CHAPTER SIX
Two years of contract negotiations, seventeen years of marriage, and it all came down to one clean, gleaming sheet of ice, waiting under the arena lights for Paul's big night.
Martina spent the week before the event in Martin's office, watching him file the last of the divorce paperwork and lock down her share of the marital assets with the precision of a surgeon.
The security footage, he confirmed, was hers to release freely.
It documented Paul's conduct on team property and his aggression in that garage, and no NDA on earth was strong enough to bury that.
"There's one more thing," Martin said, sliding across a resignation letter he'd drafted at her request. "The foundation board meets Thursday.
If you resign publicly and share what you know about how Paul used foundation staff and facilities, the donors will follow you out the door.
All of them. It'll gut his charity image completely. "
"Good," Martina said, and signed it without rereading a word.
She spent the rest of that week doing something she hadn't done in years: sleeping through the night. It wasn’t well, or peacefully, but she did sleep through it.
She was no longer a woman used to waiting up for a husband who might or might not come home in a mood.
It was strange, how much energy that vigilance had quietly taken, and how much came back once she stopped spending it on him.
Gabe handled the logistics. He walked her through the visiting-team loading dock the morning of, low-key and unbothered, like they were planning a surprise party instead of a public execution.
He couldn't touch the arena's screens directly without losing his job outright—there were limits even to what Gabe was willing to risk—but Martina still had administrator access to the foundation's own presentation system, a detail Paul had never bothered to revoke, because it had genuinely never occurred to him that the woman who built his public image might someday use it against him.
Two days before the event, her phone rang. It was Gabe, his voice tight in a way she'd never heard from him.
"Cassidy broke into my office last night," he said. "She went looking for the original file. I caught her mid-search. She panicked, hit me with the fire extinguisher off the wall, and ran with a drive she thinks has the footage on it."
Cold fear gripped Martina.
"Does it?"
"It’s an empty decoy I planted after we copied the footage." A pause, almost fond. "She's currently very pleased with herself over, well… nothing."
Martina found she could picture the whole scene without much effort: Cassidy in the dark, gloved and grim and convinced she was being clever, walking out with a drive full of nothing while the real footage sat exactly where Gabe had put it, timestamped and untouched.
It was, Martina thought, a fairly accurate summary of the last year of Cassidy's life—convinced she was winning something but left holding an empty box.
"Are you all right?" Martina asked. "The fire extinguisher part, I mean."
"I've had worse from Paul in practice drills," Gabe said, which was somehow both reassuring and not remotely funny, but Martina laughed anyway, the first real laugh she'd had all week.
Once she hung up, she realized it was the closest thing to good news she'd had in a week.
The morning of the event, Paul's security detail made a final grab, sending a team of two of his private guys to intercept Martina's phone before she reached the arena floor.
Gabe steered her through a service stairwell instead of the exposed player tunnel, radioing a deliberately wrong location to the pursuing men with a straight face that would have made a professional poker player jealous.
They reached the foundation control room with minutes to spare. Gabe checked the door twice, made sure it was locked, and then stepped back to give her the room to work, because there was nothing left to plan now, only to execute.
The control room had a lingering smell of burnt coffee, a bank of monitors purring along one wall showing feeds from every angle of the arena: the concourse filling with fans in Weddington jerseys, the ice crew making their last pass with the resurfacer, the executive box where the team owner was already shaking hands for the cameras.
Martina found herself oddly calm in the middle of it, the way she imagined surgeons must feel scrubbing in, past the point of nerves, into the part where the only thing left to do was the thing itself.
However unpleasant that might be, she thought to herself.
"You don't have to watch it happen," Gabe said, nodding at the monitor. "You could do this and walk away before he even sees your face on the screen."
"I want to watch," Martina said. "Seventeen years… I don't get to miss the ending."
On the monitor bolted above the control desk, Paul gave his pre-ceremony interview, dabbing at his eyes for a camera crew that had clearly been briefed to ask only softball questions.
"Martina's been struggling privately," he said, voice cracking with a sincerity Martina almost admired on a technical level. "I was with her at the arena that night, comforting her. None of what people think happened,” he shrugged, “happened."
Martina laughed. He'd handed her the last piece she needed and hadn't even noticed doing it—the timestamp on the security footage would put a very large, very public hole through that story.
Paul walked out onto the ice to thunderous applause, waving like a man who genuinely believed the worst was behind him.
Martina looked at the upload button on the presentation system, her thumb hovering above it, and thought—absurdly, in a moment that should have felt bigger than it did—about the ceremonial hockey stick she'd swung days ago, and how satisfying that first hit against the glass had been, and how this felt almost exactly the same, except now the whole arena was the display cabinet.
She pressed upload.
Behind her, on the monitor, the crowd noise swelled as Paul reached center ice, arms already spread for a victory he had no idea he wasn't getting. The team owner's voice, tinny through the arena speakers, began the opening lines of an introduction Paul had probably rehearsed in a mirror.
Martina watched the file bar fill, one steady percentage point at a time, and thought about all the smaller uploads that had led to this one.
It was every gala seating chart, every sponsor call at six in the morning and carefully worded press release she'd helped write to protect a man who'd never once thought to protect her back.
All of it had built toward this exact screen, this exact bar, ticking upward.
Gabe stood close enough that she could feel the warmth of him. "However this plays out," he said, "you did the actual work. Whatever happens next just makes it visible."
The bar reached one hundred percent.
For the first time all week, Martina didn't feel sick, or furious, or even frightened.
She felt ready.