33. The Rookie Speaks
Chapter thirty-three
The Rookie Speaks
Atticus POV
The league meeting room smells like recycled air and old carpet and the anxiety of a space where decisions get made and people get buried.
I'm already seated when the door opens and Jonah Pike walks in.
He's wearing a jacket two sizes too big. It's not his — some borrowed thing he grabbed because he needed to look ready, and the jacket was the best he could do.
He has the stillness of someone who has been scared into silence so long that choosing to break it feels like stepping off a ledge.
He doesn't look at me when he comes in.
I don't look away from him.
The investigators shift. One of them, Hendricks, the senior on the panel, sets his pen down. The other adjusts his recorder.
Jonah sits down across from them. He folds his hands on the table. He stares at a fixed point somewhere past the investigators' heads, and he starts to talk.
I don't move.
I don't breathe more than I have to.
He tells them about the night. Date, time, names, the order it happened in. He tells them what Razor Maddox said to him and what a second veteran did when Jonah tried to leave. He tells them about the locker room corner and the noise and how long it went on before he heard my voice cut through it.
"Captain Knox told them to stop." His voice is young and very steady. "He told them directly. By name."
Hendricks doesn't look up from his notes. "And when they didn't stop immediately?"
"He stepped in." A pause. "Between them and me."
The second investigator taps something into his laptop. The room is very quiet.
Jonah keeps going. He tells them about the report I filed with the league conduct line. He tells them the timestamp.
Hendricks turns a page.
"Are you aware," he says, "that a senior team member has provided a statement contradicting your account?"
Something goes still in Jonah's face. Not calm. The other kind. It's the first visible crack. He's twenty-one and someone he played alongside for two years called him a liar in a formal document, and the weight of that is sitting somewhere under his ribs and he's not putting it down.
"Yes," he says. "I'm aware."
"And you're comfortable proceeding with your account as given?"
He looks up. Not at Hendricks. At me.
I don't move. I don't nod, don't gesture, don't give him anything he can use as a crutch. He doesn't need it. He knows what he saw.
He looks back at Hendricks.
"I'm comfortable," Jonah says quietly. "Yes."
Hendricks slides a folder toward the second investigator.
Inside: printed screenshots. Sienna's screenshots.
Timestamp data laid over the league's original conduct report, the discrepancy right there in plain black numbers.
A gap of eleven minutes between when Razor's version claims I was still on-site and when the conduct line shows a report submitted from my registered number.
Eleven minutes.
You can't be in two places in eleven minutes when the places are across the city from each other.
I watch Hendricks look at the timestamps. Look at the report. Look at the timestamps again. The math is not complicated.
"Mr. Knox." He sets his pen down. "We'd like to take a short recess."
I stand before he finishes the sentence.
The hallway outside is beige and fluorescent and entirely without comfort.
I stand against the wall with my arms crossed and my eyes on the middle distance and I let myself feel it for exactly thirty seconds. The months of it. The suspension notice and the locker room fracture and Mason's face and Sienna's face and the folder on the hood of her father's car.
All of it.
Thirty seconds.
Then I put it back.
The door opens. Jonah comes out.
He's still wearing the big jacket. He stops when he sees me. He looks like he wants to say something and doesn't have the words for it.
I push off the wall and walk to him.
"You didn't have to do that," I say.
"I know." He looks at the floor for a second. "I wanted to."
I put a hand on his shoulder. Brief. Direct. The way I would with any of my guys after a hard shift. "You did good, Pike."
His exhale is quiet. Visible anyway, like he's been holding that breath since October.
He nods once and heads for the elevator. I watch him go.
The door behind me opens again. Hendricks steps into the hallway with a manila envelope and the expression of a man who has to say something he'd rather not.
"The panel has reviewed the additional evidence," he says. "We'll be issuing formal findings by end of week. Off the record. The conduct warning stands. The hazing charge doesn't."
I look at him.
"The conduct warning."
"Optics," he says. Flat, no apology.
He adds, almost as an afterthought, that Maddox has been placed on administrative leave pending the panel's formal findings. He says it the way you say something you've already decided doesn't require commentary.
I nod. "Fine."
Technically fair. Practically insulting. I'll take it.
Hendricks goes back inside.
I stand in the fluorescent hallway and think about Sienna at her apartment this morning, probably awake by now, probably already running the perimeter on every worst-case scenario before she's finished her first cup of coffee.
I think about the watch I left on her nightstand and the note I wrote with two fingers on the back of a receipt I found in my jacket pocket.
Meeting. Back by noon. Don't throw out my watch.
It wasn't eloquent. It was honest.
I pull out my phone to text her.
I'm almost to the elevator when I see Mason.
He's standing at the end of the corridor near the window. Pale. His phone in his hand, screen still lit. He looks up when I come around the corner and something about the way his face is arranged stops me cold.
Not anger.
Fear.
"Sienna's father just called me," he says.
The elevator is right there. The exit is right there. The cleared conduct report is in Hendricks's office and Jonah Pike is probably already downstairs and everything was supposed to be moving in one direction now.
I look at Mason. At the phone in his hand. At the particular quality of the fear on his face, which is not the fear of a man who just heard something abstract.
He heard something specific.
My hand is already in my pocket, finding my own phone.
"What did he say?"