Some days she felt like my mother, others, she felt like someone wearing her face; and everyone kept saying things like,she’s still in thereorsome days are better than others, but I called bullshit.
The truth is meaner than people liked to admit. It's watching someone you love become someone you have to learn again, over and over, while smiling through it so they don’t fall apart faster.
That's how I ended up moving back. I said it was temporary at first: that I’d just stay for a season, play for the Moose again before I went back out to the big city to pursue my career.
But then one season turned into two, and then a couple more months after that, just until things stabilized.
No one ever tells you how easily something temporary becomes permanent, how one month folds into the next, how you blink and it’s snowing again, and you’re still running the grocery list,still paying the bills, still explaining the same calendar four different ways before breakfast.
My dad is the kind of alpha who could break a man with one hand, but couldn’t ever sit long enough to hold hers. He couldn’t soothe, or stay gentle even for thirty seconds. His temper made damn sure of it.
So, in the end, I stayed. Walking away wasn’t an option, even if staying hurt in a way I couldn’t describe.
And in all of that, this house stayed quiet.
There are no fists through walls, here. No slammed doors, or waiting for a voice to snap like a trap. It might have the kind of stillness that holds weight and grief and long distant memories, but it doesn’t hold cruelty, and I’ve held onto this place because it’s the first roof I’d ever lived under that didn’t feel like punishment. Other than the Icebox, it's the only place in this godforsaken town that I felt I could breathe without bracing for impact, and I’m not ready to give it up.
Certainly not forher.
I snap myself back into reality, killing the engine before I step out into the cold. Wind bites at my neck where my jacket doesn’t quite meet my hoodie, and my shoulder throbs with every movement, a relentless pain that never really shuts up, just dulls down to background noise.
The key sticks in the lock again, and I shove the door open with my hip, teeth clenched as the warm air rushes to meet me. Snow melts off my coat and puddles onto the wood floor as I kick my boots against the mat, harder than necessary. I hang my car keys on the hook by the door, and the sound echoes.
I turn, and there she is.
Emery Tate.
She’s the new PT for the team, and the omega who is indefinitely going to be living with me in this fragile balance I’ve built out of silence and structure.
She’s curled on the long couch as though she’s been dropped there by the storm. The fleece blanket is tucked up under her chin, and her head is sunk deep into the pillow I usually lean on when my shoulder gets bad. One of her hands is tucked beneath her cheek, the other dangling loosely off the edge of the cushion, and her beanie is resting on the armchair directly across.
She has brown hair that falls in soft, uneven waves, her lips are plump and parted slightly in sleep, and I…
Well.
I didn’t expect her to look likethat.
Her scent is clearer now: vanilla, with a little citrus underneath the cold. It’s dampened by suppressants, but unmistakably omega anyway.
My instincts tighten, then lock down out of habit.
Her breath is slow and steady, and I haven’t been caught off guard by the fact of her so much as by the presence of her.
She’s supposed to be temporary—a logistical solution in the shape of a person. The house itself technically isn’t even mine; it passed to my mother as my aunt’s closest living relative when she died childless, and when my parents stayed married, my father stepped in and did what he always does best: turned it into an opportunity. The spare room’s been listed for nearly two years, untouched, because no one comes to Iron Lake unless they’re born here or stuck here.
Until now.
My father—always generous with his warnings—mentioned her a few days ago, but Coach gave me more to go on when he brought her up in passing. He said she seems sharp and grounded, that she knows her stuff, and that she doesn’t strike him as the kind who’d be rattled by a locker room full of taped-up knees and oversized alpha egos.
“She's got grit,” he told us all just yesterday, reminding everyone that she'd be arriving soon. “The Moose could use someone like her. So behave yourselves, and don't go scarin' her off.”
Right now, she doesn’t look gritty. She looks tired.
The kind of tired you carry for miles before it finally lets you drop.
There are duffel bags slumped at the base of the stairs, one gaping open and another tipped sideways, while her phone is facedown on the coffee table, the charging cable half-knotted as though it was abandoned mid-movement.
I exhale through my nose. It isn’t her fault, I know that. She probably doesn’t realize how strange this setup really is. She’s moved to a new town and is starting a new job where she’s been dropped in halfway through a broken season, surrounded by bruised bodies and bruised pride and more alphas than any sane omega should willingly orbit.
