2. Not Your Mess to Clean
Chapter two
Not Your Mess to Clean
Sienna POV
Thursday nights at O'Malley's are a religion.
Not the quiet, candles-and-whispered-prayers kind. The loud kind. The kind with sticky floors and competing playlists and eight conversations happening at once and everyone needing something right now.
I love it.
I'm three people deep. Nodding at the guy in the Tridents jersey. Pouring a gin and tonic without looking. Half-listening to a woman at the far end explain her divorce in real time. Then I feel the room shift.
Not loud. Not obvious. Just a slight change in pressure, the way a bar crowd moves when something new walks in.
Reporters.
I clock them before the door finishes swinging. Two guys with phones already up, one woman scanning like she's looking for something specific. They don't order drinks. They don't sit down. They just stand at the edge of the crowd and point their cameras at my TV.
My TV. Above my bar.
I follow their line of sight.
And there I am.
The footage is shaky, shot from maybe thirty feet back, but it's clear enough. Me grabbing a rookie by the collar before he faceplants into a parking meter. Atticus Knox stepping in behind me. Big, solid, inevitable. His arm going around my waist like an instinct. Like he'd done it a hundred times.
The chyron at the bottom of the screen reads: TRIDENTS CAPTAIN LINKED TO MYSTERY WOMAN IN HAZING SCANDAL FALLOUT.
My bartender brain gets there first.
Problem.
"Hey." I set the gin and tonic down in front of the divorce woman without breaking stride. "Talk to me in five."
I move down the bar toward the reporters and I keep my face neutral and my voice easy, which is a skill I spent years building, and I say: "Can I help you find a seat?"
The woman looks up from her phone. "Are you Sienna Hart?"
"I'm the bartender. You want a drink or a table?"
She smiles. It doesn't reach anything. "We just have a few questions about—"
"Last call for questions is eleven. We're past that." I nod toward the door. "Have a good night."
They don't leave immediately, but they stop pushing, which is the best I'll get. I go back to work. My hands are steady. My face is fine.
My stomach is doing something I'm going to ignore.
The crowd thins a little after ten. Not much. It's a Thursday, not a Tuesday. But enough that I can breathe between orders instead of just during them. I'm restocking the well when I feel it again.
That shift in pressure.
Different this time.
I know before I turn around.
Atticus Knox walks through the front door like the room owes him something.
To be fair, the room seems to agree. People step aside without him asking, conversations drop half a volume, somebody at the pool table misses their shot and doesn't notice.
He's still in post-game clothes, dark jacket over a team pullover, jaw set tight enough to crack.
He doesn't sit down.
He comes straight to the bar and stops on the other side of it, and I take my time turning around because I've been running O'Malley's for four years and I don't jump for anyone.
"Sienna."
His voice is low. Controlled. The kind of controlled that means he's working at it.
"Knox." I pull a glass from the rack. "You look terrible."
"I need you to stay out of it."
"Out of what, specifically?" I fill the glass with water and set it in front of him. "My bar? The city? Thursday nights in general?"
"The footage." His jaw tightens. "The reporters. Whatever Delia from PR decides to make of it." He leans forward slightly, forearms on the bar, and drops his voice lower. "This is my mess. Not yours. Stay out of it and it'll blow over in a week."
I look at him.
He means it. I can see that. He's standing there all dark eyes and split lip, still bleeding a little from whatever happened on the ice tonight, laying it out like it's a reasonable transaction. Step back. Let me handle it. Don't complicate things.
He's not even being cruel about it. That's the thing about Atticus Knox. He's not cruel. He's just convinced he already knows what everyone else can handle.
"Last I checked," I say pleasantly, "this is my bar."
Something moves behind his eyes.
"I know that."
"And that's me on that footage." I lean my own elbows on the bar, close enough that I can see the exact moment he clocks the distance. "Standing in front of my bar, doing what I do every Thursday, which is make sure nobody gets hurt in my parking lot."
"Sienna—"
"So explain to me exactly which part of my own life I'm supposed to stay out of."
He doesn't have a quick answer for that. Atticus Knox, who always has an answer for everything, just looks at me with an expression I can't fully read. Frustration and something quieter underneath it. Something that doesn't have a clean name.
His eyes drop.
Just for a second. Just long enough.
My mouth.
Then he catches himself and his gaze goes back up and something closes behind his eyes and he straightens off the bar.
"I'm trying to keep you out of the headline," he says.
"I appreciate that." I push the water glass an inch closer to him. "Drink that. You look like you need it."
He stares at me for a beat.
Then, because he's Atticus Knox and he'd rather die than look rattled, he picks up the glass and drinks.
I go back to work. The divorce woman at the end of the bar has moved on to chapter two of the story, something involving a lake house and a husband who hired a better lawyer, and I pour her another glass and listen with both ears while the other half of my brain stays very aware of exactly where Atticus is standing.
He doesn't leave.
He doesn't order anything. He just stands there at the bar with his water glass and his split lip and his careful eyes moving around the room like he's cataloging exits, and I think about the footage on a loop.
His arm around my waist, slow motion, broadcast to an arena full of people.
I think about the reporters by the door and the way the woman said are you Sienna Hart like the answer was already going to be a problem.
He's not wrong that it's going to be a mess.
I'm not going to tell him that.
It's half past ten when my personal cell buzzes in my apron pocket. I'm mid-transaction. Tapping someone's card, sliding it back. I palm the phone without looking, plan to check it in thirty seconds.
Then it buzzes again. Same number.
I glance down.
Unknown.
I almost let it go. Unknown numbers after ten on a Thursday are never good news, and I have a bar to run and a hockey captain standing twelve feet away making my room feel smaller than it is.
I pick up anyway. Force of habit. Some part of me that never fully relaxed.
"O'Malley's, we're—"
"It's not the bar I'm calling."
The voice hits me like stepping into cold water. Familiar in the worst way. Smooth, careful, the particular warmth of a man who uses warmth like a tool.
My hand tightens on the phone.
"I saw you on the news, sweetheart." A pause. "We need to talk about what you owe me."
The bar is loud. The bar is always loud on Thursdays, the way I like it, the way I built it to be.
Right now I can't hear any of it.
"Don't call this number again." My voice comes out steady. The bar doesn't notice. Good.
"Sienna—"
I hang up.
I stand behind my bar with my hand around my phone and the noise of O'Malley's rushes back in around me. The pool table, the jukebox, the divorce woman laughing at something. I breathe through my nose and I do not look up.
I don't look at Atticus.
I don't need him to see my face right now.
I pull a glass from the rack. Pour something. Keep my hands moving.
Across the bar, I hear him set his water glass down. Quietly. Like he's been watching me the whole time.
I still don't look up.