28. When the Team Turns
Chapter twenty-eight
When the Team Turns
Sienna POV
The internet makes up its mind by morning.
I know because Delia sends me a summary at six-forty-seven a.m. A tidy bullet-pointed document that reads like a post-mortem, each headline its own small cut.
Bartender turned brand asset. The real story behind Knox's convenient girlfriend.
One tabloid runs a side-by-side: me laughing at the sponsor dinner, Atticus stone-faced beside me, the caption reading Performance or Paycheck?
I read the whole thing at the bar before open, sitting on the wrong side of the counter with cold coffee and my phone face-up on the wood.
I've been called worse. I remind myself of that.
It doesn't help as much as I want it to.
I don't have to go to the facility today. Nobody asked me to. Delia hasn't scheduled anything, Atticus hasn't texted, and there is genuinely no professional reason for me to drive across the city and walk into a building full of people who are currently deciding what I am.
I go anyway.
The Tridents facility is familiar enough by now that I know which corridors go quiet. The ones near the locker room, the equipment bays, the back hallway where the WAGs gather before home games with their lanyards and their silent ranking systems.
I've clocked Tessa Rowe three times this week. Always smiling. Always positioned.
Today she finds me first.
"Sienna." She says my name like she's correcting a pronunciation. Full teeth. Glossed and precise. "I heard about the press conference. That took nerve."
"Thanks." I keep moving.
"I mean it." She falls into step beside me, which is not something I invited. "Standing up there with him, after everything. Knowing what people are saying."
I stop walking. Not because she's stopped me. Because I want to be facing her for this part.
"What are people saying, Tessa?"
She tilts her head. A performance of sympathy so polished it probably works on most people. "That you're smart. That you found the right moment and the right man and you made it count." A small pause. "No one blames you, really. Hockey money is hockey money."
I look at her for a long moment.
"Hockey money," I repeat.
"It's not an insult." Still smiling. "We've all made our calculations."
I smile back. Mine doesn't reach my eyes either, and I make sure she knows I know that. "I own a bar in East Van. I have a business license, a liquor permit, three part-time staff, and a lease I signed alone. When I want financial advice, I'll find someone who earns their own."
Her smile stays. But something behind it recalibrates.
I walk away before she can rebuild.
The single-occupancy bathroom at the end of the corridor. I lock the door, put my back against it, and breathe.
Not crying. I'm not going to cry. Not over this, not in this building.
I breathe through my nose the way I learned in the years before I understood that the thing you're breathing through is usually something you're not naming.
I'm not a manipulator. I know that.
I'm not a PR plant. I know that too.
What I am is standing in a locked bathroom with a mascara wand because the look on Atticus's face at that press conference was raw and certain and pointed entirely at me.
It's been living under my ribs for two days.
The internet is calling it a transaction, and I can't figure out how to hold both of those things at once without one of them breaking me a little.
I fix the mascara. I check both eyes. I unlock the door.
He's in the hallway.
Not waiting, exactly. Just there. Weight shifted to one shoulder, hands in his pockets, like he's been there long enough to get comfortable. The way he stands when he's not performing posture for anyone. He looks up when he hears the door.
His eyes are wrecked.
Not angry. Not calculating. Just tired, honest, cracked slightly open in the particular way he only gets when the armor has been on too long and cost too much to hold.
I've seen this look on him once before. The morning after the cabin, before either of us had found language for what happened there.
I keep my face even. "Were you waiting outside the bathroom?"
"Corridor." His voice is low. "There's a difference."
"Barely."
He pushes off the wall. Crosses the few feet between us and stops close enough that I have to tilt my chin. Close enough that I can see where his collar is slightly rumpled, where he's pulled at it without noticing.
"I saw Tessa corner you," he says.
"I handled it."
"I know." A beat. "I watched."
Something about that lands somewhere it probably shouldn't.
"I've been reading the coverage," he says. Not an apology. Not a lead-in. Just a fact, delivered like he owes me the information. "All of it."
"Delia sent me the summary."
"I read past the summary."
I study his face. The set of it, the slightly undone quality around his eyes, the way his mouth is pressed together like he's holding something back by main force.
"Atticus—"
"You can walk away." He says it quietly.
Carefully. Like he's been running the words for a while.
"From this. From me. Whatever the arrangement needs to look like to give you the exit, I'll build it.
I'll make sure you're covered. Legal, PR, whatever your father tries.
None of that changes." His eyes stay on mine.
"I mean it, Sienna. You don't have to stay in the middle of this because of a deal we made when everything was different. "
The offer is genuine. That's what gets me. No performance in it, no angle. Just Atticus Knox standing in a corridor offering me a door he doesn't want me to take.
I look at him for a long moment.
At the hands loose at his sides that want to reach and aren't. At the man who drove me home in silence years ago and walked me to my door and told me I was off-limits in the voice of someone making themselves believe it.
The man who showed up outside my building without being asked. Who went outside to face my father because he couldn't stand the thought of me doing it alone. Who sat in a parking lot for forty minutes just to make sure I was safe going home.
Who said I want you in an empty suite and looked as surprised by it as I was.
The corridor isn't empty. It's a building full of people who have made up their minds about me, and the man who made it all complicated is standing in front of me waiting to be told to let go.
I take a breath.
"I'm not walking." My voice carries, steady and clear. Not performing. Just done being quiet about it. "I'm not walking because I'm not fake anymore."
His whole face changes.
Not dramatically. He's not built for dramatic. But something shifts around his eyes, in the line of his shoulders. Like a calculation he's been running since the beginning just resolved.
He looks at me for a beat that lasts longer than it should.
Then his hand comes up.
He doesn't grab. Doesn't pull. Just turns his palm up between us, quiet and patient and entirely unhurried. The way he held it near mine in the dark at the cabin. Available, never demanding.
I look at his hand. I look at his face.
I take it.
His fingers close around mine. Warm, deliberate, certain. The hallway is full of people who were already watching and now have nothing left to pretend they weren't seeing.
Let them look.
He doesn't say anything.
Neither do I.
We stand there in the middle of the corridor with our hands locked together and the building doing what buildings do around us.
Voices, movement, someone's phone, the distant thud of equipment.
I am acutely aware of the warmth of his palm.
The roughness of his knuckles. The way he's holding me like something he's not going to put down.
His thumb traces once across the back of my hand. Small. Slow.
My pulse doesn't stay steady.
"Good," he says quietly. Not a question.
I don't let go.