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I am aware that I am being careful, and I am aware of why.

The sheet is cool against my back. I am not cool anywhere.

My hand was on that man for most of an hour today. I kept it on the front of his shoulder through a rotation that did not require it, and he knew, and he looked at the edge of the table and talked about a tie so that I would not have to move it.

And then he went away and told Gabi about a text message.

My hand goes down between my legs and I am wet before I touch myself, which is the sort of thing a woman notices and then has to live with.

I think about the half second where he went still.

I think about the width of his back under my palm, and the heat coming off him, and the fact that I could have put my mouth against the place where his beard ends and he would have let me. He would have let me. He would have stood in that room and let me do it and said nothing about it afterward, because he has worked out that silence is the only currency I accept.

Two fingers. Slow, because the walls here are not generous and my daughter is ten feet away and I have had years of practice at being a woman who makes no sound.

Years.

What undoes me is not his shoulders. Not his hands.

It is that he put every repetition on that page and brought it back honest, and that he stopped performing in a room where nobody could have made him, and that he said he would not look at the report, and then did not look at the report.

I bite down on the inside of my cheek.

The rhythm goes wrong, then right, then faster than I intend, and my free hand closes in the sheet, and a sound gets most of the way out of me before I stop it.

Colt.

I say his name into an empty room with my teeth shut and my heels pushed into the mattress and I come so hard that my back comes off the bed.

For a few seconds there is nothing in my head at all.

Then there is.

I lie in the dark with my heart going and conduct a short, extremely professional review of the ways this could end my career. Conflict of interest. A complaint to the board. The sponsorship that keeps my daughter in this country, attached to an employer who would not survive the paperwork.

I knew every one of those before my hand moved.

That’s not a no, Astrid.

No.

It is not.

Chapter seven

Colt

Astrid looks wrong in the Stampede annex.

Then Maren hands her a tablet, she clips a temporary badge to her shirt, and she starts reading the force-plate setup like the building belongs to her too.

Annoying.

I like it immediately.

The annex is awake around us. A cart rattles over the rubber floor. Somebody drops a plate onto a rack hard enough to make Maren look toward the sound. Cold air comes down the rink corridor every time the door opens and brings sharpened steel and wet gear with it.

Roman is at the cable machine pretending not to watch us. Brick is beside him doing a worse job of it.