3. Off-Limits, Still
Chapter three
Off-Limits, Still
Atticus POV
Delia Vance doesn't knock.
She walks into the film room at six-oh-three in the morning with a printed itinerary, a coffee she didn't offer to share, and the particular energy of someone who has already decided how the conversation ends.
I'm the only one here. That's not an accident.
I come in early because the facility is different at six a.m. No cameras, no staff, no one watching the captain perform being a captain.
Just ice noise from the zamboni running laps two floors down and the low hum of fluorescent lights that have always needed replacing.
Delia drops the itinerary on the table in front of me.
I don't pick it up.
"Community service starts Monday," she says.
"Youth hockey clinic, Tuesday and Thursday mornings.
Sponsor circuit kicks off next weekend. Three events, all family-friendly, all photographed.
" She pulls out the chair across from me and sits without being invited.
"The league wants a reformed-leader narrative. We give them one."
I look at the itinerary. Twelve items. Color-coded.
"You printed this at what, five a.m.?"
"Four-thirty." She doesn't blink. "I also built the media package, drafted the social rollout, and had three calls with the league's PR liaison before you finished your coffee."
That's Delia. She's not cruel about it. She's running a different clock than everyone else, and she wants you to know it.
I've worked with her for three years. She's good at her job the way a scalpel is good at its job: precise, useful, and not something you want pointed at you by accident.
"The package works," she says, "but it needs an anchor. Someone beside you who reads as real. Warm. The kind of person the public looks at and thinks: okay, maybe he's not what the headline says."
I already know where she's going.
I let her get there anyway.
"Sienna Hart." She slides her phone across the table.
The bar footage, pulled up and paused. Sienna in the frame, her hand flat against a drunk rookie's chest, her chin up, not backing down.
"She's already in the story. She's photogenic, she's credible, she's not a WAG or a brand partner.
She's a civilian. That's gold right now. "
"No."
Delia doesn't flinch. "Atticus—"
"She's not a prop." I push the phone back. "Find someone else."
"There is no one else. The story already has her in it.
Trying to cut her out now makes the footage look worse.
Like you're hiding something. Like she's something to hide.
" Delia folds her hands on the table, which means she's about to say the thing she's been building to.
"Right now she's a question mark. We make her an answer. "
"She didn't sign up for this."
"Neither did you." Her voice doesn't soften exactly. It levels out. "But here we are."
I stand up. The itinerary stays on the table.
"I'll do the clinics. I'll do the sponsor circuit." I pick up my coffee. "Sienna's out."
Delia watches me move toward the door. She doesn't argue. That's the thing about her. She knows when to let a person walk away, because she's already planned for it.
"The league wants a decision by tomorrow morning," she calls after me. "Just so you know."
I don't go straight to O'Malley's.
I go to practice first, because the team exists and the team needs a captain who shows up, even when the jumbotron spent last night replaying footage of him like a guilty verdict.
I run drills. I don't look at Razor Maddox.
He's a veteran who thinks seniority is a license, and right now he's watching me the way people watch something they think is already finished.
I give Jonah Pike a correction on his edge work and watch the kid's shoulders drop two inches with relief.
Like being coached by me is still normal.
Like the world hasn't shifted into something uglier.
It's barely normal. But I can give him that much.
Coach Hale pulls me aside after.
Old-school. The kind that doesn't talk unless he has something to say. Thirty years behind a bench. Eyes that have watched too many players self-destruct to be surprised by any of it.
"League called Grant," he says. Meaning our GM. "Investigation's formal now."
"I know."
"You reported it."
"Yes."
He looks at me for a long moment. He looks at the ice like the right words are somewhere in it. "Then stay clean and stay visible. Don't give them anything else to point at."
He walks away before I can tell him that's the plan.
O'Malley's is closed at two in the afternoon.
The sign says it opens at four, but the back light is on. The warm amber one that bleeds through the gap under the delivery door. She's here. She opens every day herself, because that's how Sienna runs things: personally, completely, without asking anyone to do what she's capable of doing herself.
I've known that about her for three years. It's one of the things I've been careful not to think about too hard.
I pull into the lot across the street and I'm reaching for my door handle when I see him.
He's on the sidewalk about fifteen feet from the bar's front entrance. Not moving. Not on his phone. Not waiting for a ride or checking a menu or doing any of the things a normal person does when they're standing on a sidewalk.
Watching the window.
My hands go still. Completely, deliberately still.
I know this posture. I've seen it in guys who play dirty. The stillness of someone who has already decided what they're going to do and is waiting for the right moment. Patient. Unhurried. Like the waiting is part of it.
He's maybe fifty, going gray at the temples, dressed in the kind of neat-but-cheap way that means someone who wants to look like he has money and doesn't. His hands are in his jacket pockets. His weight is forward, slightly. Like he's ready to move.
He's watching the bar the way you watch something you own.
I don't get out of the car.
I sit back and I watch him watch the bar and I run through everything I know about Sienna Hart in the specific, operational way I know my team: strengths, pressure points, what she protects and what protects her.
She's Mason's best friend. Has been since they were twenty-two and Mason brought her around like a stray he'd found and decided to keep.
Except she was the least stray-like person in the room.
Ran the bar from the time she was twenty-two, inherited it from a man named O'Malley who apparently saw her worth faster than her own family did.
She's been taking care of herself for a long time, which means she's also been handling threats alone for a long time.
Last night on the phone. The way her spine went tight and her voice went flat. That wasn't the first time.
The man on the sidewalk doesn't move.
I put the car in park.
Forty minutes.
He stands there for forty minutes, doing nothing, watching. A couple of times he shifts his weight, turns slightly, looks up the street like he's checking whether anyone's coming. Once he pulls out his phone, reads something, puts it away.
At three-seventeen, he walks away.
I watch him go until he rounds the corner and disappears.
My shoulders are up around my ears and I didn't notice until now.
I should go in. That was the whole point of coming here. Walk into the bar, tell Sienna she's not being used as my narrative anchor, make sure she understands it cleanly so she doesn't spend the next week waiting for a knock on the door from Delia's team.
I should tell her I'll handle whatever this is.
I should probably figure out what this is first.
My phone buzzes on the passenger seat.
Delia. Text, not call. Which means it's something she wants me to read slowly.
The league's PR office confirmed: reformed-leader package requires a named partner by 9 a.m. tomorrow. Attached is the press release draft. All you have to do is confirm the name.
Announce you're dating Sienna Hart. 9 a.m. press conference. Non-negotiable.
I set the phone face-down on the seat.
Outside, O'Malley's front light flicks on. The open sign blinks to life in the window.
I sit in my car in the parking lot across the street and I don't move, and I don't go in, and I don't take my eyes off the door.