Outside, wind shoved snow across the windowpane in slow, silencing waves.
I pressed my palms to the edge of the counter and exhaled. Long. Shaky.
“I’m fine,” I said to no one. “This is fine.”
The problem was, I wasn’t entirely sure who I was trying to convince. It was the lack of activity that was driving me mad. Work, I told myself. Get it done. There was plenty to prep for the playoffs. It was why I’d brought the laptop in the first place.
I managed half a page.
Maybe less.
I stared at the screen long enough for the cursor to mock me, blinking steady and bright in the middle of a sentence I didn’t remember writing. My outline sat untouched beside me. The comms calendar was open, color-coded, and somehow still blurry.
None of it made sense.
None of itmattered.
The Howlers could set themselves on fire and I couldn’t string three damn thoughts together right now. Every part of me was too aware of my own body—tight skin, flushed nerves, scent bleeding into the air with every breath. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t sit still.
I shoved the laptop away and stood up again.
Shower number two.
The first had been this morning—early. Before the sun was all the way up. I’d scrubbed like it would clear my head, like the water could drown out the pulsing scent rolling off me, the one that had started curling its way into every soft surface I touched.
This one? This one was desperation.
The water was near-scalding. The steam fogged the mirror before I’d even stepped in. I braced one hand against the tile and stood under the spray with my eyes closed, trying not to think about how hollow my chest felt. How restless I was. How the heat didn’t help the ache—it justwarmed it.
The scent faded—slightly.Washed down the drain for now.
But not gone.
And not the only thing haunting me.
It started small. Like déjà vu.
The first time I met Roan, he’d just come off the draft. Fresh-faced and pissed off for reasons no one could pin down. His rep came first—ferocious on the ice, dead silent off it. The only player Marchand bragged about like he’d landed a goddamn wolf king.
He walked into the room and every single person went still.
Even me.
Not because he was the biggest alpha I’d ever seen—but because he wasquiet.Still. Calm like a blizzard before it broke.
But his scent?
God. His scent had wrecked something in me.
I hadn’t even let it show. Not a twitch. Not a breath. But something in my chest had tilted sideways that day, and itnever really reset.
It didn’t help when Rhett and Jay came on a season later—both of them chaotic in their own way. Rhett was louder than life from the first handshake. Called me “boots” for a solid month and winked every time he got away with it. Jay, on the other hand, had barely said three words at first, but the way hewatchedeverything, every shift of tone, every change in expression? It was surgical.
They weren’t quiet about liking me. None of them were. Not even Jay, when you knew how to translate the silences.
But Roan?
Roan never said a word.
