Chapter 9 : The Face-Slap

The doors slammed open with a crack like a gunshot.

Camera flashes hit me before anything else. White, blinding, relentless. Voices flooded in over each other, a wall of noise with my name buried somewhere inside it.

"Malia! Malia, look this way!"

Derek's voice cut through all of it.

"Malia Fonoti." He shoved a microphone forward, already moving toward me with that smug, practiced urgency he used on camera. "Do you have a comment on the fraud allegations from your time in Columbus?"

I froze.

Then I was not looking at him anymore.

Three bodies moved in front of me at once, fast and seamless, like they had rehearsed this exact formation a hundred times. Lucian center. Gavin left. Zane right. A solid wall of muscle and tailored suits that swallowed every camera angle pointed at me.

I could not see Derek anymore. I could only hear him.

They moved before I even finished flinching.

"Get out of my way," Derek said. "This is a public stadium. I have a right to ask questions."

"You have a right to leave," Lucian said.

His voice was quiet. It did not need to be loud. The room went still around it anyway, the way a room does when the most dangerous person in it stops raising his voice.

Derek pushed forward anyway. "She embezzled funds from the Columbus Herald. There is a federal complaint with her name on it. The public deserves"

"The public deserves the truth," Zane said.

He lifted his tablet.

He tapped it once.

Every phone in that atrium chimed at the same moment. A wave of sound, dozens of devices going off in unison, reporters glancing down out of pure reflex.

I watched their faces change in real time.

Headlines and document scans, bank records, internal emails, all of it landing on every device simultaneously. Derek fabricating the fraud trail. Derek's actual financial history, the one he had buried under his own ex's name. Derek's payment records from a media outlet that traced straight back to League Commissioner Harlan Webb.

"What," Derek started.

"Mr. Marsh." A reporter near the front looked up from her phone, eyes sharp now in a completely different direction. "Is it true you fabricated evidence against Miss Fonoti to protect your own embezzlement charges in Ohio?"

"That is not," Derek said.

"Who is paying you?" another voice shouted. "Is this connected to Commissioner Webb?"

The microphones swung away from me entirely.

I watched eight months of fear collapse in under ten seconds.

Derek's face went through three stages fast. Confusion. Recognition. Pure, naked panic.

"This is fabricated," he shouted, but his voice cracked on the word. "This is a setup, this is"

He lunged.

Not toward the reporters. Toward me.

He shoved past two cameramen and broke through the gap between Zane and Lucian with a speed I did not expect from him.

Gavin moved like water finding a crack.

One step, one pivot, and Derek's entire body hit the marble floor with a sound that silenced the room completely. Gavin had him pinned in under two seconds, knee against his spine, one arm locked behind his back.

"Do not move again," Gavin said. His voice was almost gentle. That made it worse.

Stadium security flooded through the broken doors a moment later, radios crackling, boots pounding marble. They pulled Derek up by both arms while he screamed something about lawsuits that nobody in the room was listening to anymore.

My heart was still slamming against my ribs.

It's over, I thought. It is actually over.

Then, from the back of the crowd, past the security line, past the still flashing cameras, a single reporter's voice cut through everything.

"Is it true," she shouted, "that the new consultant is carrying the owners' children?"

The room went completely silent.