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Mack beside Sully, stance squared, looking like veteran leadership had become a human being. Flag.

Kowalski laughing at something just outside frame. Keep.

I clicked forward through another burst sequence.

Evan.

Neutral-zone regroup. Stick low. Head turning before the puck did, because his brain lived two seconds ahead of the rest of the building. I moved fast at first. Strong frame, another, then another. Every one of them technically good. Every one of them protected by the same familiar discipline: expression guarded, body closed, nothing accidental given away.

Then Frame 187 loaded.

My hand stopped on the mouse.

I did not breathe.

It was not flashy. That was the problem. No spray of ice. No dramatic collision. No blood, no airborne body, no heroic sports-movie nonsense. Just Evan on the bench between reps, helmet off, one forearm braced over his knee, water bottle hanging loose in his hand. Somebody had said something off frame, Mack maybe, maybe Brick, but he was not reacting to them. He was not reacting at all.

For one fraction of a second, he had fallen out of performance and into himself.

Tired. Open. Real.

I leaned closer to the screen.

The overhead lights caught the sweat at his temple and turned it silver. His guard had lowered, just enough. The line of his mouth had gone soft in a way the camera almost never got from him. Behind him, the bench blurred into green and white and arena light, and his face sat in the center of the frame like an answer to a question nobody else had been patient enough to ask.

I sat back. Then leaned forward again, because apparently self-preservation remained more of a hobby than a practice.

My cursor hovered over the flag.

One keystroke.

Pick.

A text banner lit up in the lower corner of my screen.

Sandra: Need your top selects by 9. Walsh wants early eyes before sponsor call.

Of course he did.

I looked back at Evan’s face.

One frame. One choice. One woman in a room full of glowing machines deciding what kind of photographer she still was when nobody else was there to watch.

I hit P.

The flag turned white.

This was how it happened.

Not with malice. That was the comforting fiction. Not with obvious predation or movie-villain glee. It happened with language. With professionalism. With the quiet internal lie that if the image was honest enough, beautiful enough, important enough, then wanting it must also be honest. That using it must somehow become clean by proximity.

Case had known that.

That was the part that made my skin go cold.

I was not him.

What scared me was that I understood, in one ugly instant, the exact mechanism he had trusted in: enough hunger pressed close enough to enough truth, and eventually someone would decide they had earned the right to keep it.