No Feelings

CHAPTER TWO: The Terms of a Devil's Bargain

The silence stretched long enough that Kess could hear the arena's massive ventilation system humming somewhere overhead, could hear her own pulse thudding in her ears. Ronan Vashti stood in front of her in full practice gear, sweat cooling on his temples, waiting with the patience of a man who'd rehearsed this moment and knew exactly how much silence he could afford to give her.

"Say that again," Kess said finally. "Say the last part again."

"I know something about the night Reyes got hurt," Ronan repeated, quiet and even, "that neither you nor the league has ever heard. And I'm not telling you what it is until you agree to the deal."

"That's not a deal. That's extortion."

"Call it whatever helps you sleep at night," he said, no cruelty in it, if anything his voice had gone rougher. "I'm not proud of it. But I need this trade, and I need it clean, and I don't have six weeks to find someone else who can pull off what you can pull off. You're the best at this. Everyone in that building knows it. And you're the only person I trust not to sell my private life to a tabloid the second the ink dries on my new contract."

"You don't get to talk about trust," Kess said, her voice shaking now, the fury finally breaking through the shock. "You are blackmailing me. There is no universe where that word applies to you right now."

Something flickered across his face — not defensiveness, something closer to shame, gone as fast as it appeared. "You're right. I don't get to use that word. I'm using leverage instead, because leverage is what I have and trust is what I've never been given the chance to earn. If you want to hate me for that, hate me. I'd probably hate me too." He skated a slow half-turn away, giving her space she hadn't asked for. "But I'm not lying about the deal. Six weeks. Public appearances, staged photos, whatever Kane's PR machine needs to sell the story to Vancouver and Colorado before the deadline. In exchange, what I know about that night stays buried, exactly like it's been buried for two years. You get the promotion. Your brother's bills get handled. And when the deadline passes, we're done. Clean break."

"And if I say no?"

"Then I let it come out on someone else's terms instead of mine. Whoever gets hold of it first — a reporter, a rival — they will not be careful with it. I'm not saying that to scare you. I'm saying it because it's true, and because I'd rather be the version of this you can survive than the version you can't."

"How thoughtful of you," Kess said, ice in her voice. "Blackmailing me for my own protection."

"I never said I was proud of it."

"No. You just said it's happening anyway."

He didn't argue with that, which somehow made it worse — a version of honesty so blunt it left her nowhere to direct the fury boiling in her chest.

"I need time," she said finally. "I'm not agreeing to anything on the ice, five minutes after you dropped this on me."

"You have until tonight. I assume Kane gave you the same deadline."

"How do you know what Kane told me?"

"Because I know how he operates. He plays both sides of every negotiation the same way — squeeze until someone breaks." A muscle ticked in his jaw. "I don't like it any more than you do. But I need this trade, and he needs a story he can sell, and you need—" he stopped himself, like he'd caught himself about to say something too personal.

"Finish the sentence."

"You need the promotion," he said instead, carefully, not finishing whatever he'd actually started to say.

She didn't believe him. Something in the hesitation told her he'd swallowed a different sentence entirely, but she didn't have the energy left to chase it down.

"I need to think," she said again, and turned to leave before he could see how badly her hands were shaking.

"Kess." She stopped at the gate, back to him. "For what it's worth, I didn't ask for you because you're convenient. I asked for you because you're the only person in this organization who'd actually tell me the truth to my face instead of managing me like a PR problem."

She left without answering, because some traitorous, exhausted part of her chest had gone tight and strange at the way he'd said it.

She didn't go back to her desk. She drove west across the city, past the harbor, until the skyline gave way to the smaller, older houses of the neighborhood she'd grown up in. Her mother's house still smelled like cardamom and dish soap, and Kess found her at the kitchen table with a stack of insurance paperwork, reading glasses pushed into graying hair.

"You're not at work," her mother said, without looking up. "Which means something is wrong."

Kess told her most of it — the trade, the image rehabilitation, the fake relationship. She left out the blackmail. She left out the promise of some buried truth about the night Malachi got hurt. Some things were too dangerous to say out loud until she understood them herself.

"Ronan Vashti," her mother repeated slowly, testing the name like a bruise. "The one who hurt Malachi."

"Yes."

"How much does it pay."

"Mom."

"How much, Kess."

"Forty percent raise. Effective immediately if I close this successfully." Kess's voice cracked on the number.

Her mother's face did something complicated — pride and exhaustion and a grief so old it barely registered as grief anymore. "I don't want you doing something that hurts you for our sake," she said quietly. "But I also know you, Kessiah. You have made yourself small for two years so nobody has to worry about you. Whatever you decide — I trust you to know what you can survive. I always have."

Kess put her head down on the table, right there among the insurance paperwork, and let herself cry — the ugly, gasping kind she hadn't let herself have in longer than she could remember. Her mother just held her hand.

By the time she drove back toward Wolves Tower, the sun had gone down over the harbor, and she'd made her decision.

She texted Kane before she lost her nerve. I'll do it. Six weeks. But I want terms in writing, and I want to talk to Vashti alone first.

His reply came instantly: Smart. Meeting room 4B, 8pm tonight, both of you.

Which was how Kess found herself, three hours later, sitting across a conference table from Ronan Vashti in an empty glass-walled room, a stack of legal paperwork between them.

He'd showered and changed — dark jeans, a charcoal Henley, damp hair pushed back — and looked, Kess thought with an irritation she didn't examine too closely, entirely too calm for a man who'd blackmailed someone six hours earlier.

"You came," he said, echoing his own words from the ice.

"You have information I need," Kess said flatly. "Tell me now, or I walk."

Something in his jaw tightened, but he nodded, slow and deliberate.

"The hit that ended Reyes's career wasn't clean," he said. "Not the way the league ruled it. I'm not saying I did it on purpose. I'm saying the ice was compromised. There was a soft patch behind the blue line — a resurfacing malfunction two hours before puck drop. I felt my blade slip half an inch at the worst possible second, which is the only reason the angle went as wrong as it did instead of just being a normal, legal check."

"That's not what the league found."

"They inspected the ice two days later, after the crew had already resurfaced it twice and quietly fixed the temperature system. There's an internal report, dated the night of the game, flagging the malfunction — before it got buried under a maintenance log made to look routine." His hands, flat on the table, had curled slightly. "The team knew within forty-eight hours. Ownership knew. They let the league's ruling stand as a clean hit, because reopening it as a facilities failure would have exposed them to a liability lawsuit the size of which would've made half this roster's trade value evaporate overnight. Reyes got a bigger settlement than a routine injury would've paid — quietly, structured to look like standard insurance — in exchange for never pursuing where the fault actually lay."

The room tilted around her. "Why would Malachi agree to that."

"Because he believed telling the truth would end his career either way. He took the settlement because it was the only version of his future that let him walk away with something." Ronan's voice had gone quieter. "I found out eight months after it happened, from a fired equipment manager angry enough to talk. I've spent two years trying to figure out what to do with it. I couldn't go to the league — no evidence trail that wouldn't implicate me. I couldn't go to Reyes directly. I've just been carrying it. Waiting for a moment where telling it might do some good instead of just detonating everyone's life for no reason."

"And you decided that moment was now," Kess said, voice shaking. "Attached to blackmail."

"I decided that if I was ever going to tell you, it needed to be attached to something that gave you actual power — standing inside this organization, someone in your corner. I know how this looks. I've been sitting on this for two years with no way to bring it to you that didn't destroy something. This is the least-bad option I found. I'm sorry it's still a bad one."

Kess sat in silence, trying to reconcile the calculating blackmailer from the ice with the exhausted man in front of her now.

"I need proof," she said finally. "Not your word."

"I have a copy of the facilities report. Kept in a safety deposit box for two years." He held up a hand before she could explode. "Not because I don't trust you — because the second that document exists outside a locked box, it becomes evidence in a liability case. I need to know you're not going to take it straight to a lawyer or a reporter the moment you have it, before we've figured out how to use it without destroying you, your job, and everyone in the blast radius. Give me six weeks. Let this trade close. Then we go after the truth together."

"Together," Kess repeated, testing the word.

"I want to fix something I've had to live with for two years, and I don't know how to do it alone. I asked for you specifically because you're the only person I trust to actually care about getting it right."

The confidentiality agreement sat between them, unsigned. Kess looked at it, then at him.

"Six weeks," she said finally. "And when it's over, you show me the report, and we figure out together what happens next. No more secrets."

"No more secrets," Ronan agreed, something in his face cracking slightly, and slid a pen across the table.

She picked it up. "One more thing," she said, before she signed. "There's a rule. Non-negotiable."

"Name it."

"No feelings." She said it clearly. "This is a job. A transaction. You get your trade, I get my promotion and the truth about Malachi, and in six weeks we walk away. Whatever we perform for the cameras stays on the surface. Nothing real. Nothing that follows either of us home."

Something flickered behind his pale eyes, gone before she could name it. He nodded, slow and solemn.

"No feelings," he echoed. "Deal."

They signed in silence. When it was done, Ronan stood, extended his hand across the table like they'd just closed a business acquisition. Kess shook it. His hand was enormous, warm in a way that startled her, and the contact lasted exactly as long as a professional handshake should have — and not one second longer, though something in her chest noted, with an alarm she immediately silenced, the strange electricity that traveled up her arm.

"Kane wants us photographed together this weekend," Ronan said, releasing her hand. "Something low-key. A coffee shop."

"Fine."

"And there's a team gala in three weeks. If we're going to sell this, that's the night it needs to look real."

"It won't be real," Kess said, sharper than necessary. "It'll look real. Remember the difference, every time we're in front of a camera."

"I remember the rule," Ronan said quietly, and something in the careful way he said it made her wonder whether he was reminding himself as much as her.

He left the conference room first. Kess sat alone for a long moment, staring at the signed agreement, the fluorescent lights humming overhead.

No feelings, she reminded herself, gathering the paperwork with hands that had finally stopped shaking. Six weeks. A transaction. Nothing real.

She almost believed it, walking out into the cold November night, the taillights of Ronan's SUV disappearing around the corner ahead of her.

She had no idea, standing alone in that parking garage with her heart still hammering, that the rule she'd just laid down so confidently across a conference table would be the hardest thing either of them ever tried to keep.