CHAPTER 1 #2
“Who else saw?”
The question confirmed what Olivia had already suspected. He knew enough not to ask what happened.
“Apparently no one,” she said.
“Not apparently.” His voice sharpened. “Exactly.”
Alex wiped his bleeding knuckles against a handkerchief. “Camera was disabled. Parker’s man had help.”
Olivia turned toward him. “Parker?”
Coach Davis cursed under his breath.
Alex’s eyes stayed on the coach.
Too late, both men realized they had given her a name.
“Richard Parker?” Olivia asked.
The former chief financial officer of the Chicago Titans had resigned six years earlier.
That was the official language. In reality, he had disappeared from the organization overnight.
No farewell statement. No replacement ceremony.
One day he was Robert Carter’s closest executive ally; the next, his photograph had vanished from the administrative hallway.
Olivia had been nineteen. Her father had refused to discuss it.
“What does Richard Parker want with Ben?”
Coach Davis removed his glasses from his pocket and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“Not here.”
“Then where?”
“Somewhere your father’s security system isn’t blind.”
“That leaves approximately nowhere.”
Alex looked at the camera again.
Coach Davis’s silence became an answer.
A cold realization settled through Olivia.
The charity gala above them had required three layers of private security, city police at every entrance, and electronic access controls on every service door. Someone had disabled a camera, opened a restricted exit, and moved an injured man out of the arena without triggering an alarm.
Whoever helped him did not merely know the Titans’ system.
They belonged inside it.
Coach Davis moved first, crossing to the ventilation grille and prying at the edge with a key from his pocket. The metal panel loosened after two attempts. Behind it sat a narrow maintenance cavity, empty except for a strip of black adhesive and the clean rectangle where a device had rested.
“Recently removed,” he said.
Alex crouched beside him. He touched nothing, only examined the dust. “Small camera. Battery powered.”
Olivia looked down the corridor toward the locked door. “Then whoever photographed us was close enough to retrieve it after the stranger escaped.”
“Or before we entered the office,” Coach Davis said.
The idea that someone had remained inside the wall while they argued made her skin tighten.
Alex stood and moved nearer without touching her. His body became a shield by position alone. Olivia noticed the choice and resented that part of her welcomed it.
Coach Davis used his own phone to contact an independent security specialist rather than the arena command center. He gave no names, only the service-level location and a code Olivia recognized from emergency procedures. Then he turned to Alex.
“You arranged the meeting?”
“Yes.”
“You came alone?”
“Yes.”
“That was stupid even by your standards.”
“I did not know he would bring help.”
“You knew he had threatened Ben.”
Alex’s expression did not change, but his injured hand closed. “That was why I came alone.”
The logic was twisted and completely consistent with him. Olivia understood it too well: if violence had to land somewhere, Alex preferred to be the only available target.
“What did Gerard want?” Coach Davis asked.
The name lodged in Olivia’s memory.
“Money at first,” Alex said. “Then Robert. He claimed he had the original medical file from the development program.”
“What development program?” Olivia asked.
Neither man answered immediately.
The hesitation became evidence.
She looked from the coach to Alex. “Do not make me drag every sentence out of you.”
Coach Davis leaned against the wall. “Seven years ago, the Titans ran an elite youth camp. It produced two first-round picks, four professional contracts, and a scandal no one was allowed to call a scandal.”
“What happened?”
“A player collapsed.”
“Evan Hale?”
Alex’s gaze sharpened. “You know the name?”
“No. But the man who just escaped expected it to matter.”
Coach Davis continued. “Evan survived the camp incident. His scholarship ended soon after. Months later he died during private training.”
“And my father buried the connection.”
“That is what Parker claims.”
Olivia remembered Richard Parker from childhood: expensive winter coats, silver cuff links, a laugh that made adults lean closer.
He had taught her how to calculate compound interest on a paper napkin while her father entertained sponsors.
He had attended her mother’s funeral and held Robert upright near the grave.
Then he vanished from their lives.
“What was Alex’s connection to Evan?”
Alex looked toward the dead camera. “I played in the same camp.”
“Did you know him?”
“I do not remember.”
The answer came too carefully.
Coach Davis watched him. “Memory is not always voluntary.”
Alex ignored the comment.
Olivia moved to where Gerard had fallen. A dark smear marked the concrete. Near it, half beneath a utility cart, something reflected the fluorescent light.
She crouched.
Alex’s hand moved toward her and stopped in midair.
“What is it?” he asked.
Olivia used the corner of a clean tissue to lift a small metal charm. It was shaped like a wolf’s head, the old Titans Foundation emblem used before the team rebranded.
On the back were engraved initials.
E.H.
Coach Davis went silent.
Alex stared at the charm as though it had opened a door inside his mind.
“I have seen that,” he said.
“Where?” Olivia asked.
He pressed two fingers to his temple. “A locker room. Red helmet. Someone laughing because the chain kept catching on his pads.”
“Evan?”
“I think so.”
The memory disturbed him more than the blood on his hand.
Olivia placed the charm inside a clean plastic sleeve from the office first-aid kit. “Gerard carried this for seven years?”
“Or someone gave it to him tonight,” Coach Davis said.
Footsteps approached from the far corridor. Alex shifted instantly, but the independent security specialist announced herself before turning the corner. She was a compact woman in a gray coat who introduced herself as Mara Quinn and looked at the scene without visible surprise.
“You three touched anything?” she asked.
“Only each other’s patience,” Coach Davis said.
Mara photographed the grille, the blood, the damaged door, and the charm. She found a fiber caught on the lock—dark blue synthetic fabric from a security uniform—and a partial shoe print leading toward an unused freight elevator.
“The person helping him had legitimate access,” she said. “The alarm recognizes the route as authorized.”
Olivia looked at Alex. “Inside the organization.”
“Yes.”
Mara sealed the charm and asked Olivia to describe the stranger’s words exactly. When Olivia repeated the reference to her mother, Alex watched her face instead of the evidence.
“You do not need to stay for this,” he said quietly.
She almost laughed. “You still think leaving is the same as being safe.”
“No.” His gaze held hers. “I think you have had enough for one night.”
“That is mine to decide.”
He nodded once.
The immediate agreement unsettled her more than another argument would have.
She turned back to Mara and completed the statement. By the time they finished, the distant music upstairs had stopped. The arena settled into after-hours silence, every empty corridor now carrying the possibility of someone listening.
Coach Davis offered to escort Olivia to the executive level. She refused. Alex did not offer. He simply walked beside her when they left the tunnel, matching his pace to hers without pretending the choice belonged to him.
At the elevator, Olivia looked at the blood drying along his knuckles.
“You need stitches.”
“I have had worse.”
“That is not medical advice.”
“No.”
The doors opened. Neither stepped inside immediately.
Three years of resentment stood between them, crowded now by a dead player, a missing file, and the memory of Alex’s hand around her wrist.
“You told me especially not to trust you,” she said.
“I meant it.”
“Then why are you the only person here who looks afraid for me?”
His expression locked.
The elevator began to close. Olivia caught the door with her hand.
Alex answered so quietly she almost missed it.
“Because I have been afraid for you longer than you know.”
Olivia’s phone buzzed.
An unknown number.
She opened the message before Alex could stop her.
A photograph filled the screen.
It showed the three of them standing in the tunnel—Coach Davis near the intersection, Alex beside Olivia, the blood on his hand still visible.
The angle was high and close.
Not from the dead ceiling camera.
From somewhere behind the ventilation grille across the corridor.
The message beneath it contained one sentence.
YOU SHOULD HAVE STAYED AWAY, OLIVIA.
Alex took the phone from her hand.
This time she did not object.
His face became expressionless as he studied the photograph. Then he looked toward the grille.
“Mark,” he said quietly.
The coach followed his gaze.
Olivia’s skin prickled.
The metal slats were dark.
For one terrible second, she imagined an eye behind them.
Alex stepped between her and the wall.
“Someone knew you would take that elevator,” he said.
Olivia forced her voice to remain steady. “Or someone followed me.”
“No.” His eyes met hers. “They knew before you did.”
Upstairs, music still drifted faintly through the concrete. Donors were probably finishing dessert. Her father would be shaking hands beneath the Titans’ championship banners, unaware—or pretending to be unaware—that someone had turned his arena into a trap.
Olivia looked at Alex’s blood on her wrist.
“What happens now?”
His thumb brushed once over the mark, not touching her skin, only tracing the air above it.
“Now,” he said, “you stop trusting everyone who works for your father.”
She held his gaze.
“Does that include you?”
The answer came without hesitation.
“Especially me.”