Chapter 6 :The Clause Only She Should Have Read

Sloane.

Nobody moved.

Eva held her phone up between us like a small glowing weapon, and the screen showed everything: my hands on Torin's chest, his hands on my face, the two of us tangled together in a tunnel where anyone could have walked through. 

The photo was clear. It was sharp, well framed, and almost professional. I would have been impressed if it had not been the end of my career.

Eva did not look heartbroken. She looked satisfied. That bloody bitch. 

Torin stepped in front of me before I could draw breath, his shoulders blocking the light from her screen. "Delete it, Eva."

"Don't use that tone with me." Her voice stayed perfectly pleasant, which made it worse. "I have spent two years building a clean image around you and this team. Sponsors, the league office, the family-man story the press loves. I am not about to watch it burn because you cannot keep your hands to yourself."

"This is not her fault."

"I did not say it was her fault." Eva tilted her head, and her eyes moved past his shoulder to find mine. "I said it was going to cost her."

I stepped out from behind Torin. My legs felt unsteady, but I made them carry me. "You don't get to threaten my job."

"Oh, Sloane." She said my name like she was tasting it. "I read your contract."

My stomach dropped.

"Section nine, personal entanglement with subjects of the production. The morality clause." She smiled. "The league liaison office can pull your credentials before lunch if I send this. Your network would have no choice but to let you go. They would be grateful for the excuse, honestly. Nobody wants a scandal attached to a championship run."

I went cold from the inside out. That clause had been added in a late revision, and Reyna had walked me through the exact wording over the phone, behind closed doors, because it was the kind of language no one wanted floating around. Only Reyna and the network's legal team should have known what it said.

Eva had gone looking through my file. She had known where to dig before she ever shook my hand.

Torin moved closer to her, and his voice dropped into something low and heavy that made the air in the tunnel feel thicker. The Alpha in him was slipping out, and I saw Eva's pulse jump at her throat even as she held her smile. "We will talk about this privately. Tonight. You will not send that photo anywhere."

"Or what?" she said softly.

He did not answer. He had no answer, and we both knew it.

Eva slid her phone into her bag without deleting a thing. "I am feeling generous," she said. "You have until tonight to fix your little problem, Torin. If you are not distant from her by then, the photo goes to the liaison office with a very concerned note attached."

She turned, and her heels struck the concrete in a steady rhythm that echoed down the tunnel long after she disappeared. She left behind the scent of her perfume and a threat that hung in the cold air like smoke.

Torin turned to me, and his hand closed gently around my wrist. "Sloane—"

I pulled free so fast it burned. "Stay away from me."

"Let me fix this."

"You already rejected me." My voice cracked, and I hated it. "Don't cause me trouble now."

Something broke open in his face, but I did not stay to see what came after it. I grabbed my camera bag and walked away, and I did not let myself look back.

I did not go to my apartment. Someone knew where I slept, and the thought of those four thin walls made my skin crawl. Instead I found the media room at the end of the east corridor and locked the door behind me, then stood in the dark for a long moment with my forehead pressed against the cool wood.

When I could breathe again, I sat down at the editing desk and plugged in my memory card.

The unlabeled folder was still there. I opened the bar photo again and made myself look at it the way I would look at any frame I was trying to rescue: slowly, edge to edge, with nothing in my head but light and shadow. Me at the bar, laughing. The angle is too perfect. The timing was too early.

I zoomed in on the mirror behind the bartender.

Most of it dissolved into blur and glare, a smear of bottles and amber lamps. But behind my table, half swallowed by shadow, stood a man in a dark jacket. His face was turned away from the glass. I could not see his features. But his arm was raised, steadying something near his chest, and on his wrist sat a watch with a dark face and a thick silver rim.

I knew that watch.

I had seen it that very morning, catching the light under the locker room fluorescents while Bastian wrapped tape around Torin's stick. I had photographed his hands without thinking about it, the way I photographed everything.

My heart began to pound.

It could have been a coincidence. Half the men in this city probably owned something like it. I told myself that twice, then a third time. It did not help. I took a screenshot of the watch and saved it in three places.

Then I sat there in the locked room, with two photos open side by side. One of me was taken in secret in a bar. One of me was taken openly in a tunnel by a woman who had been waiting for me to fall.

Two different people, or one.

Someone in Frostbridge had been tracking me since the day I arrived, and I had just kissed the one man in the city who could make that dangerous.