The Penalty for Loving You

Chapter 7 — Gold-Digger

Tessa’s kitchen smelled like burnt toast mixed with bad news.

“Don’t read it on an empty stomach,” she said, sliding her phone across the table. “That’s a medical recommendation.”

Sienna read it anyway.

FROM WEDDING PHOTOS TO WINNER’S CIRCLE: WHO IS THE RENEGADES’ MYSTERY HEIRESS?

Underneath, in smaller type, a quote from “a source close to the organization”:

“Six months ago she was a broke photographer nobody had heard of. Now she’s signing checks for a professional sports team. People work their whole lives for opportunities like this one. She just married well, divorced better, and got lucky with a will.”

Sienna read it twice.

“That’s not even clever,” she said. Her voice came out quieter than expected. “He is better than this.”

“He didn’t write it,” Tessa said. “He had someone write it. That’s not only worse but also disappointing.”

Sienna turned the phone face-down, folded her arms, and stared out the window. Morning traffic moved past, ordinary and unbothered, the way the world insists on staying normal when yours has just fallen apart. A bus. A woman walking a dog. Two kids on bikes.

Nobody out there knew. Nobody out there cared.

She wasn’t sure if that made it better or worse.

“I’m not holding a press conference to deny it,” she said finally. “That just builds the story into something bigger.”

“Then what will you do?” Tessa asked.

The hurt was still there, lodged in her chest like something sharp she couldn’t swallow down. But underneath it, something else was forming. Something quieter and harder.

She checked the clock. Five-forty.

“I show up,” Sienna said. “Somewhere the actual team can see me. Before the reporters are even awake.”

She didn’t make it before the reporters, though. By the time she pulled into the lot, three vans with satellite dishes were already parked at angles like crows on a wire, and a small crowd of microphones had gathered at the players’ exit.

Sienna stayed back by her car and watched, her arms folded against the cold, her stomach tight.

Tommy Burke walked out first. Twenty years old, all elbows and good intentions, the kind of rookie who still said sir to equipment managers. A reporter shoved a microphone at him before he’d cleared the doorway.

“Tommy — any reaction to today’s s********e fans are saying the team’s new owner doesn’t belong in that chair.”

Tommy stopped.

Sienna, twenty feet away and unseen, watched his face fold into a frown.

“You want a reaction?” he said. “She showed up to my mom’s hospital room last week with a casserole because somebody mentioned at practice that she was sick. Nobody asked her to. She just did it.” He looked dead into the camera. “I don’t care what she used to do for a living. I care that she’s the first person who’s run this team since Mr. Whitlock got sick, who actually shows up. So no. I don’t have a reaction. I have a thank-you. Print that instead.”

He walked past the microphones without waiting for a follow-up.

Sienna stood by her car with her hand pressed flat against her chest.

She hadn’t expected that. She hadn’t braced for it. And because she hadn’t braced for it, it got all the way in — past the armor she’d put on that morning reading that article, past the careful blankness she’d worn in the car.

Her eyes stung. She blinked, hard, and looked up at the top of the car until the feeling passed.

It didn’t fully pass.

She came back the next morning at five.

Sienna brought coffee. Sixty cups, in cardboard trays stacked four high in the back of her car, because she didn’t know yet how many men were on a roster and had decided to be wrong in the generous direction. It was the only thing she could think to do with the feeling Tommy had left in her chest — turn it into something useful. Something real.

Walt found her struggling with the trays at the loading door and took two out of her hands without being asked, grumbling the whole time in a way she would learn, over the following months, meant he liked you.

“You didn’t have to do this,” he said.

“I know.”

“Boys’ll think you’re trying to buy them.”

“I am trying to buy them,” she said. “Just not with money.”

He almost smiled. Almost.

By five-thirty the locker room smelled like coffee instead of liniment, and sixty grown men who skated into walls for a living were standing around in various states of suspicion, holding paper cups like they weren’t sure whether drinking one counted as taking sides.

Sienna moved through the room quietly, handing out cups, saying names she’d been memorizing for a week. It helped, having the names. It gave her somewhere to put her hands and her attention while the nerves hummed low and steady underneath everything.

Tommy took his without hesitation. “Heard you visited my mom,” he said. “Thank you. Really.”

“Is she better?”

“Yes just stubborn. Like her son.” He grinned. “Also — sorry about yesterday. The cameras. I didn’t ask permission.”

“Don’t apologize.” Something squeezed warmly in her chest. “It’s the first true thing anybody’s said about me in the paper in a week.”

Across the room, Dean watched her hand out the last tray but made no move to come over. She felt it before she saw it — the particular weight of someone’s attention when they’re trying not to be obvious about it. His eyes followed her the whole time, careful and quiet, and the back of her neck went warm in a way that had nothing to do with the coffee and everything to do with him.

She tried not to look over.

She almost did.

Three times.

She left the rink at six-forty that evening, tired in the particular way of a day that had gone better than expected. The kind of tired that felt good. Almost earned.

She was three steps from her car when her phone buzzed.

Unknown number. No name, no contact, just a string of digits she didn’t recognize.

Sell before the home opener.

Or everyone finds out exactly where you spent the night your marriage ended.

The air went out of her.

Sienna stood very still in the parking lot, the cold coming up through the soles of her shoes, the warmth of the morning draining out of her so fast it made her dizzy. Her thumb hovered over the screen. Her heart was loud. Too loud.

Somebody knew about the bar.

Somebody knew about the hotel.

She read the message again, hoping she had misunderstood It. She didn’t. It sat there, blunt and certain, and what frightened her most wasn’t the threat itself.

It was how specific it was.

Whoever sent this hadn’t guessed. They knew. And they had been waiting — patiently for exactly the right moment to use it.

Her hand was shaking slightly when she finally lowered the phone.

The parking lot was empty. The lights were coming on one by one in the early dark. Somewhere behind her, she could still hear the faint sound of skates on ice.

She stood there a moment longer, alone, the cold settling around her like a second skin.

Then she straightened up, put the phone in her pocket, and walked to her car.

She had a season to get through.

Whoever sent that text had just made a mistake.

Sienna Bennett wasn’t selling anything.