The only tell he gave.
A faint sheen of sweat gathered at his temple despite the cold. The sharp, rhythmic pulse of the vein in his neck. The smallest flicker at the corner of his eye—so subtle it wouldhave been invisible if I hadn’t spent the last two weeks learning his subtle cues better than most people ever learned conversation.
That realization hit me so hard I almost stumbled.
Two weeks.
Two games served. One fine paid. A nonstop avalanche of headlines, speculation, panel segments, talking heads, social clips, hot takes, and tabloid photos that had taken on a life of their own so quickly I wasn’t sure when the legal fallout had stopped being the center of the story and we had taken its place.
Somewhere between the league handing down its punishment and this morning’s media circus, the focus had shifted. Not away from Alois exactly—nothing ever really moved away from him—but sideways. Onto us. Onto what we looked like standing too close, leaving together, arriving together, moving through the world with just enough practiced ease to make strangers believe they were watching something private unfold in public.
It should have helped.
From a PR standpoint, in some ways, it had.
The enraged discourse over the bar fight had been forced to split itself in half. Some outlets still ran the same tired angle they always did when his name hit the news cycle—violent, unstable, liability, brute in a tailored coat—but others had found fresher blood in the relationship narrative. Young PR strategist romantically linked to controversial Frosthawks enforcer. New girlfriend stands by embattled star. Team scandal complicated by romance rumors. It was messier. More distracting. Harder to control.
This is getting messy.The thought slipped through me on instinct, polished smooth by repetition. I had been saying some version of it to myself for days now, usually whilestaring at my laptop too late at night with the television muted in the background and my inbox multiplying faster than I could answer it.
This is all part of the plan. I’m better than this.The problem was, I had started to hear the lie in it.Because the mess wasn’t just professional anymore. It hadn’t been for longer than I wanted to admit.
A camera flash burst so bright it left a white smear across my vision. Someone shouted Alois’s name. Someone else shouted mine. My gloved fingers tightened around his hand on pure reflex, and the answering shift in his grip was immediate—firmer, anchoring, his body angling just enough to block some of the impact as we hit the base of the courthouse steps.
Questions chased us from every side.
“Alois, do you expect the charges to be dropped today?”
“Bea, is the team standing behind him no matter what?”
“Is this relationship real?”
“Mr. Müller, any comment on the league’s disciplinary action?”
“Miss Ribeiro, do you believe he acted in self-defense?”
“Frosthawks Double Down on Dangerous Player Amid Legal Fallout.”I didn’t hear that one out loud.It flashed as a headline in my mind.
Clean black type. Brutal and efficient. The kind of headline that wrote itself before anyone involved had the chance to breathe. It flashed across my mind with such clarity I could practically see the layout—the photo they’d choose, the quote they’d twist, the way my name would end up wedged somewhere beneath his like a cautionary footnote.
Stop.
Not now.
My heel caught a ridge of old ice near the steps, and Ilurched half an inch before recovering. Alois’s hand tightened again, his shoulder knocking mine as he adjusted without breaking stride. Publicly, he touched me like it was the easiest thing in the world. Natural. Unthinking. The sort of man who guided a woman through a crowd because of course he did, because of course she belonged beside him.
Privately, it was the opposite. In the apartment, in the quiet, he barely touched me at all.
And I hated it. Not the fact that he wasn’t touching me in private. That was our deal. And the last shred of barrier I had left. I was thankful for the distance.
And yet—My body had started paying attention. It noticed the heat of him before he got close. The deep, clean smell of soap and starch and winter air that clung to his coat. The roughness in his morning voice after too little sleep. The exact weight of his silence across a breakfast table. The sound of coffee beans grinding in the kitchen before sunrise, followed minutes later by the whistle of the kettle and the quiet certainty of a tea made exactly the way I liked it even though I had never once told him how I took it.
That one still unsettled me.
Almost as much as waking up three mornings ago in my bed with my laptop closed on the nightstand and a blanket pulled up over my shoulder after I’d fallen asleep on the couch working through damage-control notes and hearing prep. I hadn’t asked him about it. He hadn’t mentioned it. The omission had sat between us over breakfast, silent and enormous, while he drank his coffee and read something off his iPad like carrying me down the hall had ranked somewhere between loading the dishwasher and checking the weather.
A shout snapped close enough to my ear to make me flinch. “Bea, are you concerned for your safety?”
My head turned automatically toward the voice, and that was my mistake.