“Pull everything,” I barked, reaching for the nearest tablet without breaking stride. “Mentions, tags, cross-posting—anything tied to that image or language around it.”
My fingers were already moving, pulling feeds, filtering noise from signal, isolating patterns before they had the chance to become problems.
“What angle?” Dylan asked. He was watching me now, not the screen.
“Pressure,” I said, scanning quickly. “Post-game tension. Internal accountability. Competitive environment.”
He nodded once, sharp, already turning back.
The last of the morning slipped away without ever fully settling.
Calls layered over emails, conversations half-finished and picked back up again mid-stride as I moved through the space, each one feeding into the next without pause. There was no moment where I stopped. No point where I let myself step back far enough to feel the weight of any one thing.
I kept it moving.
Kept it exactly where it needed to be.
When Alois stepped into the hallway outside media, I was already there. Notes in hand, talking points clean and minimal, every possible direction mapped out before he even crossed the threshold into my space.
“They’re circling,” I whispered, pitched low enough that it didn’t carry past us. “Tunnel footage surfaced.”
His eyes flicked to mine, immediate, sharp, reading everything I wasn’t saying as easily as what I was.
“Problem?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
There was the smallest shift at the corner of his mouth. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
I stepped in just enough to adjust his collar, smoothing fabric that didn’t need smoothing, creating a reason to be there without calling attention to it.
“Short answers,” I murmured. “No attitude.”
“I don’t?—”
I lifted my eyes to his.
He stopped. Exhaled once. “Fine.”
Questions came faster, sliding and climbing over the other, less interested in the game than everything orbiting it.
I stayed just off to the side, posture straight, expression neutral, tablet anchored in my hands as I tracked every word.
Every answer.
Every shift in tone.
Every glance that lingered a fraction too long.
He did exactly what I needed him to do.
The rest of the afternoon didn’t unfold so much as layer.
One thing over another over another until there was no clean separation between them—calls bleeding into messages, conversations picked up mid-thought and dropped just as quickly, constant monitoring of something that refused to fully ignite but wouldn’t die out either.
The arena felt different the moment I stepped back into it for the game—not louder, not busier, but charged in a way that settled under my skin before I could name it. The noise wasn’t a single thing—crowd murmur building into something restless, the sharp slice of skates carving into fresh ice, the hollow knock of pucks ricocheting off boards—eachsound stacking over the next until it became a steady, living pulse that moved through the building itself.
Light poured down in hard, deliberate beams, catching on the ice and throwing it back in bright, unforgiving reflection, a clean, untouched surface that refused to acknowledge anything happening above it. From the PR box, everything resolved into something deceptively simple. Structured. Manageable. Like every collision, every misstep, every fracture could be contained inside painted lines and blown whistles.