“…told you?—”
“…no, but did you see?—”
“…with Müller?—”
I didn’t slow.
Didn’t turn.
Didn’t give them the satisfaction of confirming I’d heard a single word.
The PR office didn’t shift when I walked in. The noise stayed exactly where it was. Low. Threaded. Just restrained enough to pass as professional if no one looked too closely at it.
I felt the current running just beneath the surface of everything. My path stayed clean, straight through the middle of the room like I belonged exactly where I was walking—and only when the glow from the central display caught the edge of my vision did I let my focus shift.
There was no buildup. Just a still image, suspended in the center of the room like it had always been there.
Me.
Alois.
The tunnel.
A few nights ago.
I knew the moment immediately—not because of the angle or the framing. The heat of it. The sharp edge of adrenaline still bleeding off him, the way it had hooked into me without permission and dragged something just as volatile to the surface.
I’d been leaning in. My hand halfway lifted. My mouth open mid-sentence.
His head angled down toward me, his expression cut from something darker than anything that could be explained away as frustration alone.
It wasn’t a fight that read as distance.
It read as collision.
There was nothing performative about it.
Nothing I could reshape into something clean.
We didn’t look like a couple. We didn’t look like strategy. We didn’t look like anything I had ever signed off on. We looked like something real enough to make people question everything around it.
Frosthawks’ “Power Couple” Showing Cracks? Sources Question Authenticity of Bad Boy in Love
I stood there just long enough to feel my blood run cold, before I moved. “Take it down.”
There was a half-second delay—someone deciding whether this was theirs to act on—before fingers moved, keys clicked, and the image disappeared.
“Who else?” I asked, already shifting, already moving.
Dylan was on his feet before I finished the question, tablet in hand, his expression somewhere between cautious andfocused. “Couple of smaller outlets. One mid-tier picked it up. No major traction yet.”
“Tasha?”
“Monitoring. It’s not trending.”
Not trending meant nothing. It meant it hadn’t been fed properly. It meant no one had decided to push it.
That could change in seconds.