15. Best Friend Interrogation
Chapter fifteen
Best Friend Interrogation
Atticus POV
Mason calls at eleven-seventeen p.m.
I'm still in the suite. Still on the couch where I almost made a very specific mistake forty minutes ago.
The city lights are doing something through the window that I've stopped looking at, and Sienna is behind her closed bedroom door, and the inch of space I didn't cross is still living in my chest like a splinter.
I pick up on the second ring.
"Hey."
"Hey." Mason's voice is neutral. Careful. The way he gets when he already knows the answer and is deciding whether to ask the question.
I wait.
"How's it going," he says. Not a question.
"Fine."
"Sienna good?"
"She's good."
Silence. The comfortable kind that isn't comfortable at all.
"Atticus."
"Mason."
He exhales through his nose. That particular sound he makes when he's holding back a full sentence.
I wait.
"I'm not going to pretend I don't know you," he says.
"I know."
"So tell me something true."
I lean back against the couch cushions and stare at the ceiling. "She's safe. That's true."
"That's not what I'm asking."
"I know that too."
Another pause. Longer this time. I let it sit. I've known Mason Knox his whole life. Twenty-six years of knowing when to talk and when to let him work through something. He'll get to the real question when he's ready. He always does.
"Are you crossing lines." Still not a question.
"No."
"Are you thinking about crossing lines."
The ceiling offers nothing useful.
"Mason."
"That's a yes."
"That's a none of your business."
He laughs. Short, not entirely warm. "She's my best friend. Everything about her is my business."
"She'd argue that."
"She'd be wrong." He pauses. "She's not someone you try things with, Atticus. She's not a situation you can manage and then correct course on. You know that."
I do know that. I've known it since the night I drove her home in the rain and sat in her parking lot until my hands stopped doing what hands do when you want something you can't have.
"I told you before," I say. "No lines crossed."
"You told me that." He's quiet for a second. "You're telling me again, which means something came close enough to need repeating."
He's too smart. He's always been too smart for the conversations I'm willing to have.
"I'm not going to wreck her," I say. It comes out with more weight than I planned. More honesty than the sentence needs. I hear it in the air between us and I don't take it back.
Mason is quiet for a long time.
"No," he says finally. "I don't think you would." Like the admission costs him. Like he arrived at it against his better judgment and decided to say it anyway. "That's not actually what I'm worried about."
"Then what."
"I'm worried she's already gone on you." His voice is even. "And I'm worried you're not far behind. And I'm worried neither of you is going to say it until it's too late to do it clean."
I don't answer.
"Atticus."
"Get some sleep, Mason."
He sighs. Long, resigned. The sigh of a man who has had this version of this conversation with me before and knows exactly how it ends. "You're impossible."
"I know."
"Fine. But if something—"
"You'll be the first call."
"I'd better be." A beat. "Tell her I said hey."
"She's asleep."
"Sure she is." He hangs up.
I sit with my phone in my hand and the suite around me too quiet and Sienna's door still closed and the city still doing whatever it's doing through the glass.
I think about what she looked like in the dark. The way she'd tilted toward me without deciding to. The way her breath had gone shallow and she hadn't moved away.
I set my phone face-down on the coffee table.
Close my eyes.
No lines crossed.
I say it until it sounds like something I believe.
Practice the next morning is clean and hard and exactly what I need.
Ice under my blades. Drills with clear parameters. A body that knows what to do when my head doesn't. I push the guys through conditioning sequences and they push back, the way a healthy team does, and for forty-five minutes the only thing that matters is the next rep.
Sienna isn't here. She texted at seven-thirty. Back to the bar, Delia has me for a sponsor call at noon. I'd read it twice and responded with okay and put the phone away before I could do anything worse.
I'm running the third line through a neutral zone trap drill when Coach Hale's assistant appears at the glass.
She doesn't come onto the ice. She holds up two fingers and points toward the corridor.
I know what two fingers means.
I know before I pull my helmet off. Before I hand my stick to the nearest player and skate toward the gate.
That old familiar cold moves through me.
The kind that starts at the back of the neck and works its way down slow.
I've had it since I was twelve years old, since the first time a referee called something against me that wasn't mine.
Two men in suits are waiting in the corridor outside the locker room.
League investigators. The kind with lanyards and expressions that cost money to keep that flat.
"Mr. Knox." The taller one extends a hand. "David Park, NHL Player Safety and Conduct. This is my colleague, Renata Solis. We appreciate you taking a moment."
I appreciate the word moment. It's doing a lot of work.
"Sure." I shake both hands. "What do you need?"
They want my phone.
They say it like it's a formality. Standard procedure, corroborating timelines, shouldn't take long.
I watch their faces while they say it and I think about everything on that phone.
Every text to Sienna. The recording of her father.
The timestamped messages to the league's reporting line the night the hazing happened.
I pull it from my practice bag.
Hand it over without hesitation.
Park takes it with both hands like it's evidence, which I suppose it now is.
"We'll return it within forty-eight hours," Solis says. She's writing something on a tablet. "We'd also like to ask you a few questions, if you're available."
"Now?"
"If you're available," she repeats.
I am available. I don't have a choice about being available, and we all know it, and the performance of asking is just the league's way of making sure I know who has the leverage here.
"Give me ten minutes to change."
The conference room they put me in smells like recycled air and institutional carpet. There's a water bottle on the table that no one opens. A recording device, small and black, sitting in the middle like a third participant.
I sit across from them with my elbows on the table and my hands loose and I think about Sienna at her noon sponsor call, probably cutting someone off mid-sentence with something dry enough to make them laugh before they realize they've been corrected.
The thought steadies me more than it should.
Park lays out the framework. They're building a full timeline of the incident. Corroborating witness accounts. Establishing who was present, who intervened, who was aware. Standard language. None of it tells me anything I don't already know.
Then Solis opens a folder.
She slides a page across the table.
I look at it.
A witness statement. Typewritten, two pages, signed at the bottom in the particular scrawl of a man who plays defense like he's punishing someone.
Razor Maddox.
I read the first paragraph.
Then the second.
I keep my face still the way I've kept my face still since I was twenty-two years old and a veteran twice my age told me that expression was the only thing between me and a suspension.
According to Razor Maddox, I didn't stop the hazing.
I organized it.
According to Razor Maddox, the rookie integration program was my design. My tradition. A team-building exercise that got out of hand, and when it did, I panicked and called in a favor from a bartender I'd been sleeping with to help manage the scene before anyone official arrived.
I read it a third time.
The recording device blinks red between us.
I set the paper down. Flat. Even.
"Mr. Knox," Park says. "Do you have a response to this statement?"
I look up from Razor's signature.
I think about the night I stood in that back corridor and put my body between a scared twenty-one-year-old and four men who thought tradition was a license.
I think about the league reporting line and the timestamp on my phone that these investigators now have in their possession.
I think about Jonah Pike's face, pale and certain and trying very hard to be invisible, and what he saw, and what he'd say if someone asked him directly.
I think about Sienna.
I think about what her father is holding, and what Razor is holding, and how many people in my life are currently weaponizing something I did right.
"Yes," I say.
My voice comes out even.
"I have a response."