mouth lifts, relief loosening his shoulders.
Kael pushes off the bench, whistling the rookies into formation. His gaze passes over me, sticks for a second, speaks in a language nobody else here hears: If you want.
“I know,” I whisper, and I don’t even realize I said it out loud until Finn’s hand brushes mine in a quiet, Me too.
The whistle blows. Bodies move. I set my clipboard on the cart and pull the bottom drawer open. My phone sits there where I left it, black glass reflecting my face in a too-bright room. I don’t pick it up. I don’t need to. The buzzing can wait.
“Hydrate,” I call out to a rookie who’s already trying to skip water in favor of heroics. “You cramp, I bench you in front of your mom Friday.”
He groans, grabs a bottle, and shoots me a grin. The arena breathes. So do I.
On the ice, Atlas takes his spot on the far lane, where I can see him every time I look up. He doesn’t wave. He doesn’t nod. He just exists there, heavy and certain, exactly where I asked him to be.
Finn skates past the glass and taps it twice with his stick—hello, I’m here—before sliding into drill position. Kael blows the whistle and the whole machine starts to move under his hand.
I stand at the boards and let the world be big again. The fear is still there. The texts are still there. The past is patient. But right now, I am upright. Right now, I am not alone in a hallway. Right now, I have three men learning how to hold a storm without trying to control it.
Better counts.
I wrap a wrist. I check a blade. I laugh at a terrible joke. I don’t look at my phone. When my hands start to tremble, I look up. Atlas is there, not moving, not asking, not pushing.
I’m not fine.
But the ground holds.
And for today, that is enough.