CHAPTER THREE
Gabe met her at a service entrance before dawn, in a Breakers hoodie his uaul alert, unhurried calm that made Martina understand, for the first time, why players trusted him with their backs on the ice.
He noticed her hand—the cut from the cabinet, dried blood along her palm that she'd been too numb to deal with—and insisted on cleaning and wrapping it using the tiny first-aid kit behind the security desk before he'd let either of them near a computer.
He didn't ask what happened. He just worked, quiet and efficient.
They sat down in front of the monitors.
The camera didn't reach inside the recovery room, a small mercy, but it caught everything around it.
Paul and Cassidy arriving together, laughing, comfortable, clearly not new at this.
Forty minutes later: Martina, arriving alone.
The alarm strobing red across the corridor.
Paul chasing her half-dressed, mouth open, obviously shouting.
Cassidy emerging seconds later, wrapped in a jacket that had Martina's own initials embroidered on the collar.
And then the garage. Paul's hand on the door. The sheer, casual strength of it.
Watching it from a distance, from outside her own body, Martina understood something she hadn't let herself see in real time: that wasn't just anger. That was a man who, in the moment, genuinely had not cared whether he hurt her. How had she been so blind to this, to everything?
Gabe made a legally timestamped copy and logged the incident in the system before anyone with clearance above his could quietly delete it. "He's going to know I helped you," he said, not like a complaint, just a fact he wanted on the table.
"You don't have to risk your job for me."
"Paul made his own choices." He said it simply, a man reading a scoreboard.
For one unguarded second, a moment passed between them that had nothing to do with cameras or footage. Martina felt it land low in her stomach before she pulled back from it, hard, ashamed of her own timing. Gabe didn't chase it. He went back to the monitors like he hadn't noticed her flinch.
She studied him for a second longer than she meant to.
Here were the same steady hands that used to block shots for Paul, now bandaging her palm at five in the morning and moving deftly over the controls.
Gabe had never once, in all the years she'd known him, tried to make himself the center of a room like Paul would.
She filed the thought away in the same place she was filing everything else tonight (a growing folder labeled deal with this later) and turned back to the screen, because there wasn't room for anything else yet.
They didn't get the chance to leave.
Paul arrived with Cassidy and the team's general manager in tow, already mid-sentence about reviewing "the misunderstanding," already several steps into a plan where Cassidy would report Martina for assault and property damage before Martina could report anything at all.
Gabe had her behind the equipment cage door before she'd fully registered the footsteps.
Through the gap in the shelving, she watched Paul order Gabe to erase the footage.
Gabe refused, cool and immovable, citing arena policy and the police report the alarm had automatically generated, citing every boring bureaucratic wall a furious sports star hates running into.
Paul shoved him into the console hard enough to rattle the monitors.
Martina stepped out before it went further than that.
Paul's face became complicated when he saw her. It was shock first, then something uglier underneath it. Cassidy recovered faster, already pivoting, already pointing. "See? She's been stalking us. She’s insane."
"There are copies," Martina said. Just that. Calm, almost bored, the way you'd tell someone their parking meter had expired.
Paul lunged for the computer like he could physically un-happen the last twelve hours. Gabe caught him, and then arena security was flooding the room, and Paul was shouting that she'd ruined his career like she was the one who'd walked into a treatment room wearing someone else's blouse.
Behind her, she heard the general manager asking someone, weakly, whether they should be calling the team's lawyers or the police. Nobody seemed to have an answer ready.
Martina turned and walked out while Paul was still shouting.
"You bitch. You've ruined everything!" Paul screamed after her, voice cracking on the last word in a way that would have terrified her twenty-four hours ago. But now she only felt an uneasy, sort of supernatural calm over the events taking place, maybe acceptance of what her life had become.
She stopped in the doorway, but she didn't turn around. When she finally spoke, it was the first thing she'd said to him since the recovery room that wasn't a question.
"Not yet, Paul. Not yet."