Chapter 4 The Offer
2072 Words
SIENNA’S POV
I find them in the hallway outside the elevator.
All three of them. Phones out. Reading the same thing I just read. The energy coming off them is different now, tighter, faster, the kind of controlled urgency that happens when a plan gets moved up against its will.
Rhett is already on a call. Low and clipped. Words like *damage containment* and *statement timing* and *do not confirm anything until I call you back.*
Cole is typing. Fast. Both thumbs.
Blake sees me first.
“You saw it,” he says.
“Just now.” I hold up my phone. “I didn’t do this. I talked to one person at the league office and I didn’t give them names or details. I don’t know where those photos came from.”
Rhett ends his call. Looks at his screen. Looks at me. “Security camera angle. Someone in this building sold them.”
“Not me,” I say.
“I know.” Flat. Not reassuring. Just a fact he already established. “You were sitting across from us at six forty-two. The alert timestamp is six forty-two.”
I didn’t think about that. He did. Immediately.
“So now what?” I ask.
“Now we have about forty minutes before this becomes a five-alarm situation,” Cole says, pocketing his phone. “We need to be ahead of it.”
“Then do what I asked. Cancel Damon’s contract. Remove Reid. Put out a statement saying the franchise acted swiftly upon becoming aware of a conduct violation. The story becomes about how fast you moved, not about what happened.”
Rhett looks at me like he is recalculating something.
“You’ve thought about this,” he says.
“I had a long night.”
“Come with us,” he says.
“Where?”
“Upstairs. Twenty minutes. Then we’ll have an answer for you.”
I look at the three of them. Expensive suits, controlled faces, the specific energy of men who are used to being the ones with all the power in every room they walk into.
I follow them.
The suite has a separate living area, a table big enough for a board meeting, and a view of the city that makes you understand immediately why some people think they are better than everyone else.
Rhett goes straight to the table. Laptop open. Two calls in quick succession, both short, both ended with *I’ll call you back in twenty.*
Cole sits. Opens his own laptop.
Blake stands by the window, scrolling.
I sit on the couch. Nobody told me to sit and nobody told me not to and standing in the middle of the room feels worse.
For a few minutes nobody talks to me. I watch them work. The way they move around each other, no wasted steps, no crossed signals, like they’ve been doing this together so long they don’t need to say what they’re doing out loud.
“Photos are already on four outlets,” Cole says. “Two more running it in twenty minutes.”
“Reid has already lawyered up,” Rhett says, reading his screen.
“He was calm when I walked in on them,” I say. “Too calm. He looked at me like I was a scheduling conflict. Like he had a plan for this.” I pause. “I don’t think Damon is the first player.”
The room goes quiet.
Cole’s jaw tightens.
Blake turns from the window.
“A man doesn’t react that calmly to getting caught unless he’s been caught before and survived it,” I say. “If you investigate properly you’re not going to find one violation. You’re going to find a pattern.”
Rhett looks at the ceiling for exactly two seconds. Then at me.
“If that’s true, this isn’t a Reid problem,” he says slowly. “This is a franchise-wide problem. Whoever owned this team before us knew or should have known.”
“Yes.”
“And we just bought it.”
“Yes.”
He exhales through his nose. The only outward sign that any of this bothers him.
“Okay.” He closes the laptop. Looks at Cole. Cole nods. Looks at Blake. Blake shrugs in a way that means yes. Then he looks at me. “Damon Price’s contract is being terminated this morning. Undisclosed conduct violations. No details.”
I open my mouth.
“Reid is being placed on immediate suspension pending investigation. Not fired yet. Suspension. Because firing him this morning looks reactive. Suspension, full investigation, then termination is cleaner and harder to challenge legally.”
“And the investigation?” I ask.
“Will be thorough. If there are other players, they will have the opportunity to come forward through a confidential process.” He holds my gaze. “You have my word.”
I look at him. I think about what his word is worth. I think about the fact that he was outside Reid’s door at six in the morning, that he sat across from me and has been straight with me this entire conversation even when he didn’t have to be.
“Okay,” I say.
“The league meeting,” Cole says. “We need you to postpone it. Not cancel. Forty-eight hours. Tell them the franchise is already responding.”
“Why forty-eight hours?”
“Because you go in at ten with a story and no institutional backing, they listen, they investigate slowly, Reid hires three lawyers and it takes six months. You go in at forty-eight hours with us already on record, it takes six weeks and Reid has nowhere to go.” He looks at me levelly. “If you want him actually gone, career over, can’t do this to anyone else, then forty-eight hours is the move.”
I sit with that.
The city outside the window is waking up. Pale light. Early traffic. The ordinary start to a day that is not ordinary at all.
“What do I get?” I ask.
Rhett raises an eyebrow.
“You get a clean narrative. You get ahead of the story. You get time to build a proper case.” I look at him. “What do I get? Besides watching Damon lose his contract, which, don’t get me wrong, is significant.”
Blake makes a sound that might be a laugh.
Rhett looks at me with something underneath his neutral face that wasn’t there before. Something that looks almost like respect.
“What do you want?” he asks.
“A job.”
Silence.
“You just bought a franchise. You’re going to need new support staff, new faces, people who understand this world and aren’t connected to previous management.” I hold his gaze. “I have been inside professional hockey for two years. I know how these teams run, the players, the schedules, the sponsors, the press. I know where the bodies are buried because I helped carry some of them.”
“You were a player’s girlfriend,” Cole says. “That’s not a professional qualification.”
“I was an unpaid team manager. I handled Damon’s schedule, press appearances, sponsor communications, physio bookings, travel. I did it for free because I thought I was building a future.” I sit straighter. “I’m not doing anything for free anymore.”
“What kind of role?” Rhett asks.
“Media and communications. Something that is mine and has nothing to do with any man’s career but my own.”
Blake is definitely smiling now. Just at the corner of his mouth.
“You’re negotiating,” Rhett says.
“I’m stating terms.”
“In the middle of a crisis—”
“That was created the moment your head coach decided to sleep with his player.” I don’t back down. “I showed up at your door. I gave you the window. If that’s not worth a conversation about a job then I don’t know what is.”
Rhett looks at Cole. Cole looks at the table. Blake looks out the window then back at me.
“She’s not wrong,” Blake says.
“I know,” Rhett says. Like it bothers him slightly.
He is quiet for a moment. Then, “We’ll discuss it.”
“You have forty minutes,” I say.
“Now you’re using my timeline against me.”
“You taught me it in the lobby.”
Blake makes that sound again.
Rhett stands and walks to the window and I can see his jaw working from across the room. A man taking a problem apart and putting it back together in a shape he can manage.
Cole is looking at me with something careful and evaluating. Not unfriendly. Not warm.
“You said you handled sponsor communications,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Which sponsors?”
I list five names. He recognizes all of them. I can tell by the slight shift in his posture.
“And press?”
“Interview scheduling, prep, statement drafting when something needed managing quietly.” I pause. “Which was more often than people would think.”
“Like what?”
“Like the time Damon was late to a sponsor event because of a personal conflict. I called the sponsor, rescheduled, drafted an apology, sent a gift basket and a handwritten card from him, and had the whole thing smoothed over before he even knew there was a problem.”
“Unpaid,” Cole says.
“Unpaid. Because I loved him and I thought it mattered.”
Something moves across Cole’s face. Just briefly. Gone before I can name it.
He looks at Rhett’s back. “Rhett.”
Rhett turns.
Cole nods.
Rhett looks at me. “Three month trial. Media and communications. You work under our existing press team. You prove yourself and we talk about something permanent.”
“Salary?” I ask.
He names a number.
It is more than I made in the last year combined.
“Fine,” I say. Like it is fine. Like my entire nervous system is not doing something completely undignified right now.
“You postpone the league meeting. Forty-eight hours.”
“Done.”
“And Sienna.” He holds my gaze. “If anything from this conversation ends up anywhere public before we put out our own statement, the offer disappears and we let the lawyers handle the rest.”
“Understood.”
“Good.” He checks his watch. “Go get changed. You look like you slept in those clothes.”
“I did sleep in those clothes.”
“Then you have thirty-four minutes to fix that. Lobby at seven thirty. I want you in the room for the press conference.”
I stand up. I am almost at the door when Blake says, “Hey.”
I turn.
He is leaning against the wall, arms crossed, that almost-smile still at the corner of his mouth. Up close he looks less like the gossip column photographs and more like a person. Sharper. More awake.
“What he did to you was s**t,” he says.
I look at him.
“Yeah,” I say. “It was.”
He nods.
I walk out.
The hallway is empty. Reid’s door is closed and silent.
I get into my room and press both hands against my face and breathe.
Three month trial. Media and communications. A salary with more zeros than anything I have earned in my life.
Thirty-three minutes.
I get in the shower.
I am rinsing shampoo out of my hair when I hear it. A door opening. Fast footsteps. Reid’s voice, low and urgent, words I can’t make out through the wall.
Then Cole’s voice, cutting through clean.
“Your suspension is effective immediately, Harlan. Security will escort you out. Don’t make this difficult.”
I stand under the water and close my eyes.
Done.
I get out. Get dressed. Shake out my hair and look at myself in the mirror and this time I don’t look away.
My phone buzzes on the sink.
A text from an
unsaved number.
*Press conference is at 8. Lobby at 7:30. Don’t be late. — R*
Rhett Beckett has my number.
I look at the text. Then at the mirror.
Then I pick up my bag and I go.
- Writer
