13. Dirty Work
Chapter thirteen
Dirty Work
Atticus POV
I see her move before she says anything.
That's how I know. Not the careful way she folds the note in half and slides it into her palm like she's done this before, like she knows how to hide things quickly and without drama. It's the way her body orients toward the exit. Small shift of weight. Decision already made.
I'm on my feet before she takes a step.
"Don't." I keep my voice low. The dinner is still loud around us, silverware and forced laughter and the PR-approved sound of a team in good standing. Nobody's looking. I intend to keep it that way.
Sienna stops. Turns just enough to let me know she heard me. Her eyes are sharp and flat at the same time, a combination I've learned means she's already run the math and doesn't love the answer.
"It's fine," she says. Quiet. Even.
"It's not."
"Atticus—"
"Outside alone." I lean in slightly, just enough that she can hear me under the noise. "That's not happening."
She goes very still. The kind of still that means she's already decided something and is three steps ahead of me, and is about to say something that will make me want to put my fist through a wall. Not in anger. In something closer to helpless admiration.
"I didn't sign up for you to manage my exits."
"You signed up for safety. This isn't safe."
"You don't get to decide—"
"The arrangement—"
"Isn't a leash." Her voice stays low but it sharpens at the edge. "I know how to handle him. I've been handling him since I was seventeen."
That lands harder than she means it to. I see it in the way she doesn't look away, like she dared herself to say it and now has to hold it.
I hold it too.
"I know," I say. "That's exactly the problem."
Her mouth presses together. Not hurt. Something more complicated. The look of someone who is used to being their own solution and is currently furious at how little ground that argument has.
She's right that I don't get to decide for her. She's wrong that going out that door alone is anything other than what her father wants.
I don't say either thing.
"Let me go instead," I say.
A beat. Her eyes move across my face like she's checking me for something. Leverage, calculation, the angle I'm running. She won't find one. There isn't one.
"You don't owe me this," she says finally. The sharpness has gone somewhere quieter.
"I know." I hold her gaze. "Go back to the table. Tell Delia I stepped out for air."
She holds the look for three more seconds.
Then she sits down.
The night air outside the venue is cold and still and Calvin Hart is leaning against the far pillar with his hands in his pockets like a man who arrived early and is comfortable with that.
He smiles when he sees me. Not surprised. Not unsettled.
That tells me everything.
"I was expecting Sienna," he says.
"I know."
He shifts, resettles his weight, looks me over with the specific assessment of a man who has built a life on reading rooms and walking out before the check arrives.
"You're the captain." He says it like a compliment. It isn't. "She talks about the team like it's family."
"She doesn't talk about the team."
"No." His smile doesn't move. "But she talks about Mason. And Mason talks about you."
He's good. I'll give him that. The charm is calibrated, just warm enough that a room would read it as sincerity, not performance. I've heard that voice before. Not from him. From men who learned early that soft tone does more damage than loud.
I've met men like him before. They're the ones you have to watch in the locker room, not the ones who get loud.
"You wanted money," I say. No preamble. No return serve on the charm.
He adjusts. Barely. "I wanted my daughter."
"You wanted money," I say again.
A pause. He decides to drop the first layer. Good. Saves us both time.
"She owes me," he says. Unbothered. "I don't expect you to understand the dynamic. Father-daughter relationships are complicated, and Sienna—" he tilts his head, "—Sienna has a way of rewriting history."
I let the silence sit for a beat. "What does she owe you."
"That's a family matter."
"Not anymore."
His eyes tick over me again. Recalibrating. He didn't expect directness. He expected posturing, or defensiveness, or the particular type of ego that needs to win the conversation before it wins the conflict.
I don't need to win the conversation.
"She made a mistake," he says. "Years ago. Young, scared. I'm not unsympathetic. I never blamed her." The sympathy in his voice is a tool. Finely honed. "But there are consequences for what she did, and I've been patient."
"Consequences you've been holding over her head."
"I've been giving her time." His tone stays warm. Magnanimous. The voice of a reasonable man being unfairly pressed. "You've been collecting."
His mouth curves. He doesn't deny it.
I think about Sienna at seventeen. Scared and making the only calculation available to her, covering for him, keeping the peace, surviving the fallout.
I think about her at the bar two nights ago, standing at her own countertop like she was planted there, built there, like nothing could move her.
About the gap between those two versions of her and how much it must have cost to cross it.
And I think about him. Standing on the same ground the whole time. Waiting.
"You come near her again," I say. My voice doesn't change. I want him to understand that, that this isn't passion or threat display. This is settled. "You deal with me. Not the team's PR team. Not venue security." I let the words take their time. "Me."
He looks at me with something close to appreciation. The way you'd appreciate a card that got played well right before you showed a better hand.
"Captain Knox." His voice is warm. "I like you."
I don't respond.
He straightens off the pillar. Takes his time doing it. A man in no hurry, which is either genuine comfort or the most dangerous kind of performance. He buttons his jacket. Glances back at the venue doors like he's already thinking about the next move.
"Good," he says pleasantly. "Because the story I'm about to give a reporter isn't about her at all."
He meets my eyes.
"It's about you."
He walks away like he has somewhere comfortable to be.
I stand on the pavement and watch him go and I don't move until he rounds the corner and the night closes behind him.
Then I breathe out. Slow. Even.
He has something. Something real, or something shaped like something real, and either way it's aimed at me now instead of her.
The fraud statute ran out years ago — Calvin can't be touched by whatever Sienna signed at eighteen, which means releasing it costs him nothing and gains him everything.
Leverage doesn't expire. It just changes hands.
I pull out my phone. Check the voice memo running in my pocket.
Still going.
I go back inside.
Sienna looks up the moment I clear the door. Not toward the entrance, directly at me, like she's been tracking the door through sound. Her expression holds about three seconds of visible relief before she buries it under something more neutral.
I cross to her. Lean down slightly so only she catches it.
"He's gone for tonight."
Her shoulder drops a fraction. She'd never call it relief.
"What did he say?"
"We'll talk after."
"Atticus—"
"After."
She holds my eyes. Reading the line between after because I'm protecting you and after because I need to think. She's sharp enough to find it.
I sit back down beside her.
Her hand rests on the table. Close enough to mine that I could close the gap with two inches of movement. I don't. But I'm aware of it the way I'm aware of everything she does, with the full weight of attention I'm running out of justifications for.
Under the table, her knee presses against mine. Not reaching. Not deliberate. Just the warmth of her there, solid and close, and her not moving it away.
I don't move either.
Delia is talking across the table. I hear approximately none of it.
Her father just painted a target on me instead of her, and I don't know what he's aiming with, and Sienna is going to ask me on the way to the car and I'm going to have to decide how much to give her.
I've spent years deciding what people can handle. What they should carry and what I should carry for them. Sienna has told me, without ever saying it directly, that she hates that about me.
Under the table, her knee is still warm against mine.
I think maybe she's right.