Power Play

Chapter Seven: Aftermath

Rae woke tangled in sheets that weren't hers, in a bed in the room she'd fought Beckett for and lost, sunlight cutting thin lines through blinds she didn't remember closing, and the specific, disorienting realization that the warm weight against her back was Beckett Vance's arm, thrown loosely over her waist, his breathing slow and even against the back of her neck.

For one long, suspended moment, she didn't move. Didn't want to. Let herself exist, briefly, in the version of this where last night had simply been two people finally admitting something true, uncomplicated by fraternization clauses or anonymous photographers or a father circling the program with an ultimatum neither of them had discussed yet.

The moment didn't last.

"You're thinking too loud," Beckett said, voice rough with sleep, his arm tightening slightly around her. "I can feel it."

"I'm not thinking anything."

"You're doing the thing where your whole body goes rigid because your brain's spiraling. I've watched you do it on the bench during penalty kills." He propped himself up on one elbow, studying her with an expression she'd never seen on him before — soft, unguarded, none of the careful composure he wore for the rest of the world. "What's the spiral about?"

"The text." She reached for her phone on the nightstand, the message from the unknown number sitting exactly where she'd left it at two a.m., neither of them having found the will to discuss it properly before exhaustion and everything else had pulled them both under. "Someone knows. Someone's watching us closely enough to threaten the board directly."

Beckett read it again, jaw tightening. "This isn't just some jealous teammate anymore. This is someone deliberate. Someone patient." He set the phone down, careful, controlled, the captain's mind clicking back into gear even lying half-dressed in bed with her. "We need to figure out who has access to close enough proximity to photograph us twice."

"That's basically the whole team."

"Not the whole team. Someone who knew we'd be in that specific closet at that specific time, and someone who was near the apartment last night." He was quiet for a moment, working through it with the same analytical precision he applied to opposing power plays. "That's a short list."

"Bear knew about the closet."

"Bear wouldn't do this." Beckett said it with immediate, total certainty. "He's known me twelve years. He'd tell me to my face if he had a problem, not blackmail us anonymously."

"Then who?"

Neither of them had an answer, and the not-knowing sat heavy in the room alongside everything else neither of them had said out loud yet — what last night meant, what came next, whether "professional" was a word either of them still had any right to use.

"We should talk about this," Beckett said finally, meaning something other than the text, and Rae felt her chest tighten with the particular fear of a conversation she both desperately wanted and wasn't sure she could survive.

"Talk about what."

"Don't do that." His voice was gentle but firm, the specific tone he probably used correcting a rookie's mistake without embarrassing them in front of the team. "Don't pretend you don't know what I mean."

"Beckett, we have a fraternization clause hanging over both our heads and someone actively trying to blackmail us over exactly this. Maybe last night was a mistake."

"Do you believe that?"

She didn't answer right away, and the silence told him everything her words weren't willing to.

"I don't regret it," he said quietly. "I want to be clear about that before we get into anything else. Whatever happens with the clause, with Halloran, with whoever sent that text — I don't regret last night. I've wanted this since I put my hand on your hip that first morning and told myself it was a stance correction."

The admission landed somewhere soft and unguarded in Rae's chest, dismantling the last of her defenses more thoroughly than anything he'd said the night before. "I don't regret it either," she said. "I'm just scared of what it costs."

"Me too." He reached out, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear with a tenderness that felt entirely at odds with the cold, controlled captain she'd spent months learning to read. "But I'm more scared of pretending it didn't happen and watching you walk around this apartment like a stranger for the rest of the season."

"So what do we do?"

"We figure out who sent that text," he said, "and we figure out how careful we need to be. And in the meantime—" His hand found hers under the sheets, fingers lacing through hers with a certainty that steadied something in her chest. "We don't pretend. Not to each other. Whatever we tell everyone else."

It wasn't a solution. It wasn't safety, not with a blackmailer somewhere in their orbit and Halloran's office one photo away from ending both their careers. But it was honest, and after months of careful distance and colder lies, honest felt like more than either of them had dared to hope for.

Priya's reaction, delivered over emergency brunch two hours later while Beckett was at a mandatory team film session, was exactly what Rae had expected and somehow still not prepared for.

"I need you to say the words out loud," Priya said, setting down her coffee with the specific gravity of a woman about to deliver a diagnosis. "I need to hear you say 'Beckett Vance and I slept together' in a complete sentence."

"Beckett Vance and I slept together."

"Oh my god." Priya put both hands over her mouth, then dropped them, then put them back, cycling through what appeared to be several competing emotional responses at once. "Rae. Rae. Do you understand what this means for the clause? For your eligibility? For—"

"I understand exactly what it means, Priya, I don't need the risk assessment, I need—" Rae stopped, swallowed, forced herself to say the rest of it. "Someone photographed us. Yesterday. In the equipment closet. And then someone texted me last night threatening to send it to the board if it happens again."

Priya's face went from teasing to serious in the space of a single breath — the switch Rae had learned to trust completely, because underneath the jokes, Priya Anand had the sharpest instincts of anyone she knew. "Show me the text."

Rae pulled it up, and Priya read it twice, her expression darkening with each pass. "This isn't random," she said finally, echoing exactly what Beckett had said hours earlier. "This is someone who's been watching you two specifically, closely enough to catch a private moment in a locked equipment closet. That's not a lucky snapshot. That's surveillance."

"That's what Beckett said."

"Beckett's right." Priya set the phone down, her expression grave. "Rae, I love you, and I am fully, one hundred percent on Team Beckett-and-Rae's-f*******n-hallway-tension, but you need to take this seriously. Whoever's doing this isn't done. People who send warning texts instead of just leaking the photo immediately are people who want leverage, not just chaos. They're going to use this."

"Use it for what?"

"I don't know." Priya's jaw tightened, the specific worry Rae had rarely seen on her usually unshakeable friend. "But I don't think this ends with one text, and I don't think it's a coincidence that it happened the same day you two finally stopped pretending."

Rae looked down at her coffee, cold now, untouched, and thought about the warm weight of Beckett's arm around her that morning, the honesty in his voice when he said he didn't regret it, the specific, terrifying fact that whatever they'd started the night before was now tangled up with a threat neither of them fully understood yet.

"I'm not walking away from this," she said, quiet but certain. "Not from him. Not from the team."

"I know," Priya said, and reached across the table to squeeze her hand. "I just need you to be careful. Both of you. Because whoever's doing this clearly isn't."