She steps back. The distance she creates is deliberate, a physical withdrawal that mirrors the emotional wall reconstructing behind her eyes.
"But you are a shit leader, Rafe."
The assessment lands without cushioning.
"Your brother executes more command with silence than you do screaming at everyone and disregarding their limits. He walks into a room and people listen because his presence communicates competence, not volume. You walk into a room and people flinch because they have learned that your presence means someone is about to be blamed for a problem you created."
Rafe's nostrils flare. The bruise on his jaw pulses with the clenching of his teeth.
"And you think the judges and scouts are not watching?" Mae adds, tilting her head with a sharpness that makes the question land like an accusation. "You think tonight happened in a vacuum? That you can lose four to one on home ice with a roster you personally assembled and no one outside this building notices?"
He huffs, the sound carrying less conviction than it did five minutes ago.
"No one is going to see anything," he mutters. "It is one game. One loss. It happens."
Mae laughs.
The sound is not warm. Not bright. It is the laugh of a woman who has just been handed proof that her opponent does not understand the board they are playing on, and the humor she finds in that ignorance is sharp enough to cut.
"Let me enlighten you, since your game plan did not include a scouting report on the people watching it fail. There were sixNHL observers in the crowd tonight. Six. Sitting in the upper bowl with clipboards and tablets, documenting every shift, every line change, every tactical decision, and every single reaction you had when those decisions collapsed. They were watching all of you. Every move. Every fumble. Every screaming match on the bench that you thought was a private conversation but was actually a performance review conducted in front of the people who decide whether your hockey career extends beyond this campus."
The room erupts.
Not in argument. In panic. The restrained, wide-eyed panic of athletes who have just been told that the most important audience of their careers witnessed the worst performance of their lives.
"Wait, what?" one of the rookies blurts, his voice cracking on the question.
"Six?" another echoes. "There were six scouts and nobody told us?"
"You are not supposed to be told," Mae fires back, the frustration in her voice cutting through the rising noise. "That is the entire point. They observe you in your natural state so they can assess how you perform without the pressure of knowing you are being evaluated. And guess what? You flopped. Spectacularly. Not because you lack talent, because most of you have plenty of that if someone would bother to develop it. You flopped because your leadership set you up for failure, your preparation was nonexistent, and your post-loss behavior tells the scouts more about your character than any highlight reel ever could."
She pauses, letting the information settle into the room like a stone sinking to the bottom of still water.
"You guys are so oblivious. You do not know how the real game is played. How acquiring players actually works. You thinkthat simply because you win, you are going to be picked and drafted? That victories are the only metric? It is how you treat your teammates. How you perform individually within a system that requires collective execution. How you take loss. How you accept criticism. How you respond when the plan fails and the scoreboard is not in your favor and the easy thing would be to blame everyone around you instead of looking in the mirror."
She shrugs.
The gesture is deliberate, a performance of casualness that thinly veils the trembling I can see in her hands, the physical evidence of a woman who just spent ten minutes pouring her fury and her grief and her experience into a room full of strangers and is now running on fumes.
"The choice is yours," she says. "You want a shot at getting into the preliminary leagues, you will listen to Coach Mercer's advice. Have Raphaël as your new captain. Show up this weekend for practice to fix this disaster. And for me..."
She pauses. Her lips curl into a smile that does not reach her eyes.
"I will see if I FEEL like helping. Because like your great captain said, I am just a whore, right? Let me go ride my men's cocks after a losing game since that apparently needs to be celebrated. Maybe I will bake a cake. Put a big number four on it for the goals you let in. Festive."
She huffs.
Throws the last handful of papers into the air.
They scatter upward in a burst of white that arcs toward the ceiling before drifting back down in lazy spirals, landing on benches and shoulders and the floor around Rafe's feet, adding to the growing archive of his documented failures that now covers approximately twelve square feet of locker room tile.
Then she turns on her heel and stomps out.
The door slams behind her with a force that rattles the hinges and sends a vibration through the floor that I feel in the bench beneath me. Her vanilla sugar scent lingers in her wake, fading slowly, the sweetness now carrying an undertone of smoke and pepper that she absorbed from the confrontation. A borrowed sharpness that will dissipate once she is away from the source.
The locker room is silent.
The silence lasts for approximately eight seconds, which is long enough for every person present to process the fact that an Omega just walked into a room full of Alpha hockey players, dismantled their performance with ten pages of hand-drawn evidence, called their captain a shit leader to his face, informed them that NHL scouts witnessed their humiliation, and exited by throwing papers in the air and making a sarcastic remark about celebratory cake.
