CHAPTER 9
BEA
“What am I going to do?” I whined, pacing the length of my apartment as Micah’s face filled my screen, her smile already starting to slip.
Even through a grainy FaceTime connection, I could see it—the exact moment she realized this wasn’t normal stress. Not me overthinking something small and fixable.
“Okay,” she said slowly, shifting where she sat, her camera tilting for a second before settling again. The familiar background of her apartment came back into focus—textbooks stacked behind her, a half-empty coffee mug balanced dangerously close to the edge of her desk. “I think I need some more to go on here.”
I dragged a hand through my hair and turned too fast at the end of the room, nearly clipping the arm of the couch. Bento startled, blinking up at me like I’d personally offended him, before pushing to his feet with a long, dramatic stretch. He circled once, deliberately ignoring me, then flopped down, tail giving a single, irritated flick.
“I got the job,” I blurted finally.
Micah blinked. “You—” Her brows shot up. “Wait. What?”
“I got it,” I repeated, the words coming out faster now, tripping over each other as if saying them slower would make them less real. “Frosthawks. PR. It’s official. Ezra worked some voodoo apparently. There was a meeting and?—”
She held up a hand, her mouth already curving back into something like excitement. “That’s—Bea, that’s huge. Why do you sound like you’re about to throw up?”
“Because that’s not—” I let out a sharp breath, turning again, my socks sliding slightly against the hardwood. “That’s not all that happened.”
“What else happened?”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Because how did you say this out loud without it sounding insane?
“They—” I swallowed, pressing my lips together before forcing the words out. “They assigned me a player.”
Her expression didn’t change right away. “Is that a problem? That’s…the job, isn’t it?”
“No,” I groaned immediately. “This is not—this is not normal. This is not onboarding. This is not ‘here’s the team, here’s the structure, welcome to the organization.’ This is—” I broke off, shaking my head, my chest tightening as the reality of it surged back up again. “This is damage control.”
Micah leaned forward, elbows braced on her desk now, her entire posture shifting from casual to locked in. “What does that actually mean?
I let out a breath that felt too thin to be useful. “Alois Müller.”
The name didn’t just land between us. It detonated.
Micah’s eyes went wide, her spine snapping straight like someone had just pulled a wire through her. “Holy hell,” shebreathed, the words slipping out before she could catch them. “Are you serious right now?”
I pressed my lips together. “Yes.”
Her hand dragged down her face, slow and disbelieving. “No, Bea. Absolutely not. That man is—” She cut herself off, shaking her head like she needed to physically reset. “I watched that clip three times this morning. They keep replaying it between segments.”
“I’m aware,” I muttered.
Micah stared at me for a long second, recalibrating. Not as my best friend. As a hockey fan. As someone who knew exactly what kind of player we were talking about. Her gaze snapped back to mine, sharp. “Okay. Take me through this like I’m stupid,” she said slowly.
“I walked into a meeting,” I started, my voice tightening as the memory sharpened. “Ezra, GM, head coach, legal, PR—everyone was there. And before I even had time to—” I stopped myself, inhaling sharply. “I wasn’t even told I had the job. One second, I was in a chaotic mess, completely confused as to what was even happening. And the next, I was being handed an assignment—handle Alois.”
“Handle how?”
“Internally,” I responded, the word automatic, pulled straight from the way it had been presented to me. “PR, management—everyone is watching him right now. And if anything else happens, it escalates.”
“To the league,” Micah finished quietly.
I nodded once.
“So they hired you to…manage him?”