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The barn detonates. The bench empties over the boards and buries me at center ice, and for one perfect minute I am nothing on this earth but a hockey player who just won a hockey game with the girl he loves in the building.

Then I skate off, and I find her in the tunnel, and she’s not celebrating.

Margot's standing where the families wait, white as fresh ice, phone locked in her fist. Denise is planted beside her.

"Jax." Her voice barely clears the roar behind me. "It's out."

"What's out?"

"Reyes. She didn't wait for Monday. She published an hour ago, while you were on the ice." She turns the screen to me and there's my entire life in one headline.

"It’s all in there. The fake romance. The conflict of interest. Me, the fixer who wrote herself into the story." Her voice cracks straight down the middle. "It leads with Cade, Jax. It leads with my brother."

My phone's already buzzing in my bag. I dig it out.

And it drops on me all at once. I saved the season and lost everything else on the very same shift.

I look at my phone.

It’s Cade.

Chapter 20: Margot

"Cade." Jax turns away from me to take it.

"Cade, let me…"

Whatever my brother says on the other end drops Jax's head like a hit he didn't see coming.

"I know." His voice is wrecked. "Cade. I won’t let it hurt her. I’ll take the fallout. I'm the one who.."

He goes quiet. Pulls the phone from his ear. Looks at the black screen.

Cade hung up on him.

I’ve never seen Jax look like that. Like something structural gave out under his weight.

“My brother must be very angry and scared for me. He'll come around." I don't believe it, but my voice does the thing it does in a crisis, goes smooth and certain when I don’t know the outcome but hoping for the best. "He's your best friend."

Jax's eyes are rimmed red, and it guts me. "Me and Cade have had exactly one rule since we were kids, and I broke it." He scrubs both hands down his face. "I did that. Not you. Me."

"Margot." Denise's voice, right behind me. I forgot she was there.

I turn. My boss is holding her phone up, and Reyes's follow up post is glowing on the screen, and the headline is worse. FIXER, ALL FAKE! And under it my name. My actual name, in print, next to a photo of me in the stands tonight.

"They want a statement by morning. The league, Meridian, all of them." Denise doesn't do me the disrespect of softening it, and I love her a little for that even now. "Margot, you're the best hire I've ever made." She lets it land. "But right now, you and I know the least damaging statement this team can put out is the one where you're a rogue employee who ran a con nobody sanctioned. Where you manufactured the whole thing on your own and the player" she doesn't look at Jax "was a mark, not a partner. That version saves the deal. It saves the team. It saves every single person in that story except one."

Every person except me.

And there it is. The out. My entire career traded for his. I know this play. The fixer falls, the client walks, and the machine keeps running. But I have to save my brother too. I can do it, spin it with a twist.

It would work. Meridian signs. Jax keeps his nine figures and his newly polished halo. Cade gets to go on hating me instead of hating his best friend. Everyone I love walks out of this wreck, whole and intact.

I open my mouth to say yes. To do the thing I’m good at. The thing that ends with me carrying a cardboard box to my car while the rest of the world keeps its life.

Jax steps between me and Denise.

"No." His voice comes out quiet and final. "She's not doing that. I'm not putting my name on a single word that calls Margot a liar to save my own face. I have spent years being the villain in every story anyone's ever written about me."