Enforcer's Bargain

Chapter Six: Cached

Delaney

The email arrived on a Tuesday, subject line innocuous enough that she almost deleted it without reading. Question re: Ravenquill93, from an address she didn't recognize, a name she didn't recognize, a sports gossip blog she'd never heard of called Rink Rat Report.

She read it standing in the Ironclads' PR office at 9 a.m. with a coffee going cold in her hand, and felt the floor tilt the way it had in the hallway six weeks ago, except this time there was no Roman standing across from her offering a deal. This time it was just her, alone, staring at a screenshot attached to the email, a cached version of chapter one of Enforcer's Bargain pulled from an archive site she hadn't known existed, timestamped fourteen months ago, with her old username still visible in the corner where she'd forgotten to scrub the metadata.

Hi Delaney. I run Rink Rat Report and I think you know why I'm reaching out. I found this cached chapter through a fan forum thread from last year, someone was trying to figure out who Ravenquill93 was after the account went dark, and the writing style plus a few specific details, the scar over Kade's eyebrow, the Detroit game reference, line up a little too well with your current, ah, situation. I'm not trying to blow anything up. I'd rather get a comment from you directly than run a guess. You have 48 hours before I publish something either way.

She sat down hard in the office chair. Marchetti, two desks over, glanced up and then very quickly looked back at his screen, the universal gesture of a man who had learned to recognize a crisis in progress and wanted no part of standing near it.

She called Roman before she called Priya, which told her something about her own priorities that she didn't have time to examine.

"It's out," she said, the second he picked up. "Or it's about to be. A blogger has a cached chapter with my old username still attached. Forty eight hours."

There was a long silence on the line, long enough that she thought the call had dropped, and then Roman said, quiet and even, "Okay. We deal with it. Come to the rink. Bring the email."

"That's it? We deal with it?"

"What did you want me to say, Voss?" His voice wasn't sharp, but there was something taut underneath it, something she recognized from watching him skate into a hit he knew was coming. "I've had worse things said about me by better sources. We deal with it. Come to the rink."

Priya, when Delaney called her next, was considerably less calm, in a controlled, professional way that was somehow more alarming than actual panic would have been.

"Forty eight hours," Priya repeated, typing something rapid fire on her laptop the second Delaney arrived at the arena. "Okay. Options. One, we get ahead of it, controlled statement, own the narrative before Rink Rat Report does. Two, we lawyer up and try to kill the story before it runs, which almost never works on a blog with nothing to lose. Three, we ignore it and hope a hockey blogger doesn't have the reach to actually make this land." She looked up over her laptop screen. "I want your read on option three, because I think you already know it's not real."

"It's not real," Delaney confirmed. "Rink Rat Report has forty thousand followers and half of them are exactly the demographic who'd eat this up. If it drops, it drops loud."

"Then we own it," Roman said, from the doorway, still in his practice gear, hair damp. "Before the blog does. We control the framing."

"Own it how," Delaney said. "Own it as, hi, I secretly wrote your boyfriend fanfiction for a year while dating someone else, and yes, also, our relationship started as blackmail? There isn't a version of owning that doesn't detonate."

"There's a version," Roman said, "where you don't say the blackmail part, obviously, and you tell the truth about the rest. You were a fan of the sport who wrote fiction. You didn't know we'd end up together. It's not illegal, it's not even that unusual, plenty of people write about athletes they've never met." He crouched down in front of her chair, steady, the way he got right before a big hit, all the nervous energy converting into something controlled. "The only thing that actually destroys you here is if it looks like you lied about who you are. So don't lie. Get ahead of it and tell the truth, the parts of the truth that are actually yours to tell."

Priya was already nodding, already typing. "That could work. Humanizes you both, actually. Frames it as fate instead of scandal, if we're careful with the language."

Delaney looked at Roman, crouched in front of her in full gear, offering her exactly the kind of calm, load bearing presence she'd once accused fiction of making up out of thin air, and thought, with a jolt, that maybe she hadn't been making anything up at all. Maybe she'd just been paying closer attention than anyone gave her credit for.

"Okay," she said. "Let's own it."

Roman

He drove her to his grandmother's house that same night, because Delaney had spent the entire day fielding calls and drafting statements and looking, by 8 p.m., like a woman who badly needed to be somewhere that had nothing to do with cameras, and his grandmother's kitchen was the only place Roman knew that qualified.

"You didn't tell me we were doing this today," Delaney said in the car, visibly bracing.

"I didn't decide until an hour ago." He kept his eyes on the road, aware of how much this mattered to him and unsure how to say so without sounding like more than he'd meant to be, six weeks into whatever this had become. "She's going to like you. I need you to know that going in, because she doesn't like most people, and it took her nine years to like me, and I need this specific stress test to go well today of all days."

"No pressure."

"All the pressure," he agreed. "She'll ask about your family. She'll feed you too much and get offended if you don't finish it. She'll ask if I'm still skating angry, which is her way of asking if I'm happy, and I need you to not laugh when I lie and say no."

His grandmother's house smelled like doenjang and old paper, and she took one look at Delaney in the doorway, one long, assessing look that Roman recognized from every important moment of his childhood, and said, in Korean, something Roman translated only reluctantly.

"She says you have kind eyes. She says that's rare in the women who usually end up on television with you." He watched Delaney's face do something soft and grateful at that, unguarded in a way she rarely allowed around cameras or Priya or even him, most days. "She's deciding if that's a compliment or an insult. Honestly, so am I."

Over dinner, his grandmother asked about the article Delaney was bracing for, having apparently heard about it from a neighbor's granddaughter who followed hockey blogs more closely than any of them, and instead of the horror Delaney visibly expected, the old woman laughed, a real, delighted laugh that filled the small kitchen.

"You wrote stories about him," she said, in careful English, patting Delaney's hand. "Good. Somebody should have been writing him softer stories a long time ago. He used to be a very serious little boy. Very serious. I worried he'd forgotten how to be anything else." She looked at Roman, something fierce and proud passing over her face. "Whatever the article says, you tell them the truth. You tell them my grandson has always been softer than he lets people see. You're not the first person to notice. You're just the first person he let write it down."

Later, in the car, driving Delaney home through streets gone quiet and dark, Roman said, without looking at her, "She doesn't say things like that. About people I bring around. Ever."

"I noticed."

"I wanted you to." He reached over, found her hand on the console, held it the way he'd been wanting to all day, since the email, since the crisis, since every version of the last six hours that had asked something real of both of them and gotten it. "Whatever the blog runs tomorrow, whatever it costs either of us, I need you to know that tonight happened first. That's not something they get to take credit for breaking, or take away from us after. That's ours."

Delaney didn't say anything for a long moment, just held his hand tighter, and when she finally spoke, her voice had gone thick in a way he'd never heard from her, not once, not even in the tunnel.

"I think," she said, "I might be past the point where I can call this fake, even to myself."

"Good," Roman said, and meant it more than he'd meant almost anything in a season full of hits and headlines and cameras that had never once, until her, managed to catch the parts of him that actually mattered. "Because I stopped calling it that weeks ago. I was just waiting for you to catch up."