SIN BIN

Every neighborhood in New York has its own religion. In Red Hook, where the Brooklyn Saints keep their practice rink, the religion is hockey, and it’s practiced with a kind of devotion that makes the church two blocks over look like a casual hobby.

People here will forgive almost anything. A DUI. A bar fight. A slump. A wife, a girlfriend, a second girlfriend with her own hashtag. What they will not forgive is a woman who looks one of their Saints in the eye and tells someone with the power to do something about it, He put his hands on me after I said no.

That woman is me.

Five weeks ago, I filed a complaint. Four weeks ago, the front office handed down a twenty-five-game suspension without pay, and the whole organization found out exactly who to blame for it. I’d love to say the last month has made me regret it. It hasn’t. I would file it again tomorrow. But there’s a version of doing the right thing that feels like standing in sunlight, and a version that feels like swallowing gravel every morning, and I have been choking down gravel for a while now.

Today’s serving was extra crunchy.

It started in the staff lot, where somebody had taped a piece of cardboard over my parking spot. NARC, it said, in black marker, next to a little drawing of a rat holding a clipboard. Whoever made it had taken the time to give the rat a ponytail. I ripped it down, parked anyway, and sat in my Corolla for a full minute with both hands clenched on the wheel, reminding myself that I’m twenty-six years old, I have a degree, and I’m two years away from a doctorate. I do not have to cry in a parking lot over a cartoon rat.

I didn’t cry. I want that on the record.

Then I walked into the training room and found my treatment table papered with photocopies of my complaint. Not the whole thing, just the first page, the one with my name and the date and the description of what happened at the Holiday Gala after-party. A document that, last I checked, only HR, the general manager, and Declan Rourke’s agent were supposed to have seen. Somebody had gone through the trouble of making dozens of copies and taping them over the table, the stool, the supply cart. Across every single one, in red Sharpie: SNITCH.

Under that, in different handwriting: Hope it was worth 400K.

I stood there holding my coffee until it went cold, because what else was I going to do? Scream? The only person who’d walked in to see me standing there was Walt Brennan, our head athletic therapist, a sixty-year-old man who has been nothing but kind to me. He took one look at the table, then at me, and his face did this tired, sorry thing that made me want to hug him and slap him in equal measure.

“Take the morning in the back office, kid,” he said quietly. “Do charts. Stay off the floor.”

“Is that an order?”

“It’s a suggestion from a man who likes you.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “A lot of guys are wound up. Rourke’s got friends.”

So I peeled every page off myself, one at a time, and I stuffed them all in the shredder, and I did my charts in the windowless back office like a good little pariah. When the guys came in for treatment, I heard them in the next room. Someone coughed snitch into his fist when I walked past, and a few of the others snickered. The equipment manager, Frankie, who used to leave a chocolate bar on my desk every Friday because he thought I was too skinny, walked by without looking at me. Frankie has two daughters. That one stung more than the Sharpie.

By lunch I couldn’t face the staff room, where everyone stops talking the second I walk in. So I did what I’ve been doing all week. I took my turkey sandwich and a clipboard and I went down to the one place in the building where nobody ever looks for me.

The equipment room.

It’s in the basement, at the end of a long, windowless corridor that smells like rubber mats and old sweat, and it’s lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves of skates and sticks and tape and about a thousand pieces of gear that have been left to dry. Nobody comes down here before game days. It’s quiet and it’s boring and it’s mine, a little cave where I can restock the athletic tape and pretend I’m not a villain in a story I didn’t write.

I’m on my knees counting rolls of white tape, mouthing numbers to myself, when I hear the door open behind me.

I don’t turn around right away. I think it’s Frankie. I think maybe he’s come to say something, to apologize, to tell me the chocolate bars are still on the table if I want them.

“Hey, Reyes.”

Every muscle in my body locks.

I know that voice. I’ve heard it in my sleep for five weeks. It’s a pleasant voice, that’s the awful part, a warm, easy baritone that sounds like it belongs to somebody who’s never had to try for anything. It sounded exactly like that at the Holiday Gala, when it said, Come on, stop acting like you don’t like it, into my ear while a hand I didn’t want closed around my wrist and gripped my ass.

I stand up slowly and turn around.

Declan Rourke is leaning in the doorway, six-foot-two and golden, with that jaw and those teeth that have sold half the Saints’ sponsor deals in the tri-state area. He’s wearing a Saints hoodie and a smile, and he looks relaxed, which is the worst thing about him. Behind him, filling the rest of the doorway like a wall with a goalie’s mask tucked under its arm, stands Mikey Boudreau. And behind Mikey, leaning against the corridor wall with his hands in his pockets and his ankle crossed over the other like he’s waiting for a bus, is Luca Santangelo.

My stomach drops straight through the floor. Everybody in Brooklyn knows who Luca Santangelo is. He’s the captain, the center who scored fifty goals last season, the face on the side of the number 3 bus, the guy whose jersey is on every kid in the borough. People call him the franchise, and they mean it literally. The Saints didn’t make the playoffs for nine years before he got here, and they’ve made it every year since. If Declan Rourke is a Saint, Luca Santangelo is the thing the Saints pray to.

I’ve spoken to him exactly twice. Once he asked me for ice. Once he said, “Thanks.” That’s the entire relationship. He has dark hair that never seems to be out of place, and a jaw that was designed for a cologne ad, and eyes so dark they don’t give anything back. Not warmth. Not interest. Looking at him is like looking down a well.

He isn’t looking at me now. He’s studying the ceiling tiles like they’re more interesting than any of this.

“What are you doing down here?” I ask, and I’m proud that my voice doesn’t shake. “Players aren’t supposed to be in the equipment room without Frankie.”

“Frankie’s at lunch,” Dec says pleasantly. He steps inside, and Mikey follows, and the door swings shut behind them with a heavy, final thud. Mikey takes a hockey stick from the nearest rack and slides it through the door handle like a bolt. It fits perfectly. That’s not an accident. These guys have been using this room for years.

“Open the door,” I say.

“We just want to talk.” Dec spreads his hands. “Saint Sienna. Patron saint of narcs. Come on, you’ve been avoiding me for a month.”

“I’ve been avoiding you because I filed a complaint against you for sexual harassment.”

“Yeah. That.” He tilts his head, as if he’s honestly trying to remember what the fuss is about. “See, that’s what I want to talk about.”

My heart is going so hard I can feel it in my teeth. I grab the nearest thing within reach, a hockey stick that has been left leaning against the shelves, and I hold it in front of me with both hands like a baseball bat. It isn’t much, but I’m five-foot-four, and I’ll take what I can get.

Dec glances at the stick and laughs.

“You gonna hit me with that?”

“If you come near me, yes.”

“I’m not going to touch you.” He takes a casual step closer. “I never wanted to touch you, remember? You’re the one who made it a whole thing. All I did was give you a hug at a party. A hug, Reyes. People hug.”

“You grabbed my wrist and my ass and wouldn’t let go when I told you to.”

“To be fair, you do have a lovely rack. What’s a man supposed do?”

“I said no three times.”

“And I said I heard you.” His smile gets a little thinner. “You know what it cost me, that little hug? Twenty-five games, in the one year my contract’s up. Four. Hundred. Thousand. I didn’t even stick my dick in you.”

“I’m sorry your actions had consequences.”

It comes out of my mouth before I can stop it. I watch his face change. The pleasant act slips like a mask on a sweaty face, and underneath it, there’s something small and mean and furious. This is the man I saw at the gala, the one who thought no was an opening bid.

“Here’s how this is going to go,” he says, no longer friendly. “Monday morning, you walk into HR, and you tell them you made a mistake. You were stressed. You misread a friendly guy. You’d had a couple of drinks.”

“I don’t drink.”

“Then you were confused. I don’t care. You write it up and sign it, and they reinstate me, and we all go back to normal.”

“No.”

“Reyes—”

“No,” I say again, and my voice cracks right on the vowel, but I say it anyway. “I didn’t lie. You did it. Everybody knows you did it. You can’t threaten me into saying otherwise.”

“Can’t I?”

He says it so lightly that a chill goes all the way down my spine.

“My cousin sits on the state licensing board,” Dec says conversationally. “Funny thing about therapists. All it takes is one anonymous tip about misconduct and it’s years of hearings before you ever practice again. Your doctorate’d be a nice piece of paper to frame.” He turns his head and looks at Mikey, then back at me. “And your mom. She still run that little bakery on Fifth Avenue? It’s a shame about those health inspectors. They’re all over places like that. One bad report, a few angry customers...”

The room tilts.

My mother has worked at Panadería La Esperanza for twenty-two years. She opens at four every morning. She has hands that smell like cinnamon and a back that aches every time it rains, and the bakery is the only reason my little brother can afford his braces and I can afford my tuition. Dec knows the name of her store. He knows what street it’s on.

“Don’t you dare talk about my mother,” I say, and my voice is suddenly very steady, because rage has a way of burning the fear off. I lift the stick higher. “I’ll put you through that wall, I swear to God.”

“Feisty.” Dec clicks his tongue and, before I can react, he reaches out, catches the end of the stick, and yanks it out of my hands like I’m a toddler holding a toy.

I stumble forward.

He tosses it aside, and it clatters against the concrete, and now he’s close enough that I can smell his cologne.

Mikey shifts by the door, and I realize with a cold, sinking horror that there’s no one on the other side of this room who’s going to help me.

Three to one. No witnesses.

And I made it so easy for them, hiding in the basement where nobody comes.

“Dec,” a voice says from the back of the room.

It’s the first thing Luca Santangelo has said since he walked in. It’s not loud. It’s quiet and almost bored. But Dec’s head turns toward him like a dog hearing its name.

“Stay out of it, Cap,” Dec says. “You said you’d let me have my way with her.”

“I said I’d let you talk.” Luca pushes off the wall, unhurried. He’s taller than I remembered, broader through the shoulders, and he moves like someone who has never in his life had to hurry for anything. “You’ve been talking for ten minutes. Not having your way.”

“But—”

“She said no to your face while you were threatening her mother.” Luca’s gaze finally lands on me, and I feel it everywhere, like a hand pressed flat against my sternum. “That’s not having your wat.”

I should feel relieved. The one decent guy in a room full of animals, right? Except I feel the hair rise on the back of my neck, because I’ve looked into those dark, empty eyes, and there’s no decency in them.

“So fix it,” Dec snaps. “Have your way with her. You’re the captain. She’ll listen to you. Everyone does.”

“Does everyone,” Luca murmurs.

He walks the length of the room toward me, and I back into the shelves, and a roll of tape falls to the floor with a hollow knock. He stops a few feet away. Close enough for me to see the tiny scar that cuts through his left eyebrow. Close enough to smell soap and cold air, and nothing else, no cologne, no sweat, like he just stepped out of a snowstorm.

“What’s your first name again?” he asks me.

“You know my first name.”

“Humor me.”

“Sienna.”

“Sienna.” He rolls it around like he’s tasting it. “I’ve worked with you for two years and I couldn’t have told you that. That’s on me.”

“What do you want?” I whisper.

“Right now? To clear the room.” He turns his head a few degrees toward the other two without taking his eyes off me. “Dec. Mikey. Out.”

“What?” Dec says.

“You heard me.”

“Cap, no way, she hasn’t agreed to anything. She’s gonna run to HR the second we walk out—“

“I said out.”

He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t have to. There is something in the way he says it that makes the temperature in the room drop a few degrees, and for a second I watch Declan Rourke, six-foot-two and golden, the man who has never been told no in his adult life, actually hesitate.

“You owe me for this,” Dec says finally, low and bitter.

“I know what I owe you,” Luca replies.

Mikey slides the stick out of the door handle without being asked. He gives me one long, uneasy look and then he’s gone.

Dec lingers in the doorway.

“Saint Sienna,” he sneers, and the last of the charm is gone. “I’ll see you Monday.”

The door swings shut behind him.

For a few seconds, there’s only the buzz of the fluorescent lights and my own breathing, too loud, too quick. I have just watched the most powerful man in this building dismiss two professional athletes with four words, and the part of my brain that’s still working has done the math.

Three against one was a mob. This is one against one, and he’s the one who’s in charge.

“Thank you,” I say stiffly, because my mother raised me right. I start toward the door on legs that feel like wet sand. “I’ll just—“

“Where are you going?”

“Out.”

“Not you, Saint.”

I stop.

It’s the nickname that does it. Dec threw it at me like an insult, but when it comes out of Luca Santangelo’s mouth, soft and unhurried, it sounds like something else. It sounds like a claim.

The corridor outside is silent. There’s no footsteps, no voices, no one coming. Behind me, I hear the stick slide back through the handle, a small and deliberate scrape, and then a quiet click as Luca Santangelo settles himself against the door.

I turn around slowly, my pulse hammering, and meet those bottomless dark eyes.

“Sit down,” he says. “We’re going to talk about what happens next.”