Chapter 3 RAW POWER

The phone lights the nightstand at 2:14 a.m., and I know who it is before I look, because only one person in my life believes the small hours belong to her.

"Hello, Mother."

"Scarlett, darling." Vivienne pours my name out slowly, the way she pours everything. Behind her, a 90s jazz record turns in the dark of the big empty house.

"Did you see the Post? They called me a 'former starlet.' Former! As if your father didn't buy out my studio contract and lock me in his house like a trophy."

I sit up and pull my robe around me. "It's past two. Have you taken your medication?"

"Don't speak to me like I'm a child." The warmth drains out of her voice in a single breath. "I gave my youth to that man, and what did I get? A daughter who works for him. Who laughs on television while that boy calls her his favorite distraction."

"I wasn't laughing. And I am handling Pierce."

"You're handling nothing. You're letting them make fools of both of us, exactly the way he did." Her voice breaks into something wet and theatrical, and it cuts deeper than the insults ever do. "You're just like him, Scarlett. Cold. Calculating. Using people until there's nothing left."

"I'm nothing like Christian," I say, and I hear how much of it is a prayer.

"Call me tomorrow. Or don't. You only call when you want something."

The line clicks off. The silence in my bedroom is the silence of very expensive soundproofing.

Cold. Calculating. I put the phone face down, as if she might climb out of it. Then I lie awake for two hours trying to decide which parent I am failing worse.

By 5:30 I'm driving through fog with the heater on and the radio off, in the Porsche my father gave me for my twenty-fifth birthday. He chose the color. I have never once asked it for a better one.

I don't decide to go to the practice facility. My hands simply turn that way, the way a tongue finds a sore tooth.

At that hour the building belongs to the cleaners and the ice. I let myself in through the side entrance with my agency keycard and walk the long concrete corridor in running shoes that make no sound. It smells of frozen water, rubber matting and cold steel, and for the first time since midnight my shoulders come down half an inch.

I was going to sit in my office until the staff arrived. I was going to review contracts.

Then I hear it: iron, rhythmic, patient. Clank. Breath. Clank.

The weight room's main lights are off. Amber strips along the floor throw the mirrors into long gold shadows, and in the middle of them, Liam Knox is alone at the squat rack.

He isn't wearing a shirt.

I am not prepared for this, so I treat it as data. Gray shorts. Chalked wrists wrapped in lifting straps.

A dragon tattoo winds up his left side and disappears over his shoulder, and a bruise the color of old tea has bloomed across his ribs, healing from last season or the one before. He counts under his breath, the way children count when they're afraid of losing their place. Six. Seven.

He sets himself under the bar and stands. The steel bows in the center with the weight of it. His back works in long, deliberate lines, nothing flashy, nothing for show.

The mirrors give him back to me from four angles, and in every one of them he is alone. He isn't performing for anyone, and that is exactly what makes it difficult to look away.

I know the sensation. It is the sensation of watching someone be completely honest.

Eight.

He racks the bar. The crash rolls down the corridor and into my sternum. He leans forward, forehead against the steel, and just breathes.

He looks tired in a way I wouldn't have guessed from a man who bills himself as a wall.

I should leave. I take one step back, and my shoe finds the edge of a rubber mat and squeaks.

His head comes up fast. "Who's there?"

I could run. I'm in leggings, with my hair in a loose clip and no heels, and every instinct I own says retreat is a form of defeat. So I step into the doorway of my own free will and say, "Me."

He pulls a towel off the bench. He doesn't hurry, and he doesn't come toward me. He stops a good six feet away and drags the towel across his face and chest, and when his eyes find mine, the first thing in them isn't a smirk. It's wariness.

"You're early," he says.

"So are you."

"I'm always here at five." He drapes the towel around his neck. "Your office is the other direction, though."

"I know where my office is."

"Then you walked past it." One corner of his mouth lifts, finally, and the wariness gets company. "Came to watch me work, DuBois?"

It's meant as a jab, I think, but he says it quietly, and it reaches somewhere the jab wasn't aimed. I should say something cutting. I'm good at cutting.

"I came because I couldn't sleep," I say instead, "and I'd rather be in a building full of ice than in an apartment full of my mother's voice."

The silence that follows isn't the kind I'm used to. He doesn't pounce on it. He looks at the floor mat, then at the squat rack, then back at me.

"Mine doesn't sleep either," he says. "My head, I mean. Five a.m. is the one hour it shuts up." He lifts one shoulder. "I count."

"I heard."

"Yeah." He almost laughs. "That's embarrassing."

"It isn't." It comes out with more sincerity than I intended. I fix my face. "Your media training is at seven. Eat something first. The trainer hates a hungry client."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Don't."

"Manager," he amends, and he's back in the doorway of his own smile. I turn to go.

"DuBois."

I stop. He is exactly where he was, six feet back, his hands visible at his sides.

"Rule seven," he says. "Still on my side of the door."

It shouldn't undo me, a hockey player quoting my own fine print. It does, a little. I nod once and walk back down the corridor with my spine as straight as it has ever been.

Behind me, a few steps later, the iron starts up again, slower than before. It isn't until I reach the elevator that I realize I'm smiling at a concrete wall.