Seal it against the words that are building behind my teeth with the pressurized urgency of a confession that the wrong environment will convert into a detonation. My jaw clenches. My fists tighten inside my gloves. The four-count inhale and six-count exhale engaging automatically, the breathing protocol intercepting the spiral before it can establish a foothold.
Yeah. You'd leave too.
You'd leave too when the senior player you idolized, the one whose jersey number you requested for your own because you wanted to honor his legacy, decided that your admiration was an invitation. When the bullying started in public, the laughter that was designed to isolate you from the team, the comments that eroded your confidence in increments so precise that you didn't recognize the demolition until the foundation was gone. When the humiliation in front of the senior squad was the setup and the privacy of an empty locker room was the delivery.
You'd leave too when the man you trusted forced himself past a boundary you did not consent to crossing and then toldyou the secret would keep itself because who would believe the coach's son over the team's golden boy?
You'd leave without an explanation because the explanation would require you to speak words that your throat physically cannot produce and your brain cannot organize into sentences that make the horror of the experience accessible to people who have never occupied the specific, devastating intersection of trust and violation.
The thoughts snarl behind my sealed mouth. Loud. Insistent. Clawing at the back of my teeth with the frantic energy of a mind that wants to scream the truth into this arena and watch it detonate across every face that is currently staring at me with the bewildered hurt of men who lost a captain and never understood why.
I maintain the blank expression.
The mask. The wire-rimmed fortress. The neutral, unreadable surface that I present to the world when the interior is burning and the exterior is the only fire suppression system I possess.
Not here. Not now. Not in front of a team that deserves the truth and a woman who deserves it more and a pair of twins who already carry the weight of it and do not need to watch me distribute it to a room that is not prepared to hold it.
Ronan steps in.
His timing is perfect because his timing is always perfect, the six years of friendship having calibrated his instinct for Archie-specific interventions to a precision that professional therapists would envy. He glides forward on his skates with the casual, unhurried energy of a man who is about to redirect an entire room's attention and wants the redirection to look spontaneous rather than strategic.
"Wait a minute." His voice carries the performative naivety of a man who is approximately zero percent naive and onehundred percent aware of what he is doing. "Did we just bypass the fact that Coach said we have an Omega on our team?"
The room's focus rotates. Away from me. Away from the silence that was thickening into something the team would have started asking questions about. Toward Sage, who is standing beside me with HOLLOWAY 55 on her back and an expression that communicates the specific, incandescent fury of a woman whose cover has been deliberately blown by an ally she trusted.
"You fucking brought that back up on purpose!" She side-glances at Ronan with the visual force of a woman whose eyes function as weapons. "I could have just blended behind you like a nobody!"
He chuckles. Rowan joining him in stereo, the twin laughter filling the rink with the harmonic warmth that I have been hearing through gaming headsets for six years and am now experiencing in person for the first time.
Rowan holds up a finger.
"First of all, you're standing right next to Cap." He gestures between Sage and me with his stick, indicating the approximately zero inches of daylight between our positions on the ice. "And you're both functionally the same height, so you're not really hiding from anyone."
He holds up a second finger.
"And second, you smell like a floral dessert right now. Peppermint and cherry blossom with a stress-spike sweetness that is broadcasting your location to every Alpha nose in a fifty-foot radius. So I'm not entirely sure how long you could have pretended you didn't exist without being acknowledged by at least seven sinus cavities."
Sage groans with the full-body resonance of a woman whose scent profile has been publicly narrated by a man she met over Caribbean food yesterday.
"I don't want to know how I smell to you!"
Ronan laughs, his cooler cadence providing the counterpoint to his brother's warmth.
"Why not, Wildcard? Scared you'll tempt us Alphas instead of showing us your skills?"
Her teeth grind. The sound audible at my proximity, enamel protesting the pressure of a jaw clenching against a retort that wants to exit at a volume the building codes have not been engineered to withstand.
"You TWOOOOOO." The word stretches past reasonable phonetic duration, her frustration elongating the vowel into a sonic event that echoes off the rafters.
The twins skate forward in synchronized motion and ruffle her hair. Both of them. Simultaneously. Four hands descending on her navy-and-emerald strands and disrupting the controlled chaos she assembled this morning with the casual, affectionate aggression of siblings tormenting a younger family member they have decided to adopt.
She swats at them. Misses. Swats again.
"Wait a damn minute!" She ducks beneath their retreating hands, her helmet knocked askew by the assault. "Why are YOU TWO calling me Wildcard now?!"
They laugh. The stereo effect filling the arena with the specific, bright resonance that I have learned is the twins' default response to producing chaos and enjoying the results.
Rowan grins. "We heard Archie saying it last night."
