All Chapters of Accidentally Dating Hockey’s Ice King : Chapter 31 - Chapter 35

POV: THORNEPruitt arrived at my office on the eighth morning, exactly as promised, carrying a plain brown folder as though it held nothing more valuable than a receipt from the dry cleaner.I had used him for nineteen years. He was a soft spoken man in a gray coat, with the kind of face people forget while they are still looking at it, which in his line of work was the entire point. He did not sit until I told him to. He never did."You found something," I said."I found what you asked for." He set the folder on my desk and stepped back. "Emails from her last job. A marketing firm called Kessler Brandt, on the east side. She left there almost four years ago.""Where did they come from?""An account she stopped using a long time ago. Closed, on paper. Old things last longer than people expect." He paused, and for a moment I thought he might say more. "I would rather not explain further."I did not press him. In nineteen years I had learned that the men who found things for me were mos

POV: BEATRIXMy phone was already buzzing when I woke up, and this time I knew better than to hope it meant something good.It was a few minutes past six. The bed beside me was empty, the sheets still faintly warm, and somewhere down the hall I could hear the low, clipped rhythm of Nikolai's voice behind his office door.It was the tone he used only when something at work had gone wrong. I lay there for a moment telling myself it was a sponsor. A schedule. Anything.Thirty-seven messages. Maya, three times in a row. A number I did not recognize. Priya's name, twice, both marked urgent.And a link, sent by four different people, with no words attached at all.I opened it.The headline stretched across the top of the page in heavy black letters. SYMPATHY FIRST, FACTS SECOND: THE BILLIONAIRE'S BRIDE WHO BUILT FALSE STORIES FOR A LIVING.Beneath it was a photograph of me in the flour-dusted apron, laughing, cropped from the cook-off clip, with a thin red circle drawn around my face like a

POV: BEATRIXI used to get paid to read numbers like these.By the third day, I could recite them without looking. Two sponsors gone from the charity benefit. A third name quietly missing from the sponsor page on the team website, which I noticed only because I had stared at that page so long I knew its shape. Meridian, holding its position, for now. A story shared more than a million times, and a second story, written by a different outlet, that began with the words as previously reported.I stayed inside the penthouse. There was no rule about it. Nobody had told me I had to. But two photographers had taken up a permanent position across the street, and every time I walked past a window I felt the small cold pull of a lens finding me.Marcus stood in the hallway more than he used to. Priya called the apartment twice a day with updates, and I listened from the next room while Nikolai said, in his most even voice, that it was being handled.It was not being handled. I had spent years i