Chapter 5 — The Footage Trent Wants

Luca

The team house at 1 a.m. smelled like pizza boxes and old gym socks, and Luca sat at the kitchen table with his laptop open to an email he’d read four times and still didn’t fully believe.

Subject: Rough Cut — Episode 1

From: Trent Coleman

Luca thought you’d want a preview before it goes to the network for approval. Big fan of the Sofia moment. Really humanizes you. Let me know your thoughts.

He clicked play before he could talk himself out of it.

The episode opened with the viral clip of course it did, eleven seconds of him checking Hale into the boards, slowed down, scored with something ominous before cutting hard to the diner, to Isabella’s face lit gold under the window light, to Sofia’s voice saying you’d think, if you were dating someone, you’d want to know the truth. Trent had cut it to land exactly where it would hurt most, holding on Luca’s face a half-second too long right after, capturing the flinch he hadn’t known the camera caught.

Then, worse a title card. NEXT WEEK ON NORTHRIDGE CONFIDENTIAL. A teaser reel. Ten seconds of Isabella laughing at something off-screen, warm and unguarded, followed immediately by a clip of Marco Ibarra, walking fast through a hallway with his head down, refusing to meet the camera’s eye, a chyron beneath him that read: WHAT REALLY HAPPENED THAT NIGHT?

Luca’s stomach dropped straight through the floor.

He was calling Trent before he’d even fully processed what he was doing.

It went to voicemail. He tried again. Voicemail. He texted instead, fingers moving too fast, autocorrect mangling half the words. Take Marco out of the teaser. Now. That’s not what we agreed to.

Three dots appeared, disappeared, appeared again.

Trent: relax, it’s b-roll, we haven’t even interviewed him yet. audiences love a mystery. builds anticipation for the redemption arc.

Luca: He’s not a storyline. Take it down.

Trent: contractually the network owns final cut on promotional material. talk to marlene if you have concerns, my hands are tied.

Luca stared at the screen until the words blurred, a familiar, cold fury rising in his chest the same fury he’d felt the second Hale’s stick had connected with the back of Marco’s knee, the same fury that had put him in this exact mess in the first place. He wanted to put his fist through something. Instead he stood, grabbed his keys, and drove.

Marco’s dorm room light was still on, which didn’t surprise Luca at all Marco hadn’t been sleeping well in weeks, not since the incident, not since whatever Hale had actually been threatening him with had started keeping him up past 2 a.m. every night. Luca knocked twice before letting himself in with the spare key Marco had given him at the start of the season, back when things were simpler, back when the worst thing either of them worried about was ice time.

Marco was sitting on his bed, laptop balanced on his knees, and the second he saw Luca’s face, his own went pale.

“What happened,” Marco said. Not a question. A brace.

“Trent put you in a teaser. For the show.” Luca kept his voice level, careful, the way you’d talk someone down off a ledge. “Just a shot of you in the hallway. A chyron asking what really happened. Nothing else not yet.”

Marco’s laptop slid off his knees onto the mattress, forgotten. “They’re going to make me talk about it.”

“Not if I can help it.”

“You can’t promise that, Luca.” Marco’s voice cracked on the last word, and he dragged both hands through his hair, breathing too fast, the particular kind of panic that had been building in him for weeks finally cresting. “You don’t understand what he said he’d do if I ever told anyone. He said he has he said there’s proof, Luca, proof I did something with the bets, and even if it’s not true, even if I never touched any of it, it doesn’t matter, it’ll look like it’s true, and my parents”

“Marco. Breathe.”

“You should’ve just let it go.” Marco’s eyes were wet now, furious and scared in equal measure. “You should’ve let him hit me and looked the other way like everybody else does, because now you’re the villain on national television and I’m about to be a storyline, and none of this fixes anything, it just makes it worse for both of us”

“I’m not letting you take this alone.” Luca crouched in front of him, forcing eye contact, the way he would with a rookie who’d lost his nerve on the ice. “I checked Hale because what he was doing to you was wrong, and I’d do it again tomorrow. I don’t regret it. I regret that it’s costing you peace of mind, and that’s on me to fix, not you.”

“How? You can’t control the show. You can’t control Trent.”

“No.” Luca’s jaw set, something hardening behind his eyes that hadn’t fully formed into a plan yet, but was getting there fast. “But I know someone who might.”

He found Isabella in the library at half past midnight, the only lit table in a mostly empty study room, a legal pad covered in her small, slanted handwriting beside three open books. She looked up when he dropped into the chair across from her, startled, then wary, then something softer when she saw his face.

“You look like someone died,” she said.

“Trent’s about to expose Marco. In the show. As a storyline.”

Isabella set down her pen slowly. “The teammate from the video.”

“Yeah.” Luca dragged a hand down his face, exhaustion catching up to him all at once. “He’s terrified. He’s got real reasons to be terrified, reasons I can’t explain to you yet, and I can’t let Trent turn his worst month into content for four million strangers.”

“Okay.” Isabella’s voice was steady, already thinking, already three steps ahead in the way that had made her insufferable and brilliant in equal measure back in that lit seminar two years ago. “Then we don’t let him.”

“You have a plan?”

“I have a literature degree and an unreasonable amount of anger about narrative manipulation, which is close enough.” She pulled the legal pad toward her, flipping to a blank page, pen already moving. “Trent needs a story that sells better than Marco’s. Something with more heat, more drama, that pulls the eye somewhere else entirely.” She looked up at him, something sharp and reckless flickering behind her eyes. “Something like us.”

Luca stared at her. “You want to give him more of us.”

“I want to give him a controlled version of us. Something we choose, instead of something he manufactures out of a hallway shot and a chyron.” She tapped the pen against the pad, already sketching out an idea he could see taking shape behind her eyes. “There’s a winter formal next week. Athletics department’s hosting it, half the show’s cast will be there. If we give Trent a big enough moment something undeniable, something the internet can’t stop talking about he won’t need Marco’s face in the teaser. He’ll have us instead.”

“And if it works too well?” Luca asked quietly. “If the internet falls for it for us and it’s not real?”

Isabella’s pen stilled on the page. For a moment neither of them said anything, the library humming faintly around them, the weight of the question sitting heavier than either of them had probably intended it to.

“Then I guess we find out how good an actor you actually are,” she said finally, not quite meeting his eyes.

Luca almost laughed except his phone buzzed on the table between them before he could answer, screen lighting up with a name he hadn’t expected to see this late, or possibly ever again.

Dominic Hale.

New message: We should talk. Before your girlfriend finds out the truth from somebody else.