CHAPTER 3
MAREN
The executive breakroom on the third floor of the arena has a skyline view of Portland, granite countertops, and an espresso machine that is currently displaying a flashing red error code.
I stare at the digital screen, pressing the reset button for the fourth time. The machine whirs, grinds a single coffee bean, and then dies completely.
I close my eyes for two seconds, cataloging the specific brand of frustration that comes with a lack of caffeine on a day that is already spiraling out of control.
I abandon the expensive machine and walk over to the standard drip coffee maker in the corner.
The glass pot is half-full of a dark, sludgy liquid that looks like it was brewed during the previous season.
I pour a cup anyway. I take a sip, grimace at the taste of burnt copper and stale water, and carry it back down the hall.
My office is exactly how I left it ten minutes ago, with one exception.
The small, folded piece of black friction tape is still sitting on the edge of the side table by the door.
I stop and look at it. It is a piece of garbage.
A discarded scrap from a hockey stick. I should throw it in the trash can.
Instead, I set my terrible coffee on the desk, pick up the tape, and turn it over in my fingers.
The adhesive is strong, the fabric rough against my skin.
It is a physical marker of Bennett Hayes’s defiance.
He left it there to remind me that he walked into my space, dictated the terms of the crisis, and walked out on his own two feet.
I open the top drawer of my desk and drop the tape inside, pushing it to the back corner before sliding the drawer shut.
I check my watch. I have exactly twelve minutes to set up the media room before my session with the captain.
I grab my laptop and a legal pad, walking two doors down to a small, windowless conference room. It is the space the franchise uses for internal HR meetings, which makes it perfect for media training. The walls are painted a flat, non-reflective gray.
I set up a tripod at the end of the table and attach a high-definition camera, flipping the monitor out so I can see the frame.
I position a single LED ring light behind it.
The setup is designed to be slightly uncomfortable.
When you put an athlete in front of a camera, you need to strip away their media-trained autopilot and see how they react under actual pressure.
Bennett Hayes doesn't have an autopilot. He operates entirely on raw, defensive instinct.
The door opens exactly on the hour.
Bennett steps into the room, ducking his head slightly to clear the doorframe.
He has showered and changed into team apparel—a dark gray polo with the Kodiaks logo embroidered on the chest, and black athletic trousers.
The corporate uniform doesn't make him look any less dangerous.
If anything, the tailored fit of the polo only highlights the broad, heavy build of his shoulders.
He looks at the camera, then at the ring light, and finally at me.
"Take a seat, Captain," I say, gesturing to the single chair positioned at the opposite end of the long table, directly in the glare of the light.
He walks over and sits down. The chair creaks under his weight. He rests his forearms on the table, his hands loosely clasped. He looks like a man waiting for a prison sentence to be read.
"The goal of this session is baseline establishment," I say, taking my seat behind the camera.
I open my laptop and pull up the draft of the statement.
"You volunteered to take the fall for Grant Evans.
That means tomorrow morning, you are going to sit in the main press room downstairs and tell thirty sports journalists that you were at that VIP party. "
"I know what I volunteered for."
"Knowing it and selling it are two different things." I hit the record button on the camera. A small red light blinks to life. "Look at the lens, not at me."
Bennett shifts his gaze to the camera. His jaw is locked.
"Let's start with the narrative," I say, keeping my tone perfectly neutral. "The league office is already investigating the sponsor conflict. The media is painting this team as a locker room completely out of control. I need you to give me the statement we agreed on."
Bennett stares at the lens. "I was at the club. Grant Evans was under my supervision. The failure in judgment was mine, and I take full responsibility for the distraction it has caused the franchise."
He recites the words perfectly. And it is the worst delivery I have ever seen.
"Stop," I say, holding up a hand. "You sound like a hostage reading a ransom note."
Bennett drops his gaze from the camera to me. "It's the statement you wrote."
"The words are fine. The delivery is a disaster." I stand up and walk around the table, stopping a few feet away from his chair. "You are angry. You are sitting rigidly, your shoulders are practically touching your ears, and you are glaring at the lens like you want to break it over your knee."
"I don't like cameras."
"I don't care what you like," I reply, keeping my voice level. "I care about the optics. If you go out there tomorrow and look like you want to murder the press corps, they won't believe you are apologizing. They will think Marcus Thorne forced you into that chair to protect his star rookie."
"Thorne did force me into the chair."
"But the media can't know that," I say, stepping closer. "The entire point of crisis management is controlling the reality the public sees. If you want to protect Evans, you have to make them believe you are genuinely remorseful."
I look down at him. He is still tense, his posture defensive.
"Sit back," I instruct.
He doesn't move.
I step into his personal space. The scent of hotel soap and cold air radiates off him. Without thinking, I reach out and place my hands on his shoulders to manually adjust his posture.
The moment my right hand presses against his right shoulder, the muscle beneath his polo shirt turns to absolute granite. He flinches—a sharp, involuntary movement—and pulls away from my touch so fast the chair scrapes loudly against the floor.
I freeze, my hands suspended in the air.
Bennett is looking at me, his chest rising and falling in a slow, controlled rhythm. He doesn't say anything, but the warning in his dark eyes is unmistakable.
I slowly lower my hands. I file the reaction away in my mind, adding it to the slight hesitation I noticed in the hallway earlier.
"Don't lean away from the camera," I say, smoothly recovering my professional tone. I step back, giving him space. "It makes you look evasive. Keep your back straight, but drop your shoulders. You need to look relaxed."
Bennett exhales slowly through his nose. He adjusts his seating, dropping his shoulders a fraction of an inch.
"Better," I say. I walk back to my side of the table and pick up my pen. "Now, what are you going to do with your hands?"
He looks down at his hands, currently resting on the table. "Nothing."
"You have a tell, Hayes. When you are stressed, you fidget.
I watched you tear a roll of tape apart in the hallway.
" I slide my expensive metal pen across the smooth surface of the conference table.
It stops right in front of him. "Hold that.
Keep it out of frame, under the table. When you feel the need to move, grip the pen. It will anchor you."
Bennett looks at the pen, then picks it up. He turns it over in his large hands, the metal looking absurdly delicate against his scarred knuckles.
"Let's try again," I say. "And this time, I am going to ask the questions the reporters are going to ask. You need to deflect without sounding defensive."
For the next forty minutes, I run him through a gauntlet. I throw every invasive, aggressive, and manipulative question I can think of at him. I ask about his leadership, about the rumors of a trade, about the sponsor conflict.
He hates every second of it.
He answers in short, clipped sentences. He refuses to expand on his apologies. But he holds the pen under the table, and he keeps his eyes on the lens.
"Captain Hayes," I say, leaning forward, playing the role of the lead sports columnist for the local paper. "You are in the final year of your contract. The team is struggling. Now you are caught at an unauthorized party. Is this a sign that you have given up on the Portland Kodiaks?"
Bennett’s jaw tightens. He looks away from the lens, his eyes locking onto mine.
"I have never given up on this team," he says. His voice is low, completely stripped of the PR polish we have been practicing. It is raw and brutally honest. "I have given this franchise everything I have. Every shift. Every season."
The room goes entirely quiet.
I look at him, sitting in the harsh glare of the ring light. He is a terrible liar. He is a terrible liar because he is a fundamentally honest man trying to navigate a corporate machine that thrives on deception.
I know exactly what that machine does to people.
It chewed me up in New York. It took my ambition and my trust and weaponized them.
Looking at Bennett, I can see the exact same process happening to him.
He is offering his own throat to Marcus Thorne to save a rookie who didn't have the discipline to put a bottle down.
I break character.
"They are going to tear you apart tomorrow," I say quietly.
Bennett places the pen on the table. He leans back in the chair, the tension finally draining out of his frame, leaving behind a heavy exhaustion.
"Let them," he says.
"You don't understand the exposure here," I argue, my frustration spiking. I point at the camera. "That lens doesn't care about your loyalty. The media doesn't care that you are trying to be a good captain. They want blood, Bennett. And if you give them yours, they will take it and ask for more."
"It doesn't matter what they want," he replies calmly. "It only matters that Thorne gets his scapegoat, and Grant gets to play out the season."
"And what happens to you?"
"I survive the season. I always do."
I stare at him. My hand, still resting on the legal pad, is trembling slightly. It is a combination of the terrible coffee, the lack of sleep, and the sheer, infuriating stubbornness of the man sitting across from me.
I try to press my palm flat against the paper to hide the tremor, but it is too late.
Bennett stands up. He walks around the long table, stepping out of the harsh light of the camera. He stops next to my chair.
He looks down at my hand. Then, very slowly, he reaches out.
He doesn't grab my hand. He simply places two of his fingers over the top of my knuckles, applying a steady, grounding pressure. His skin is warm. The calluses on his fingers are rough against my skin.
The tremor stops immediately.
I look up at him. The proximity is dangerous. I can see the faint silver scar cutting through his left eyebrow. I can see the exhaustion in the lines around his eyes.
"You drink too much bad coffee, Whitaker," he says softly.
"You take too many hits for people who don't deserve it, Hayes," I reply, my voice barely above a whisper.
He doesn't move his hand away. "We all have our bad habits."
The air in the small room feels suddenly thin. The professional boundary I have spent two years building is currently being dismantled by a hockey player with a self-sacrificing instinct and a heavy touch. I need to step back. I need to re-establish the protocol.
Before I can pull my hand away, my phone lights up on the table, vibrating violently against the wood.
The spell breaks. Bennett drops his hand and takes a step back, slipping his hands into his pockets.
I pick up the phone. It is a text message from Vivian Price, my lawyer and the only person I trust in this industry.
Vivian: Check your email right now. The sports blogs just got an anonymous leak.
I open my email app. My chest tightens as the message loads. It is a link to a local sports gossip site.
I click the link. The page loads a new, high-resolution photo from the VIP party. It shows Grant Evans holding the vodka bottle, laughing.
But that isn't the problem.
The problem is the timestamp in the corner of the security footage, and the wide angle of the shot. It clearly shows the entrance to the VIP room.
Bennett Hayes is nowhere in the frame.
"What is it?" Bennett asks, watching my face.
I look up from the screen, the cold reality of the situation washing over me. The narrative we just spent an hour building is completely useless.
"You told me you were at the door," I say, my voice turning to ice.
"I was."
"The timestamp on this new photo is 2:14 AM," I say, turning the phone around so he can see the screen. "It shows the entire room. You aren't there."
Bennett looks at the photo. A muscle moves once in his cheek, hard enough to show beneath the skin.
"If you go out there tomorrow and claim you were supervising him, a reporter is going to project this photo onto a screen and call you a liar on live television," I say, standing up. "Thorne won't just fine you. He will suspend you for lying to the front office."
I grab my laptop and my legal pad.
"I told you what would happen if you lied to me," I say, walking toward the door.
"Maren," he says, using my first name for the first time. The sound lands too close to a place I do not want him touching.
I stop in the doorway and look back at him. He is standing in the shadows of the conference room, looking like a man who just realized the ice beneath his feet is cracking.
"You are the face of this redemption campaign, Captain," I tell him coldly. "I suggest you figure out exactly where you were at 2:14 AM, because tomorrow morning, I am going to ask you in front of the cameras. And I won't accept a lie."
I walk out into the hallway, leaving him alone in the gray room.