Enforcer's Bargain

Chapter Seven: The Drop

Delaney

Rink Rat Report published at 6 a.m., which meant Delaney woke up to ninety four notifications instead of an alarm, and read the headline before she'd fully opened her eyes.

SHE WROTE THE ROMANCE BEFORE SHE LIVED IT: Inside Ironclads Publicist Delaney Voss's Secret Fanfiction Past

It wasn't cruel. That surprised her most of all, sitting up in bed at 6:04 a.m. with her heart going like a drum line, scrolling through four thousand words that Priya's carefully worded statement had clearly gotten to first, framed exactly the way Roman had suggested three nights ago. A publicist and lifelong hockey fan who happened to fall for the player she'd been quietly writing about for over a year. Fate, dressed up as coincidence, dressed up as a scandal that mostly wasn't one.

The comments were a different story, the way comments always were, a mix of delighted and horrified and, worst of all, a small but vocal contingent convinced the entire relationship had been engineered from the start, that no publicist accidentally ends up dating her own fictional muse, that something didn't add up.

They weren't wrong. That was the part that made Delaney's stomach twist worst of all, sitting in bed at dawn, reading strangers accidentally reconstruct the outline of the truth while missing the one detail that would have actually broken it wide open.

Her phone buzzed. Not Roman. A number she hadn't seen in two years, deleted and somehow, apparently, still memorized by her contacts app's ghost of old data.

Beckett Reyes: Saw the article. Didn't expect to feel anything about it but I do. Can we talk?

She stared at the text for a long time, coffee cooling untouched beside her, feeling something old and complicated rise up that she'd thought she'd finished feeling.

Roman

He'd read the article at 6:02 a.m., two minutes after it dropped, sitting in his truck outside the rink with the engine running and his phone lit up in the dark, and he'd felt, against every instinct honed over a decade of professional scrutiny, something close to relief. It wasn't good. It wasn't nothing. But it also wasn't the detonation either of them had braced for, and Priya's framing had held, mostly, and the internet, for once, seemed more charmed than outraged.

Petrov found him in the locker room an hour later, grinning like a man who'd been handed the best gossip of his career. "Your girl wrote you a whole book," he said, delighted. "I read the excerpt in the article. Very good writing, honestly. Very... descriptive."

"Don't finish that sentence."

"I'm only saying, some of these details, very specific." Petrov was still grinning. "The scar. The Detroit game. Did she really write about the hit?"

"That's enough, Petrov."

But it landed somewhere it shouldn't have, a small cold spot at the base of his neck, because he hadn't actually asked her that. Hadn't asked how much of the fic covered the hit itself, the night that had ended Beckett Reyes's season and started, however obliquely, everything that followed. He'd read forty chapters and felt, mostly, seen. He hadn't stopped to consider what reading her own worst night, refracted through fiction, might have cost her to write, or what it might now cost her to have it published for the entire internet to parse.

He called her between practice and media availability, and she picked up on the second ring, voice tight in a way that told him something else had happened, something the article alone hadn't caused.

"Beckett texted me," she said, before he could ask. "This morning. After he saw it."

Something in Roman's chest went very still, the particular stillness he recognized from watching game film, the half second before you knew whether a hit was clean or not. "What did he say?"

"That he felt something. That we should talk." A pause, heavy with things she wasn't saying yet. "I haven't answered. I don't know what I'm supposed to feel about the fact that my ex resurfacing the same day my secret gets exposed feels like the universe running a stress test on both of us at once."

"Do you want to talk to him?"

"I don't know." Her honesty cost her something, he could hear it, and he loved her more in that moment of admitted uncertainty than he had in any of the moments where she'd been sure of herself, which told him something about what he actually wanted from her, underneath all the performance and the contracts and the careful management of two competing careers. "I owe him a conversation, probably. Closure, or whatever the word is for finally explaining why I spent a year writing about the man who ended his career instead of grieving him properly like a normal person."

"That's not nothing to sit with."

"No," she agreed. "It's really not."

He wanted, badly, to tell her not to go, to protect the fragile new thing they'd built in a kitchen with one photo on the wall, but he recognized, with the same clarity that had let him read a shifting defense his entire career, that telling her not to go would only prove every insecure thing she'd probably feared about him from the very beginning: that underneath the softness, he was still the man who took things from people without asking, the man Section 114 had watched skate away without looking back, before he'd learned to look back on purpose.

"Go talk to him," he said instead. "Tell him whatever's true. I trust you to know what that is."

"You're not worried?"

"I'm terrified," Roman admitted, low, honest, the way he'd been trying to be with her since the tunnel. "But being terrified and trusting you aren't opposites. I'm choosing to do both at once. That's the whole deal now, apparently. Welcome to dating an enforcer who's finally figured out how to be scared of something other than a bad hit."

She laughed, small and surprised, and something in the sound eased the cold spot at the back of his neck, not all the way, but enough.

"I'll call you after," she said. "Whatever happens."

"I'll be here." He meant it as more than a scheduling detail, and from the pause before she hung up, he thought she'd heard it that way too.

He sat in the parking lot another ten minutes after the call ended, turning over the specific, uncomfortable shape of loving someone whose past he'd once used as leverage, now watching her walk directly back into that past on her own, unprotected, because it was the honest thing to do and she'd apparently decided, somewhere over the last six weeks, that honest was worth more to her than safe.

He thought about his grandmother's kitchen. About a name only she still used. About helping, assisting, whatever Seo joon was actually supposed to mean for a man who'd spent a career getting paid to hurt people on purpose.

Maybe this was what it meant, he thought, starting the truck, finally. Not protecting Delaney from her past by controlling it. Just standing close enough to catch her, if the conversation with Beckett went somewhere that needed catching.

He drove to the rink for morning skate, and for the first time in a decade of practices, his head wasn't on the ice at all.