Chapter 6 Ryder's Girl

I texted Knox at six forty-three in the morning, sitting on the edge of my bed in yesterday's clothes because I hadn't slept enough to bother changing out of them.

Unknown number last night. She's threatening to post everything to my writing account unless I meet her at noon.

I watched the screen. Three minutes passed. Then my phone rang.

"Don't go," he said. No hello.

"She'll post it, Knox."

"Let her try." His voice was flat, certain in that way he had, like the outcome was already decided and he was just waiting for me to catch up. "She wants you alone somewhere with no witnesses. That's the whole point of using an unknown number."

"She knows exactly how many followers I have. Four thousand people."

"Half are bots and she knows that too. She's not actually trying to hurt your account. She's trying to get you alone." A pause. "Come to the game tonight. Six o'clock. Sit in the section behind the bench and don't answer that number and don't say a word to Mason."

The call ended before I could answer.

I put the phone face down on my desk. The sky outside was going from dark gray to lighter gray, that slow reluctant kind of morning. The house was starting up around me, pipes in the walls, a floorboard somewhere down the hall, the smell of coffee working its way up from the kitchen. I sat there and listened and told myself to get up and get dressed and do something useful.

I stayed in my room until I heard the front door close.

The day dragged. My nine o'clock lecture might as well have been in another language. I ate lunch alone at the back of the campus cafe and kept my phone face down on the table and checked it every ten minutes anyway. The unknown number didn't text again. Noon came. Nothing happened. I sat with that for a while, the way waiting for something that doesn't come is sometimes worse than the thing itself.

At five-fifteen I grabbed my jacket and walked to the arena.

The cold hit as soon as the doors swung open, that rink cold that has nothing to do with outside temperature, something cleaner and sharper. Cody's girlfriend found me in the corridor before I reached the seating section. Bree, with his number on the back of her hoodie and a coffee from the arena cart already half gone.

"You're Knox's girl," she said. Easy, no calculation in it. "He told Cody."

"He mentioned you'd be here."

"Petrov's girlfriend is Dana. She's always late, seriously always, don't take it as a statement about you." Bree fell into step beside me like we'd been doing this for a while. "Knox said you were private. Didn't say much else."

We found our seats. I looked at the ice where the team was running warmups and found number eleven without searching. Knox moved differently from the others. Not faster, but like he was using space the others were still deciding whether to enter, already positioned where the play was going before anyone else had read it.

"He asked Cody to make sure we made you feel welcome," Bree said. She was watching the warmups too. "Just so you know. He's never done that before. In two years of me coming to these games I have never heard Knox Ryder ask for anything that wasn't hockey-related."

I didn't say anything to that.

Dana arrived in the first period, breathless, scarf half unwrapped, dropping her bag and apologizing to three separate people on her way to her seat. She had Petrov's last name written in marker on the inside of her wrist, neat letters, not her own handwriting. Nobody asked about it.

The game pulled me in from the first minute. It was fast and loud and physical in a way that made it impossible to hold any other thought. Knox scored in the second period, a wrist shot from the left side, top right corner, before the goalie had finished reading the movement, and the arena came up off its seats all at once and Bree grabbed my arm and I was already standing before I'd decided to stand.

Knox did one lap. Then he looked up into our section. He found me the way he always found me, like there was a line between us whether or not he was looking for it. One second, two. Then he was skating back to the face-off circle and Bree was watching my face with a small careful expression.

I sat back down and kept my eyes on the ice.

After the buzzer the team filed out through the side corridor. Knox came out with his bag, hair still wet, jacket unzipped, and walked straight to me through the crowd without looking anywhere else. He put his arm around my shoulders and pressed a kiss to my temple and I had to remind myself, quietly, what this was.

"You stayed the whole game," he said, low.

"You asked me to."

He pulled back just enough to look at my face. That loose open quality he had after games, something worked out of him that nothing else seemed to reach.

"What'd you think," he said.

"You don't watch the puck. You watch where it's going to be."

He looked at me for a moment. Something moved behind his eyes.

"Yeah," he said. "Exactly."

Cody pulled him sideways into a conversation and Knox turned but kept his arm where it was. Dana was telling Bree something and Bree was laughing and the corridor was warm and crowded and smelled like coffee and rubber and cold air from outside.

My phone buzzed.

Unknown number.

Clock's still running. Noon was a courtesy. You have until tomorrow.

I put the phone in my pocket. I leaned into Knox's side and laughed when Cody said something and kept my face exactly where it needed to be. The arm around my shoulders was warm and solid and real and underneath all of it, quiet and separate, the countdown kept going.

Knox drove me home after. The arena lot had emptied and the streets were quiet, the radio on low, something with just guitar.

"She texted again," I said.

"I figured. What did it say."

"That noon was a courtesy. I have until tomorrow."

He was quiet for a moment.

"She's not going to post it," he said.

"How do you know."

"Because if she posts it she loses her leverage. The threat is more useful to her than the action." He turned onto the main road. "She wants you scared and isolated and making decisions from that place. The moment she posts it she can't threaten you with it anymore."

"And if you're wrong."

"Then we deal with it." He glanced over. "But I'm not wrong."

He said it the same way he said everything, like the outcome was already settled. I used to find that quality in him irritating, that particular certainty. Sitting in his truck at eleven o'clock with a burner number in my phone I found it was the only thing keeping me steady.

He pulled up in front of the house. Porch light on. Upstairs window dark.

"Get some sleep," he said.

"You keep saying that."

"You keep looking like you need to hear it." He looked at me. "Tomorrow we figure out the next move. Tonight you sleep."

I got out. The night was cold and still. I stood on the curb for a second and looked at the dark upstairs window and thought about Sienna in there, ten feet from my room, sleeping with her phone and her full file and her four thousand reasons.

"Knox."

He was watching me through the open window.

"Thank you," I said. "For tonight."

He held my gaze for a moment. Something moved in his face that he didn't say out loud.

"Go inside, Lila," he said quietly.

I went inside and didn't look back