Chapter 16
BEA
A FEW WEEKS LATER
Minnesota wind that morning was unrelenting. Unforgiving in a way I had never experienced in Brazil. Not even in hurricane season.
It charged off the lake in sharp, slicing gusts that found every opening in my coat and slithered beneath the wool, needling my skin hard enough to make my eyes water before we even reached the courthouse steps.
Northbend in November had turned cruel overnight—gray sky, frozen sidewalks, wind that smelled faintly of snow and exhaust and the bitter burn of a city already bracing for winter.
My boots struck the pavement in quick, clipped beats, leather slick against old salt and slush, and for one stupid, disjointed second, all I could think about was the first time I’d worn proper boots around Alois Müller and how impossibly far away that version of me felt now.
Then the noise found us. It broke over the sidewalk in a violent wave the second our SUV door opened—voices rising over one another, camera shutters snapping in relentless bursts, questions hurled with all the precision and mercy of stones.
My pulse kicked hard enough to make the base of my throat ache.
Security moved first, legal close behind them, a wall of dark coats and practiced urgency cutting a narrow path toward the courthouse entrance, but it didn’t matter.
There was no real shielding from this. Not with cameras stretched overhead.
Not with microphones shoved forward like weapons.
Not with half the city apparently waiting outside to see whether the NHL’s resident monster was finally going to look like one in daylight.
A hand closed around mine. Not tentative. Not searching. Certain.
Alois’s fingers laced through mine with a pressure that left no room for hesitation, and just like that I was moving, pulled into motion beside him, my shoulder brushing the hard line of his coat as the crowd surged toward us.
The contact should have startled me. A month ago, maybe even two weeks ago, it would have.
Now it only sent a different kind of awareness skidding down my spine—hot and sharp and immediate, my body recognizing him before my brain had a chance to catch up.
“Restez avec moi.” His voice was pitched low enough that it barely existed beyond the space between us. Completely steady. No crack. No strain. Nothing to suggest the storm closing in from every side.
Stay with me. The words—simple, wrapped in his perfect accent—pulled my attention up anyway. To the hard line of his jaw. The fixed, unyielding set of his stare. The darkening of his irises from crystal or deep ocean blue. The slight knitting of his brows.
And then I saw it.
The only tell he gave.
A faint sheen of sweat gathered at his temple despite the cold.
The sharp, rhythmic pulse of the vein in his neck.
The smallest flicker at the corner of his eye—so subtle it would have been invisible if I hadn’t spent the last two weeks learning his subtle cues better than most people ever learned conversation.
That realization hit me so hard I almost stumbled.
Two weeks.
Two games served. One fine paid. A nonstop avalanche of headlines, speculation, panel segments, talking heads, social clips, hot takes, and tabloid photos that had taken on a life of their own so quickly I wasn’t sure when the legal fallout had stopped being the center of the story and we had taken its place.
Somewhere between the league handing down its punishment and this morning’s media circus, the focus had shifted.
Not away from Alois exactly—nothing ever really moved away from him—but sideways.
Onto us. Onto what we looked like standing too close, leaving together, arriving together, moving through the world with just enough practiced ease to make strangers believe they were watching something private unfold in public.
It should have helped.
From a PR standpoint, in some ways, it had.
The enraged discourse over the bar fight had been forced to split itself in half.
Some outlets still ran the same tired angle they always did when his name hit the news cycle—violent, unstable, liability, brute in a tailored coat—but others had found fresher blood in the relationship narrative.
Young PR strategist romantically linked to controversial Frosthawks enforcer.
New girlfriend stands by embattled star.
Team scandal complicated by romance rumors.
It was messier. More distracting. Harder to control.
This is getting messy. The thought slipped through me on instinct, polished smooth by repetition.
I had been saying some version of it to myself for days now, usually while staring at my laptop too late at night with the television muted in the background and my inbox multiplying faster than I could answer it.
This is all part of the plan. I’m better than this. The problem was, I had started to hear the lie in it. Because the mess wasn’t just professional anymore. It hadn’t been for longer than I wanted to admit.
A camera flash burst so bright it left a white smear across my vision.
Someone shouted Alois’s name. Someone else shouted mine.
My gloved fingers tightened around his hand on pure reflex, and the answering shift in his grip was immediate—firmer, anchoring, his body angling just enough to block some of the impact as we hit the base of the courthouse steps.
Questions chased us from every side.
“Alois, do you expect the charges to be dropped today?”
“Bea, is the team standing behind him no matter what?”
“Is this relationship real?”
“Mr. Müller, any comment on the league’s disciplinary action?”
“Miss Ribeiro, do you believe he acted in self-defense?”
“Frosthawks Double Down on Dangerous Player Amid Legal Fallout.” I didn’t hear that one out loud. It flashed as a headline in my mind.
Clean black type. Brutal and efficient. The kind of headline that wrote itself before anyone involved had the chance to breathe.
It flashed across my mind with such clarity I could practically see the layout—the photo they’d choose, the quote they’d twist, the way my name would end up wedged somewhere beneath his like a cautionary footnote.
Stop.
Not now.
My heel caught a ridge of old ice near the steps, and I lurched half an inch before recovering.
Alois’s hand tightened again, his shoulder knocking mine as he adjusted without breaking stride.
Publicly, he touched me like it was the easiest thing in the world.
Natural. Unthinking. The sort of man who guided a woman through a crowd because of course he did, because of course she belonged beside him.
Privately, it was the opposite. In the apartment, in the quiet, he barely touched me at all.
And I hated it. Not the fact that he wasn’t touching me in private. That was our deal. And the last shred of barrier I had left. I was thankful for the distance.
And yet—My body had started paying attention.
It noticed the heat of him before he got close.
The deep, clean smell of soap and starch and winter air that clung to his coat.
The roughness in his morning voice after too little sleep.
The exact weight of his silence across a breakfast table.
The sound of coffee beans grinding in the kitchen before sunrise, followed minutes later by the whistle of the kettle and the quiet certainty of a tea made exactly the way I liked it even though I had never once told him how I took it.
That one still unsettled me.
Almost as much as waking up three mornings ago in my bed with my laptop closed on the nightstand and a blanket pulled up over my shoulder after I’d fallen asleep on the couch working through damage-control notes and hearing prep.
I hadn’t asked him about it. He hadn’t mentioned it.
The omission had sat between us over breakfast, silent and enormous, while he drank his coffee and read something off his iPad like carrying me down the hall had ranked somewhere between loading the dishwasher and checking the weather.
A shout snapped close enough to my ear to make me flinch. “Bea, are you concerned for your safety?”
My head turned automatically toward the voice, and that was my mistake.
The question came from somewhere behind the main crush of cameras, ugly in a way that had nothing to do with volume.
It slid under my ribs and stayed there, meaner because it knew exactly what it was doing.
For half a second, the world narrowed around it.
Not the courthouse. Not the case. Just that ugly little implication, offered up for public consumption like bait.
Concerned for my safety.
As if I was some trembling girl being dragged along by a brute too powerful to escape. As if the thing unraveling me was fear.
As if it wasn’t the much more dangerous truth that I was worried about Alois—not his image, not the team, not the spin, not even what this hearing might cost my already fraying professional life, but him.
Whether he’d walk out of this untouched.
Whether the pressure was carving into him deeper than he’d ever let anyone see.
Whether the rigid, discipline he wore like armor would crack under the weight of cameras and judges and people who had decided what he was long before today.
He was supposed to be an assignment.
A difficult one. A career-defining one, sure.
A problem to solve. A reputation to stabilize.
A man whose edges I managed, not one whose silences I noticed.
Not one whose tension I felt in my own muscles.
Not one whose face I found myself thinking about at stupid, unguarded times—standing in line for coffee, answering emails, staring blankly out a conference room window while somebody droned on about optics and exposure.
This was not part of the plan. And I was starting to understand, with a clarity I deeply resented, that it hadn’t been for a while.