THE HOCKEY STAR’S CONTRACTED ENEMY

Chapter 2: Three Things He’s Afraid Of

Forty-eight hours earlier, I stood in Coach Harlan’s office with my fists still clenched from the night before.

The playoff game replayed in my head on a constant loop that I couldn’t shut off. Third period. Ethan Cross laid a dirty hit on my teammate, the kind that was designed to injure and everyone on the ice knew it. I responded the way I always responded, clean enough to draw a penalty, hard enough to make sure he understood the message. But after the buzzer, in the tunnel where the cameras didn’t reach as well, Ethan ran his mouth about my mother. I shoved him into the wall. No punch thrown. Just my hand flat on his chest and the sound of his back connecting with concrete. That was the whole of it.

Now the footage made me look like a predator. His senator father had made absolutely sure of that. The clip circulating online was seventeen seconds long and started three seconds after the hit that caused it. My draft stock had dropped overnight, the kind of drop that took years of work and collapsed it into a news cycle. One bad camera angle, one moment stripped of every piece of context that made it make sense, and everything I had built since I was nine years old on a frozen backyard rink started to burn.

Coach Harlan sat behind his desk with his face pulled tight. I felt the rage settle cold in my gut. Not the hot kind, not the kind that got me into the tunnel situation in the first place. The quiet kind. The kind I learned from watching my father operate before he stopped operating in our lives entirely. The kind that let me go somewhere deep inside myself where the noise could not follow and nothing on the outside could touch what was actually happening in my chest.

My agent Sloane paced near the window the way she always did when the options were bad and she was trying to figure out which one was least bad. “Options are thin, Kai. Campus Clash is the only path that gives us any control over the narrative. Reality show. Redemption arc. You get paired with a girl who already has a public profile, you demonstrate growth on camera over several weeks, the audience processes it as genuine, and we get ahead of the draft conversation before it hardens into something permanent.”

I stared at the contract draft sitting on the desk. “I am not doing some fake situation for cameras.”

Sloane stopped pacing. She looked at me with the particular patience of someone who had been in this industry long enough to stop being surprised by anything. “Your choice right now is to look like a loose cannon who belongs in a different sport, or look like a man who made a mistake and learned something from it. The league watches this content now. That is not an opinion. That is the reality of what you are dealing with.”

Coach Harlan leaned forward with his elbows on the desk. “You have got real talent, kid. But talent does not survive a sustained rumor cycle. Sign it. Do the work. Prove you are not your father.”

Those words hit exactly where he intended them to hit. My father, impulsive and destructive and eventually gone, the kind of gone that doesn’t come back. I did not want to become that. I had spent fifteen years and every practice session and every early morning on the ice specifically not becoming that, and the fear of failing at it sat heavy in my chest the way it always did when someone named it out loud. Cold and familiar and older than anything else I carried.

I picked up the pen. My hand did not shake. I signed because signing was the only move available that let me drive the story instead of lying down in the road and letting it run over me.

I arrived at the conference room first and spent six minutes alone with the documents before anyone else walked in. I had read Lila Voss’s op-ed three times since the night it published. “Toxic Ice.” The title was designed to do damage and it did. But the writing underneath the title was something else entirely. It was good, actually, better than good. Documented. Precise. Sharp in the specific way that only came from someone who had done the actual work of understanding what they were writing about rather than just assembling accusations. It called out the exact patterns I had watched operate in locker rooms for years, in teammates I liked and teammates I didn’t, in the culture that produced all of us, and in darker moments, in corners of myself I didn’t look at directly.

That was the part that made me angrier than anything else. She was not wrong about the patterns. She just did not know me specifically, and she had written about me specifically, and those two facts were going to have to live in the same room together now.

The door opened.

She was smaller than I expected from someone who had managed to generate four hundred thousand shares of controlled institutional fury. Chin up, shoulders back, the posture of someone who had decided before she walked through the door that she was not going to give anyone in this room the satisfaction of watching her hesitate. Her eyes found mine the second she cleared the doorway. No flinch. No performance of confidence either. Just a direct look that assessed and moved on.

I pushed off the wall and let a smile curve across my mouth. It did not reach my eyes and I did not intend it to. I needed to see what she was actually made of underneath the posture.

“So you’re the b***h who tried to end me.”

She didn’t blink. Good. That told me something worth knowing.

The producer in the sharp blazer tried to move us through the contract review at the pace of someone who had a dinner reservation. Lila read every page like she was performing a dissection, her finger tracking each line, her eyes moving at the speed of someone who understood what she was reading rather than skimming for the signature lines. I watched her more than I watched the documents. The way her fingers held the pen without gripping it. The way she let silences sit without rushing to fill them with noise. When she reached the no breakup clause her jaw tightened by a fraction, a very small tell from someone who was otherwise running a controlled exterior. She was recalculating. Mapping the exits and finding out how many of them had been sealed before she arrived.

“Keep moving,” the producer said.

“Shut up,” I told him. Two words, no volume required. He sat back down without further comment.

We finished the pages. Then they wanted the publicity photo for the initial press release. I stepped in beside her and settled my hand at the small of her back the way the producer indicated, a formality, a staging direction, nothing more. Her spine went rigid the instant my palm made contact. I felt the heat of her skin through the fabric of her shirt and the immediate involuntary tension moving through her muscles in response to the touch. She didn’t pull away. I didn’t look at her face. But something pulled low in my gut that had no business being there, something inconvenient and specific and entirely unhelpful given every aspect of the situation I was currently in.

I ignored it the way I ignored most things that complicated a clear objective.

The camera flashed twice.

The session ended. We stood approximately three feet apart near the elevator bank, not speaking, not looking at each other. My phone buzzed in my jacket pocket. Jax.

Bro. You good? Also I need to tell you something about that op-ed. Not over text.

I stared at the message with my thumb hovering over the screen. Something in the phrasing sat wrong. The particular way he had separated those two things, the check in and the information, like he needed the buffer of the first before he could get to the second. The story I had been carrying in my head about how all of this started, the op-ed and the clip and the timing of everything, developed a crack that I could not immediately explain.

The elevator doors opened. Lila stepped in without looking at me. I followed. The doors closed and sealed us into the small space together and the text sat unanswered on my screen.

The air felt considerably thicker than the square footage required.