Iced Out

Chapter 6: The Contract Clause

NOVA

My apartment in the South Loop was exactly how I liked my life: meticulously organized, sparsely decorated, and completely devoid of surprises.

Tonight, it felt like a cage.

I sat at my kitchen island, a glass of untouched Cabernet breathing next to a thick stack of legal documents. Outside, the Chicago wind rattled the floor-to-ceiling windows, but the chill creeping up my spine had nothing to do with the weather.

I flipped to page fourteen of my employment agreement with the Chicago Glaciers, tracing my finger down the dense block of legalese until I found Section 4, Paragraph B. The words seemed to burn against the heavy stock paper.

...strictly prohibited from engaging in any romantic, s****l, or otherwise non-professional intimate relationship with any active roster player, coaching staff, or front-office personnel. Violation of this fraternization policy is grounds for immediate termination with cause, forfeiture of severance, and mandatory reporting to the relevant state and national psychological licensing boards.

I read it twice. Then I closed the folder so hard the sound cracked through the quiet apartment like a gunshot.

Immediate termination. Mandatory reporting. The clause was a guillotine blade suspended directly above this entire arrangement, and the rope holding it up was a single word.

*Fake.*

That was the bitter irony Diane had failed to mention in her pitch. As long as the relationship was a performance, the clause didn’t apply. I wasn’t actually dating a player. I was executing a PR strategy with clearly defined boundaries and an expiration date. No romantic involvement. No violation. The contract was technically intact.

But the contract didn’t care about technicalities. The board cared about optics. And the optics were this: the team psychologist, hired to evaluate Cole Harrington’s mental fitness, was now appearing on his arm at charity galas and being photographed looking up at him like he was the last man on earth. If the board decided the relationship was real, Section 4 Paragraph B would come down like a hammer. Fired with cause. License review. Career over.

Which meant the only thing protecting me was the lie itself. As long as nobody believed it was real, I was safe.

The problem, sitting at my kitchen island at 11:47 PM with a glass of wine I couldn’t bring myself to drink, was that I wasn’t sure how long that protection would hold. Diane’s entire strategy depended on the public believing it was real. The more convincing the performance, the better it worked for Cole’s reputation and the worse it worked for my contract. Every successful photo op, every believable smile, every moment the cameras caught that looked authentic pushed me closer to the edge of the very clause I was trying not to trigger.

I was being asked to walk a razor’s edge. Convincing enough to save Cole’s career. Controlled enough to save my own.

I pushed away from the island, the legs of my barstool scraping harshly against the hardwood. I was furious. I was furious at Diane for her utter disregard for my professional boundaries. I was furious at Cole Harrington for being reckless enough to put himself in this position.

But mostly, I was furious at myself for not walking out of that office the second Diane pitched the idea.

I left the wine on the counter, turned off the lights, and went to bed.

I didn’t sleep. I lay staring at the shadows playing across my ceiling, the numbers on my digital clock glowing a relentless, mocking red. 1:14 AM. 2:36 AM. 3:15 AM.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw silver-grey ones staring back at me. I saw the way Cole had favored his left shoulder on the ice. I saw the cornered, desperate look he’d tried so hard to mask with hostility. He was a man fighting a war on multiple fronts, slowly losing ground.

*Just like Marcus.*

The thought hit me like a physical blow, knocking the breath from my lungs. I sat up in the dark, my hands gripping the edge of the duvet.

Five years ago. A cramped graduate assistant’s office in Portland. A laptop left open by a careless athletic director. The spreadsheets. The offshore accounts. The sickening realization that games were being thrown.

I had been twenty-two, hyper-logical, and terrified. I had filed the anonymous tip to the league integrity office because it was the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do.

Six months later, Marcus Harrington’s car had flipped over a guardrail on an empty stretch of highway. The official report said he lost control. The whispers in the dark corners of the sports world said otherwise.

I had run. I moved across the country, buried myself in my clinical work, built a fortress of credentials and professional detachment to hide the guilt eating me alive. But the ghost of Marcus Harrington had followed me.

I threw off the covers and walked barefoot into the living room, staring out at the scattered lights of the city.

Why had I taken this job? Not for the money. Not to climb the corporate ladder of a professional hockey franchise. I took this job because the Chicago Glaciers were the last team Marcus Harrington played for. Because somewhere in this organization, in the records, the contracts, the people who had known him, there might be an answer to the question I had been running from for five years. *Did my anonymous tip get a man killed?*

If I refused Diane’s proposal, she would find a way to quietly push me out. I would lose my access. My position inside the franchise. The only foothold I had in the world Marcus had inhabited before he died.

But if I said yes, I wouldn’t just be an employee. I would be on the inside. Attending private dinners, standing in the VIP boxes, embedded in the inner circle of the franchise in a way a team psychologist never could.

And I would be close to Cole. The one person who might hold the missing pieces of his brother’s life.

I looked back at the kitchen island, where the contract lay in the shadows.

The risk was staggering. Not from the lie itself, but from the possibility that the lie might stop being a lie. Every moment I spent with Cole Harrington, performing closeness, performing trust, performing the kind of intimate attention that cameras ate alive, was a moment the performance could slip into something genuine. And the instant it did, the instant the board had reason to believe I had actually fallen for my own patient, Section 4 Paragraph B would end me.

*I had to stay in control. I had to perform the relationship well enough to satisfy Diane’s strategy and keep it clinical enough to satisfy my contract. I had to be close to Cole without getting close to him.*

Standing in the dark, the cold floor grounding my bare feet, the hyper-logical part of my brain locked into place. The panic subsided, replaced by a crystalline, terrifying clarity.

My professional identity was my armor. But sometimes, to win a war, you had to take the armor off.

I checked the clock. 4:30 AM. Cole was notorious for being the first one at the practice facility. If we were going to do this, we were going to do it on my terms. And I wasn’t going to let Diane be the one to dictate them.

I walked to my bedroom and started pulling on my gym clothes. It was time to go negotiate with the captain.