Enforcer's Bargain

Delaney pov The Ironclads' practice facility smelled like rubber and Axe body spray, and Delaney Voss had exactly four minutes to fix the team's social media page before Coach Halvorsen noticed she'd posted a video of Number 14 faceplanting during warmups. She didn't fix it. She never fixed it in time. That was half the appeal, if she was honest, chaos content got triple the engagement of the polished stuff the front office wanted. "Voss." The voice came from behind her, low and rough, like gravel dragged over ice. "My office. Now." She knew that voice. Everyone in the building knew that voice. Roman Kade didn't ask for things, he collected debts, on the ice and off it, and the sound of her name in his mouth made the back of her neck go cold. She turned around anyway, chin up, because if there was one thing three years working PR for professional hockey players had taught her, it was that you never let them see you flinch first. "I don't answer to you, Kade. I answer to Halvorsen and, on a good day, to God." "You're going to want to make an exception." He held up his phone. The screen was angled away from her, but she recognized the layout instantly... the burgundy header, the swirling cursive font, the little hockey-stick icon in the corner. Ravenquill93's profile page. Forty one thousand followers. Six completed novels. One hundred and twelve chapters of a story called 'Enforcer's Bargain', about a bruising, silent hockey player named Roan Vale who falls for the team's buttoned up publicist after breaking his rival's collarbone in overtime. Delaney's stomach dropped through the floor of the arena. "That's not..." she started. "Don't." Roman's jaw ticked. "I read chapter thirty-one twice before I figured out why 'Roan Vale' sounded so familiar. You gave him my scar. The one over my eyebrow. From the Detroit game." He took a step closer, and she had to tilt her head back to keep looking at him, which she resented on principle. "You've been writing about me for a year, Voss. Under an alias. On league time, if the timestamps on some of these posts are anything to go by." "You don't know it's me." "I know your Wi-Fi password is your childhood dog's name because you told Marchetti in the break room, and I know Ravenquill93 uses the same password recovery email as the one on your team badge application, because the IT guy owed me a favor and doesn't ask questions when I buy the beer." He said it flatly, without triumph, which somehow made it worse. "You're not as careful as you think." She felt the floor of her career tilt beneath her. Sports romance fanfic wasn't illegal. It wasn't even really 'wrong'. But she was the Ironclads' 'publicist'. She built the sanitized, sponsor friendly image these men wore in public, and she'd spent three hundred nights writing the version of them that made teenage girls and lonely housewives short of breath. If it got out that the woman managing Roman Kade's brand was also the woman writing forty thousand word slow burns about him bending his love interest over a Zamboni, she wouldn't get fired quietly. She'd get fired publicly, memed into oblivion, unemployable in sports media from Seattle to Sunrise. "What do you want," she said. Not a question. A surrender already, and she hated herself for it. "A girlfriend." Roman said it like he was ordering a coffee. Delaney actually laughed, one short, disbelieving bark. "Excuse me?" "Sponsors are nervous. League's nervous. I put a guy through the boards in March and broke his radius in two places, and now every time I so much as breathe near another team's bench, they run footage of it before the game like a horror trailer." He shoved his hands in the pockets of his hoodie, and for the first time, she saw something under the granite... tired, maybe. Cornered, like her. "My agent says I need to look human. Settled. Not the guy the league's about to make an example of. A relationship does that. A 'stable' one. With someone respectable." His eyes flicked over her blazer, her lanyard, the little pin on her collar that said ASK ME ABOUT SEASON TICKETS. "You're respectable. On paper." "So you're blackmailing me into being your fake girlfriend." "I'm giving you a way to keep your job." He shrugged, like it was the same thing, and maybe to him it was. "Three months. Public enough that it lands. Private enough that neither of us has to like it." "I don't like you 'now'." Something moved behind his eyes... not quite a smile, but adjacent to one, a flicker of the man she'd apparently spent a year writing four hundred thousand words about without ever once being in a room with him for longer than it took to schedule a media appearance. "That's fine, Voss. Chapter thirty one didn't like him either. For about eleven pages." He walked out before she could answer, and she stood alone in the hallway with her heart going like a slap shot, and thought, with real, cold horror: 'he's read all of it.' Roman's pov He shouldn't have said the thing about chapter thirty one. Roman sat in his truck in the players' lot for ten minutes after, not driving anywhere, just gripping the wheel and staring at the fogged up windshield like it owed him an explanation. He hadn't planned to bring up the book. He'd planned to keep this transactional, hand over the leverage, state the terms, walk away clean. Instead he'd stood there quoting her own writing back at her like a lovesick i***t, and the worst part was he 'remembered' the chapter. Remembered the exact paragraph where Roan Vale finally touched the publicist's wrist in a hospital hallway after she took a puck to the face at a game she wasn't even supposed to be at. He remembered, because his life had never once felt like something worth writing forty thousand words about, and reading it, reading himself imagined that carefully, that closely, like someone had actually 'looked' at him instead of just watching him hit people for a living, had done something to his chest he didn't have a name for. He found her name in his contacts under D. VOSS — PR (DO NOT CALL AFTER 9PM, SHE MEANS IT) and didn't call. His agent, Priya, had been blunt about the timeline on the phone that morning. "Three endorsement deals are on ice, Roman. Ice, like your terrible pun of a career. The league wants a redemption arc and they want it before the All-Star break. You need a face. A nice one. A believable one." He hadn't planned to use the fic as the mechanism. He'd found the account by accident, doing what any reasonably paranoid athlete did after a bad hit, scrolling for chatter about himself at 2 a.m., bracing for cruelty, and instead falling into a story that got him 'right'. Got the loneliness under the temper. Got why he skated like something was chasing him. He'd told himself he was only confirming who wrote it because he needed to know if a beat reporter had inside access to things that could actually hurt him. Then he'd found out it was Delaney Voss, and something in him had gone quiet and strange, and instead of walking away, he'd built an entire blackmail plan around getting to stand near her on purpose. He wasn't proud of that. He also wasn't going to examine it too closely, because examining things too closely was how you ended up benched with your own head instead of a bad knee. His phone buzzed. Priya. 'Well?' 'She's in,' he typed, which wasn't strictly true yet, but felt true in the way a hit felt true half a second before it landed, inevitable, already decided, just waiting for the ice to catch up to it. He thought about Delaney's face in the hallway, furious, cornered, refusing to look small even while he held her whole career in his hand like a puck he could drop or keep. She'd have made Roan Vale nervous, he thought. She made him... nervous, and he'd broken a man's arm in front of nineteen thousand people without blinking. Three months, he'd told her. Public enough to land. Private enough that neither of them had to like it. He drove home turning that lie over and over, because some small, unhockey part of him already suspected three months wasn't going to be nearly long enough, and liking her wasn't going to be the problem at all. The problem was having to stop.