No Feelings

The espresso machine in the Ironclad Wolves' executive kitchen had been broken for three days, which meant Kessiah Odara was drinking bad drip coffee out of a paper cup with the Wolves' snarling wolf-head logo stamped on the side, and she hated everything about her morning already before Priya Malhotra dropped into the chair across from her desk like she'd been shot out of a cannon. "You need to sit down," Priya said. "I'm already sitting down." "Sit down more." Kess set the paper cup on her desk, next to a mock-up of next month's sponsor deck, and looked at her best friend with the specific dread reserved for mornings that started with someone telling her to brace herself. "Silas wants you in his office," Priya said. "Now. Like, five minutes ago now." "About the Coastal Bank deck?" "No." Priya's mouth did something complicated. "About Vashti." The name landed in Kess's chest like a fist. She didn't react — years of practice had taught her how not to react — but her hand found the edge of her desk and gripped it, just for a second, just long enough to steady the room. Ronan Vashti. She hadn't said the name out loud in longer than she could remember. She'd built an entire architecture of avoidance around not saying it — around not watching Wolves highlight reels past the point where his number flashed onto the screen, around changing the channel when his name came up in a broadcast. Two years of careful, deliberate avoidance, and now her boss wanted her in his office to talk about the one man in Ashcombe Bay she'd sworn to keep permanently out of her life. "What about him," she said, and her voice came out steadier than she felt. "I don't know the details. I just know Kane called down and said your name and Vashti's name in the same sentence." Priya's dark eyes went soft with worry. "Kess. Are you okay?" "I'm fine." "You're doing the thing with your jaw." "I don't have a thing with my jaw." "You have a whole thing." Priya reached across the desk and touched her wrist. "You don't have to go in there smiling. You can go in there and say no." Kess almost laughed at that. In four years of climbing from unpaid intern to junior marketing associate, she'd learned exactly one immutable law of corporate survival: when Silas Kane said hold my ten o'clock, "no" was a theoretical option in the same way jumping off the Frostvane Center's upper deck was a theoretical form of transportation. "I'll be fine," she said, and stood, smoothing her blazer, and walked toward the glass-walled office at the end of the floor like she wasn't currently reliving the worst night of her life. She'd been sitting in section 114, four rows back from the glass, wearing Malachi's away jersey with REYES stitched across the shoulders, because she'd worn it to every home game for three seasons and it was, by then, less a jersey and more a superstition. Malachi had been having the best season of his career. He'd proposed two months earlier, down on one knee at center circle in an empty rink, and she'd said yes so fast she started crying before he finished the question. Then, in the third period of a Tuesday-night game against a team that didn't even matter in the standings, Ronan Vashti — six foot four of shoulder and menace — had put his shoulder into Malachi's chest along the boards at full speed, and something in the angle had gone catastrophically, permanently wrong. She remembered the sound more than the sight. A c***k that carried through nineteen thousand people falling silent all at once. Running down the concourse stairs in borrowed heels. Malachi's face — not screaming, which was somehow worse, just staring at the arena lights like his future had switched off behind his eyes. Spinal compression. Nerve damage. Two surgeries, a settlement, a medical retirement at twenty-four, and the slow collapse of an engagement built entirely around a shared future on ice that no longer existed for him. He hadn't blamed her when he ended things eleven months later. He'd said, quietly, that he couldn't keep watching her build a life adjacent to the sport that had taken his. The league had reviewed the hit. Called it clean. Ronan Vashti served zero suspension and, six weeks later, signed an extension that made him one of the highest-paid enforcers in the league. Kess had never forgiven any of it. Silas Kane's office smelled like the good coffee, and Kess hated him a little for that on principle as she stepped inside. He was standing behind his desk instead of sitting, which was never a good sign. "Kess. Sit." There was a manila folder on the desk, squared to the edge, waiting. "We have a problem," Kane said, "and the problem's name is Ronan Vashti." "Go on." He turned the folder toward her — tabloid headlines, blurry photos, speculation. VASHTI'S TICKING TIME BOMB: IS ASHCOMBE'S ENFORCER TOO VOLATILE FOR TRADE? "He's up for a trade in six weeks. Vancouver's interested. So is Colorado. Both franchises have concerns about his off-ice image. It's costing him leverage, which costs us leverage, because a bigger trade return means a better package coming back to this franchise." "He's an enforcer. Being intimidating is his job description." "Being intimidating on the ice is his job description. Being a headline off it is a liability. We need something that reframes the narrative. Ideally—" a flicker of discomfort crossed his face, "—something that humanizes him. Personally." "Personally," Kess repeated. "A relationship. Public. Visible. I want you to run point on his image rehabilitation for the next six weeks." Kess sat very still. "I'm not the right person for this." "Why not." She could have told him the truth. She didn't. "Personal reasons." "Does this have to do with Malachi Reyes." His voice was clinical, businesslike. "It's public record, Kess. I brought you in because you're the best person for this job despite it — and because, frankly, Vashti asked for you specifically." The room tilted slightly. "He asked for me." "By name. Said if he had to do this, he wanted someone who'd actually tell him the truth instead of blowing smoke." Kane closed the folder. "Successfully manage this, and I'll personally advocate for you to take the senior marketing role opening in spring. Forty percent raise." His gaze flicked, briefly, to the framed photo on her desk visible through the glass — Kess and Dayo at his high school graduation. "I know things have been tight for your family. This is the fastest way I know to change that." "End of day," Kane said, and it wasn't a question. Priya intercepted her in the hallway and steered her into the stairwell. "Talk." Kess told her everything. Watched Priya's face cycle through shock, outrage, and something uncomfortably close to intrigue. "He asked for you. By name. Why would he do that?" "I don't care. I'm not doing it." "What about Dayo's copays." The stairwell went cold. "That's not fair," Kess said quietly. "None of this is fair. But this raise fixes it overnight." Priya's hand found her shoulder. "You don't have to decide today." "I have until end of day." Kess pressed her palms against her eyes. "I have to at least talk to him. If I'm going to say no — and I think I'm going to say no — I want to say it to his face." She found him forty minutes later in the empty practice rink beneath Frostvane Center, alone, running drills with a bucket of pucks and nobody watching. He didn't hear her come in. She watched him skate — controlled power, nothing like the brute-force reputation the tabloids had built around him — until he fired a wrist shot into an empty net, and the c***k of the puck against the boards echoed through the cavernous space, and something in her chest tightened at the sound. "Vashti." He turned, and for the first time in two years, Kess found herself close enough to actually see him — pale gray eyes, a jaw sharpened by clenching it, a scar through one eyebrow, an expression that flickered, for one unguarded second, into something like relief before closing off entirely. "You came," he said. "I wasn't sure you would." "I'm here to tell you no. To your face. Because you owe me that much." "You don't know what I did," he said quietly. "Not really. You know what the league said happened. That's not the same thing." "I know what I watched happen." Her voice cracked despite everything. "I am not going to spend six weeks pretending to be in love with you so the league can sell you off to Vancouver with a better reputation." He skated a slow half-circle, closing some of the distance. "Then let me tell you what I know. I know your brother's rehabilitation costs are running twelve hundred a month past what your insurance covers. I know your mother picked up a second job in March." He paused, close enough now that she had to tilt her head back. "And I know something else. Something about the night Malachi Reyes got hurt that neither you nor the league has ever heard. Six weeks. You play my girlfriend in public, and what I know stays buried. Or you walk away right now, and I let it come out — on someone else's terms, not mine." The blood drained from her face. "What truth," she whispered. "What are you talking about." His jaw tightened. For one unguarded second, something like pain crossed his face. "Say yes first," he said. "Then I'll tell you everything." And Kessiah Odara, standing on the ice where two years ago her entire future had shattered in a single collision, understood with sick certainty that she'd just walked into a trap far more dangerous than the one she'd come here to refuse.