Page 110 of Wild Card 13

Ishoved my phone into the pocket of my blazer before it could ring again. It had been vibrating almost continuously for the last forty-five minutes.

League inquiries.

Sponsor questions.

Media requests.

Three different attorneys.

Two board members.

One very enthusiastic local morning show asking if Alois and Bea would be available for "a quick exclusive."

Absolutely not.

The hallway outside the media room had finally emptied enough that I could hear my own footsteps again as I crossed the polished concrete toward the executive offices.

A janitor pushed a wide mop slowly across the concourse below, the citrus scent of fresh floor cleaner drifting faintly upward through the open atrium. Somewhere deeper inside the building, equipment carts rattled over concrete while the last handful of media members packed expensive cameras into hard plastic cases.

The building sounded tired.

So did I.

The elevator chimed softly when the doors slid open. I steppedinside alone, pressing the button for the administrative level before leaning back against the wall.

For the first time since Alois had stepped behind that podium, I was still.

The silence should have felt like relief.

Instead, it gave my brain room to replay everything. The questions. The cameras. The way the entire room had shifted the second Alois walked past Bea instead of letting her take the podium.

Every crisis-management instinct I'd developed had screamed at me to stop him. Players weren't supposed to freelance press conferences.

Especially not players with reputations like Alois Müller. Especially not after someone inside our own organization had handed the media exactly the ammunition they'd been waiting for.

Our organization.The thought slipped in so naturally that it took me a second to catch it.

Three months ago, I never would have thought of the Frosthawks that way.

Three months ago, I was standing in a park across from Ty Burns, telling myself that staying in Northbend was temporary. That this was just a job. A favor. A transition period before I figured out what came next.

We made rules. Boundaries.

I thought keeping distance from Buzz would be the hard part.

I never considered the possibility that the thing I would accidentally fall back in love with wasn't a person.

It was this.

The early mornings walking into Talon Arena with Dottie trotting beside me like she owned the place. The operations meetings that somehow became second nature. The staff members who stopped asking if I knew where things were because they started asking me where things belonged.

Sarah's late-night strategy texts.

Bea showing up in my office without knocking.

My father trusting me with decisions before I realized he had stopped checking my work.

Somewhere between fall and the dead of winter, temporary stopped feeling like a timeline. It started feeling like a lie.