Chapter 22
BEA
Bonjour, menace. The words left me—half breath, half smile—still caught somewhere between sleep and the lingering warmth of the night before.
The kettle clicked as it settled onto the burner, metal meeting heat with a quiet, familiar sound that seemed louder in the hush of the apartment.
Steam hadn’t started yet, but I could already smell the faint mineral edge of warming water, the clean sharpness of it threading through the softer scents that still clung to everything else—linen, skin, the ghost of something citrus and warm that had soaked into the air overnight.
Alois stood at the counter. Barefoot. Unbothered. One hand braced against the edge as he reached for the tea tin with the other, movements precise without being careful, like he’d done this a hundred times in a place that belonged to him.
My fingers tightened slightly where they rested on his shoulder, the heat of his skin steady beneath my palm, solid in a way that grounded me faster than anything else in the room.
“Careful,” he breathed. “You keep saying that, people might start to believe it.”
I huffed a small laugh, my forehead tipping lightly against his back before I could stop myself. The contact was instinctive. Easy. My breath slid along his spine, and I felt the subtle shift in him.
“You are a menace,” I murmured, softer now, more certain. “I’ve seen the evidence.”
He turned then. Just enough that I had to lift my head, my hand sliding from his shoulder to his chest without thinking, my palm flattening.
His eyes caught mine—clear, alert in a way that had nothing to do with the morning—and for a second the rest of the apartment fell away completely.
His gaze dipped once—quick, deliberate—to where my hand rested against him, then back up, something unreadable flickering through the blue before it settled into something calmer.
“Dangerous thing,” he sighed evenly, reaching past me for the mug like the moment hadn’t just shifted under our feet, like he hadn’t noticed it at all. “Making claims you can’t prove.”
“I can prove all of them,” I countered, even as my voice came out softer than I intended, my hand lingering a fraction too long before I forced it to drop.
Alois handed me the mug without looking at me, his fingers brushing mine in the exchange—brief, unintentional, enough to send a sharp line of awareness straight up my arm anyway.
“Here,” he offered.
I curled my fingers around the warmth, heat seeping into my palms as I brought it closer, breathing in the familiar scent before taking a careful sip. Not too strong. Not too bitter. Balanced in a way that felt… perfect.
“You didn’t have to—” I started, the words automatic.
He cut me off before I could finish. “I know.”
I looked at him over the rim of the mug, something in my chest tightening at the ease of it. Not the act itself. The way he dismissed it. The way he didn’t need acknowledgment. Didn’t need anything back.
We moved around each other after that without speaking much.
He reached for a pan. I leaned against the counter, then shifted to make space without being asked.
Plates appeared. Utensils. Small, ordinary things that somehow felt heavier than they should have, like each one carried a quiet implication neither of us was willing to acknowledge.
I took another sip of my tea, letting the warmth settle deeper this time, even as something colder pressed in at the edges of my thoughts.
Because the world outside this apartment hadn’t stopped.
The gala.
The press.
The eyes that had followed us out.
The story we were supposed to be telling.
I lowered the mug slowly, my fingers tightening just slightly around it as reality began to reassemble itself piece by piece.
Alois turned toward me again, something in his expression shifting—subtle, but there—and I knew, without either of us saying it, that he felt it too.
The shift.
The end of whatever this quiet, suspended moment had been—it was time to go to work.
Alois and I moved about the rest of our morning in a smooth dance in the tiny space. Bumping and apologizing. And it should have boiled my blood. It usually did, but instead my body ached in his absence.
The apartment was too small for him—always had been—but somehow we fit.
Or maybe we didn’t, maybe that was the point.
Every movement brushed something. My hip caught the counter as he reached past me.
His arm grazed mine when I turned too quickly.
A quiet “sorry” here, a softer one there, both of us pretending it was accidental when it stopped feeling like that almost immediately.
It should have irritated me. It always had—crowded space, loss of control, too much awareness of another person’s body in mine.
But now everything was shifted just slightly off axis.
Every time he stepped away, my body noticed.
The absence registered before the logic did, like something had been pulled out from under my skin and left it exposed to cold air.
I felt it in the small spaces between us.
In the seconds where we weren’t touching.
By the time he pressed a kiss to my cheek—easy, unceremonious—and murmured that he’d see me later, I was still suspended somewhere just above reality, my body slow to come back down from the weight of him.
Not floating—no, not that light. It was heavier than that.
A lingering pull beneath my skin, like gravity had shifted overnight and I hadn’t recalibrated yet.
The arena didn’t greet me so much as close in around me the second I stepped inside, the temperature shift immediate, the air thinner, colder, carrying that familiar bite of ice that never fully left the building no matter how far you were from the rink.
The overhead lights felt harsher, catching on polished floors and reflective surfaces in a way that made everything look too clean, too exposed.
Voices overlapped in uneven layers—staff, players, operations—each one cutting through the next, none of them fully resolving into anything I could hold onto.
Radios crackled somewhere to my right, a voice half-swallowed by static, footsteps echoing in quick, purposeful rhythms down the corridor ahead of me.
It should have felt routine. It always did.
Today it didn’t. Today it felt like walking into something already in motion, something that didn’t need me to catch up before it started moving faster.
I heard it before I saw anyone looking at me.
Just enough.
A laugh that clipped short the second I passed, the tail end of it caught somewhere between amusement and restraint. A voice dropped just enough to pretend it wasn’t meant to carry, like lowering it changed the fact that the words were still there.
“…told you—”
“…no, but did you see—”
“…with Müller—”
I didn’t slow.
Didn’t turn.
Didn’t give them the satisfaction of confirming I’d heard a single word.
The PR office didn’t shift when I walked in. The noise stayed exactly where it was. Low. Threaded. Just restrained enough to pass as professional if no one looked too closely at it.
I felt the current running just beneath the surface of everything. My path stayed clean, straight through the middle of the room like I belonged exactly where I was walking—and only when the glow from the central display caught the edge of my vision did I let my focus shift.
There was no buildup. Just a still image, suspended in the center of the room like it had always been there.
Me.
Alois.
The tunnel.
A few nights ago.
I knew the moment immediately—not because of the angle or the framing. The heat of it. The sharp edge of adrenaline still bleeding off him, the way it had hooked into me without permission and dragged something just as volatile to the surface.
I’d been leaning in. My hand halfway lifted. My mouth open mid-sentence.
His head angled down toward me, his expression cut from something darker than anything that could be explained away as frustration alone.
It wasn’t a fight that read as distance.
It read as collision.
There was nothing performative about it.
Nothing I could reshape into something clean.
We didn’t look like a couple. We didn’t look like strategy. We didn’t look like anything I had ever signed off on. We looked like something real enough to make people question everything around it.
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I stood there just long enough to feel my blood run cold, before I moved. “Take it down.”
There was a half-second delay—someone deciding whether this was theirs to act on—before fingers moved, keys clicked, and the image disappeared.
“Who else?” I asked, already shifting, already moving.
Dylan was on his feet before I finished the question, tablet in hand, his expression somewhere between cautious and focused. “Couple of smaller outlets. One mid-tier picked it up. No major traction yet.”
“Tasha?”
“Monitoring. It’s not trending.”
Not trending meant nothing. It meant it hadn’t been fed properly. It meant no one had decided to push it.
That could change in seconds.
“Pull everything,” I barked, reaching for the nearest tablet without breaking stride. “Mentions, tags, cross-posting—anything tied to that image or language around it.”
My fingers were already moving, pulling feeds, filtering noise from signal, isolating patterns before they had the chance to become problems.
“What angle?” Dylan asked. He was watching me now, not the screen.
“Pressure,” I said, scanning quickly. “Post-game tension. Internal accountability. Competitive environment.”
He nodded once, sharp, already turning back.
The last of the morning slipped away without ever fully settling.