Chapter 26
ALOIS
Icaught the edge of the story before I reached the door to the media room—heat trapped under low ceilings, bodies packed too close, voices layered over one another in tight, restless currents that didn’t settle so much as churn.
The air carried the sharp bite of camera batteries warming, stale coffee, damp wool from coats that hadn’t had time to dry.
Winter clung to everything in Northbend this time of year—boots tracking in salt, jackets shedding cold in waves—but inside the arena it turned dense, contained, like all of it had been sealed in with us.
“…audio—”
“…she said it—”
“…fabricated—”
The words moved fast, slipping between people in pieces that didn’t need to be whole to land.
My phone was still open in my hand, screen dimming and brightening again as another notification pushed through. I didn’t need to look at it again. I’d already heard it once. That had been enough.
Her voice.
Clear.
Unaware.
I closed my hand around the phone and slid it into my pocket, the motion deliberate, contained. The instinct to move faster—to cut through the noise, find the source, shut it down—rose clean and familiar under my skin.
Ahead of me, the media room door stood open, light spilling out into the hallway in a hard, artificial wash that flattened everything it touched. Inside, the hum was sharper—voices layered tighter, equipment shifting, anticipation building in uneven spikes.
A storm that hadn’t broken yet.
I stepped forward.
Lucy stood halfway down the corridor, phone pressed tight to her ear, one hand braced against the wall like she was holding herself in place through sheer force of will.
Her voice cut low and fast, stripped of anything soft.
“No, I don’t care what Stella thinks she has—get legal on it now.
I want it flagged before it hits another cycle. ”
Her gaze flicked up as I passed, sharp, assessing. She didn’t stop talking, but something in her expression shifted—recognition, understanding, a quick recalibration that tracked exactly where I was headed.
Good.
That was one less thing I needed to manage.
I didn’t slow.
Inside the room, movement pulled my attention immediately—not toward the podium, but across it.
Bea.
She wasn’t standing still.
She was moving.
Cutting across the front row with purpose, tablet in hand, already mid-conversation with one of the assistants, her voice low, controlled, directing. Adjusting. Fixing.
Working.
Her coat was still on—she hadn’t even had time to shed it—dark fabric catching the light as she shifted, one hand pushing her hair back from her face in a sharp, impatient motion that told me everything I needed to know.
She and Lucy had gotten here fast.
Not fast enough.
A reporter leaned forward in his seat, phone angled just slightly, thumb hovering over the screen like he was waiting for a moment to press it into the center of the room.
“…we have the audio—”
Bea’s head turned. She shifted toward the podium, shoulders straightening, breath pulling in slow and measured as she stepped into position—ready to take it, to absorb it, to handle it the way she handled everything else.
I moved. Each step placed with intention as I crossed the threshold into the room, the temperature rising under the lights, the noise shifting a fraction as bodies registered movement at the edge of their focus.
Heads turned. In a ripple. Camera lenses followed a half second later, adjusting instinctively, chasing the center of gravity as it changed.
Bea saw me. The movement in her stopped mid-step. She angled toward me immediately, closing the distance with the same efficiency she brought to everything else, her hand lowering from the tablet as she stepped into my space.
“What are you doing?” she asked under her breath, the words tight, controlled, already layered with the beginnings of a plan she was trying to hold together in real time.
Her fingers brushed my wrist—not pulling, not stopping, just anchoring.
Her eyes moved fast—reading me, calculating, trying to get ahead of whatever I was about to do before I did it. She was already bracing to take control back, to pivot, to redirect the room into something she could manage.
The smallest crack opened in her composure. Her gaze held mine a fraction longer, searching, something uneasy slipping in under the surface of her control.
Behind us, a voice cut through the room, louder now.
“Is it true the relationship was fabricated for publicity?”
Another followed immediately, crackling in the air.
“Did the organization orchestrate this as a distraction?”
“Was Ms. Ribeiro selected because of her connection to ownership?”
The questions stacked, overlapping, each one crafted with venom to stick, to pull something out of the room whether it was ready to give in or not.
Bea’s hand fell away from my wrist as she turned back toward the podium, posture resetting on instinct, breath steadying as she prepared to step forward and take the hit head-on.
I stepped past her.
One step.
Then another.
Taking the space before she could.
The shift was immediate. Subtle, but absolute. Microphones angled forward. Chairs scraped faintly. The layered noise of the room tightened, sharpening around a new focal point.
I reached the podium and set my hand against the edge. Cool wood under my palm.
I lifted my gaze—and began. “I’m going to answer this once.”
The room didn’t go silent. Noise didn’t disappear. It just narrowed. Focused. Every voice, every lens, every expectation aligning toward the same point.
A reporter in the front row leaned forward, pen already moving. Another adjusted the angle of her phone, thumb hovering over the screen like she was waiting for something worth sending.
“It started as an assignment,” I continued, carrying without force. “That’s not speculation. That’s fact.”
A flicker of movement at the edge of my vision—Bea, still behind me now, still close enough that I could feel the shift in her breathing, already trying to get ahead of the direction I was taking this.
I didn’t look back.
I held the room.
“Your job,” I went on, eyes moving deliberately across the first row, “is to take information and turn it into something people will pay attention to. You shape it. You frame it. You decide what matters and what doesn’t.”
A few heads shifted.
“My job,” I added, “is to play hockey.”
A ripple of sound moved through the room—small, uncertain, not quite laughter, not quite agreement.
I let it pass.
“And her job,” I said, cutting clean through the space, “is to manage everything the rest of you create when you decide that a gossip matters more than the truth.”
That landed. I saw it in the way a couple of pens paused. The way one of the cameras dipped, then corrected.
“She didn’t create anything.” I didn’t pause for their questions. “She was assigned to a situation that already existed. She handled it. She controlled it. She did her job better than anyone else in this organization would have under the same pressure.”
Another voice cut in. “Then how do you explain the audio?”
I shifted my weight slightly, steadying myself against the edge of the podium. “You don’t.”
Confusion flickered across a the reporters’ faces. Someone opened their mouth, ready to follow—I didn’t give them time.
“You don’t explain stolen audio,” I clarified, my gaze steady now, deliberate, locking onto the reporter who’d asked the question. “You don’t justify it. You don’t build a narrative around something that was never meant to exist in the first place.”
The room shifted.
“You don’t care how it was obtained,” I added, the edge finally slipping in, unmistakable. “You don’t care that it was taken without her knowledge. Without her consent. That it was recorded in a private conversation and released because it was convenient.”
A few cameras lowered.
“You care that it fits the story you want to sell,” I said. “That it’s easy. That it gives you someone to point at. To profit off.” My jaw tightened once. “And she’s easy to point at. She’s connected. She’s visible. That makes her useful.”
A pause. Then, quieter—more precise. “That doesn’t make her expendable.”
No one spoke.
Not immediately.
I let it sit for a second, long enough for it to settle into the edges of the room, into the places where people didn’t like to admit they’d been called out.
Then I straightened slightly, lifting my hand from the podium, letting the space reset.
“You want something real?” I asked.
The question didn’t rise. It cut.
The room stilled.
I let my gaze move once more across the faces in front of me—reporters, cameras, phones, people waiting to decide what this was going to be.
Then I stopped looking at them.
And looked at her.
Bea stood a few feet behind me now, no longer off to the side, no longer edged out of the frame. She had stepped into the space on her own—shoulders squared, chin lifted, the line of her spine steady even as everything around her threatened to tilt.
Her eyes locked on mine.
“C’est réel,” I whispered, the words meant for her and her alone as I reached for her hand.
The contact hit harder than anything that had come before it—more than the noise, more than the lights, more than the weight of the room pressing in from every direction.
A breath moved through the space—soft, collective, almost imperceptible—but it didn’t reach her. Didn’t reach us. Because the world had already started to slip.
Bea’s focus didn’t waver, but something behind it shifted—something deeper than composure, deeper than control. The edges of the room blurred at the corners of her vision, movement dragging just slightly behind itself as if everything was a beat too slow to keep up.
Sound dulled. Like it had been pushed underwater. The scrape of chairs. The hum of lights. The low murmur of voices trying to rise again—all of it faded into something indistinct, something that couldn’t quite reach her through the tight, rushing pulse in her ears.
Her breath caught.