CHAPTER 6
The League Turns Cruel
The darkness lasted less than three seconds.
Long enough for Lars to reach me.
One moment, I stood beside Matteo’s kitchen island with my phone in my hand. The next, my back was pressed against Lars’s bare chest, his arm locked around my waist while he pulled me behind the thick concrete column near the windows.
Glass shattered.
A sharp crack split the apartment.
Something struck the far wall.
Matteo dropped to the floor.
“Down!”
Lars shoved me beneath him as another shot punched through the window.
The apartment exploded into noise.
Breaking glass.
Matteo cursing.
An alarm screaming from somewhere near the hallway.
Cold air rushed through the ruined window and swept papers from the table. Medical reports spun across the dark room like white birds.
Lars covered the back of my head with both hands.
His heart slammed against my spine.
“Are you hit?”
“No.”
“Check.”
“I’m not hit.”
“Check!”
I ran my hands over my chest and stomach.
Nothing wet.
No pain.
“I’m okay.”
Emergency lights flickered on.
A dim red glow filled the apartment.
Matteo crawled toward the interior hallway.
“The backup generator should kick in.”
“Stay away from the windows,” Lars ordered.
“Thank you, Captain Obvious.”
Another bullet struck the exterior wall.
This one did not penetrate.
Lars dragged me across the floor, using the kitchen island as cover. His body remained between mine and the shattered glass the entire time.
I could barely breathe.
Not because of fear.
Because of the photograph still glowing on my phone.
Someone had watched us through Matteo’s window.
Someone had photographed Lars between my thighs.
Then cut the power and fired into the apartment.
This was no longer intimidation.
It was escalation.
“We need the drive,” I said.
Lars looked toward the table.
The black drive lay beside the laptop, exposed beneath the red emergency light.
“No.”
“We cannot leave it.”
“You are not moving.”
“That evidence is the reason they’re shooting.”
“It is not worth your life.”
“It is worth Derek’s.”
His eyes flashed.
Before he could stop me, Matteo slid across the floor, grabbed the laptop and drive, then disappeared behind the island.
“There,” he said. “Marriage saved.”
Lars glared at him.
Matteo held up one hand.
“Not the time?”
“No.”
The building alarm changed.
A mechanical voice announced a security lockdown.
My phone buzzed again.
Naomi.
I answered.
“Someone is shooting at the apartment.”
For once, my sister did not say mhm.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Lars?”
“Fine.”
“Matteo?”
“Offended you asked about him third,” Matteo called.
“I do not care about his feelings. Police are coming. Stay down.”
“We are.”
“Send me the files.”
“What?”
“Send me copies now. If someone gets inside, the evidence cannot remain only with you.”
Naomi’s voice had changed.
No sarcasm.
No irritation.
Only the attorney.
The older sister.
The woman who had probably been waiting all her life for my stubbornness to finally become this dangerous.
Matteo opened the laptop.
“The network is dead.”
“Use your phone,” Naomi said. “Encrypted upload. I’m texting you a secure link.”
Lars shook his head.
“Transmitting the files could expose their location.”
Naomi heard him.
“Your alternative is waiting for a shooter to come upstairs and politely ignore the evidence.”
“The building is locked.”
“So was my sister’s career before they stole it.”
The generator kicked on.
Lights flashed through the apartment.
For a fraction of a second, I saw movement on the rooftop across the street.
A dark figure.
Then it vanished behind a ventilation unit.
“There,” I said.
Lars turned.
Another shot struck the window.
He forced my head down.
“Do not look.”
“I saw someone on the roof.”
Matteo crawled toward a wall panel and activated the metal storm shutters.
Heavy screens descended over the broken windows.
The gunfire stopped.
Sirens approached below.
Lars remained over me for several seconds longer, listening.
When he finally lifted his weight, blood marked the sleeve of his shirt.
“You’re bleeding.”
“Glass.”
“Let me see.”
“It’s nothing.”
I grabbed his wrist.
A long cut ran across his forearm.
Not deep.
But bright with blood.
I looked up at him.
“Stop saying that.”
“What?”
“That every injury is nothing.”
His face softened.
Only slightly.
Then the pounding began at the apartment door.
“Boston Police!”
Matteo checked the security monitor.
Three uniformed officers stood in the hallway with building security.
He unlocked the door.
The next hour became questions, photographs, and careful lies.
We told the police someone had fired into the apartment.
We showed them the threatening message.
We did not show them the drive.
Lars refused to mention Graham without evidence directly connecting him to the attack. Matteo kept his mouth shut. I hated both decisions but understood them.
Accusing one of the most powerful men in professional sports without proof would give Graham time to paint us as unstable.
The police found shell casings on the opposite rooftop.
No shooter.
No weapon.
The building’s security system had been disabled remotely.
Professional.
Clean.
Planned.
By sunrise, every news organization in the country knew.
Not because we told them.
Because someone released the photograph.
The image of Lars and me inside Matteo’s apartment appeared online before the police finished processing the scene.
It had been cropped carefully.
My open blouse.
My skirt around my thighs.
Lars between my legs.
No context.
No evidence of the stalking.
No indication the photographer had been watching us through a private window.
The headline read:
FIRED REPORTER CELEbrATES WITH HOCKEY STAR HOURS AFTER CAREER SCANDAL
Another publication called it:
AALIYAH GRANT’S CONFLICT OF INTEREST CAUGHT ON CAMERA
I sat on Matteo’s bathroom counter while Lars cleaned the cut on his arm.
My face appeared on the television mounted above the bathtub.
A commentator spoke over the censored photograph.
“This raises further questions about whether Grant and Halvorsen coordinated his refusal to play as a publicity stunt.”
A second panelist leaned forward.
“And whether their separation was ever real. She may have used the appearance of distance to continue covering the league.”
I laughed.
The sound frightened me.
Lars looked up from the bandage.
“What?”
“They shot at us.”
“I know.”
“And somehow I’m still the criminal.”
He switched off the television.
My phone continued vibrating.
The photograph had reached my mother.
Former classmates.
Sources.
Men I had interviewed.
One source sent a single message:
I cannot be associated with this. Please delete my number.
Another demanded to know whether I had shared confidential conversations with Lars.
Rebecca released a public statement on behalf of the Ledger claiming the image “validated serious concerns” about my professional conduct.
Validated.
A stolen photograph taken through a window had validated their decision to fire me.
“They were waiting for this,” I said.
Lars tied off the bandage.
“What?”
“The Ledger. They were waiting for something ugly enough to make people stop asking whether they fired me too quickly.”
“Then we destroy them too.”
“Not everything can be solved by destruction.”
“It has worked several times.”
I looked at him.
He almost smiled.
I wanted to smile back.
Instead, my vision blurred.
I turned away quickly.
Lars saw.
Of course he saw.
He stepped between my knees.
“Do not.”
“I’m fine.”
“You are not.”
“I do not need you to tell me how I feel.”
“No. You need to stop lying about it.”
My mouth tightened.
He placed his hands on either side of me, not touching.
Waiting.
The gentleness undid me more effectively than comfort would have.
“I worked for nine years,” I said. “Do you understand that? Nine years of being the first person in and the last one out. Nine years of men repeating my questions and getting answers after players ignored me.”
“I know.”
“I checked every sentence three times because I knew one mistake would become proof that I never belonged there.”
“I know.”
“I let people call me difficult because agreeable women do not uncover anything.”
His eyes held mine.
“I know.”
“They don’t care whether the allegations are true.”
“No.”
“They just needed something they could believe about me.”
His jaw tightened.
I could hear the words neither of us said.
Black woman.
White athlete.
Sex.
Access.
The public had been given an old story in a new package.
A Black woman had climbed too high.
Therefore, someone must have lifted her.
And since the person was a white man, they decided they knew exactly what she had offered in exchange.
“I wanted my work to protect me,” I whispered.
Lars finally touched me.
His hand cupped the back of my neck.
“It should have.”
“But it didn’t.”
“No.”
The first tear fell before I could stop it.
I hated it.
I hated the heat of it against my cheek. Hated that my shoulders began shaking. Hated that the humiliation had found its way inside me despite every wall I built.
Lars pulled me against him.
I resisted for half a second.
Then collapsed.
He held me without speaking.
No promises.
No threats.
No insistence that he could fix what had happened.
His chest was warm beneath my cheek. His hand moved slowly over my back while I cried into the shoulder of the shirt I had wrinkled hours earlier.
When the tears stopped, he carried me to the shower.
“I can walk.”
“I know.”
He set me on my feet inside the marble stall and turned on the water.
Warm steam surrounded us.
He removed my blouse carefully, avoiding the scratches glass had left across my arms. Then he undressed without making the moment sexual.
That intimacy frightened me more.
Sex had rules.
This did not.
He washed dust from my hair.
Cleaned a small cut near my shoulder.
Kneeled to rinse blood from my calf that belonged to neither of us.
When he stood, water ran over the scars covering his body.
I touched the surgical line near his collarbone.
“You’re going to stop playing.”
His expression closed.
“That is not a decision for this morning.”
“It should have been made eighteen months ago.”
“Aaliyah.”