I am keeping it because it is warm and my room is cold and I just received the most important letter of my life and I want to sit with the enormity of that while wearing a shirt that reminds me someone stood between me and danger today and called me Wildcard and told me not to let anyone walk over me.
That is not romantic. That is practical.
Shut up, hindbrain.
I lean back against the headboard, pulling my knees to my chest, wrapping my arms around my shins. The clover-print panties are visible below the layered shirt hems, bright greenagainst the white duvet, cheerfully ridiculous in a way that feels appropriate for a day that has been nothing if not absurd.
Lucky panties.
Maybe they actually worked for once.
I close my eyes and let the acceptance settle into my bones.
Valenridge University. Omega Integration Program. Full scholarship. Professional-grade facilities. Sanctioned league play. A pathway to the draft that has never existed for someone with my designation, opened by an institution that is either genuinely progressive or spectacularly naive, and I honestly do not care which one because either way, they are giving me ice time and a roster spot and the chance to do what I have been training to do since my father put a stick in my hands and told me the puck does not discriminate.
And Archie will be there.
The nerd who is not a nerd. The nobody who fights like he trained for it. The quiet Alpha with the hidden muscles and the cedarwood scent and the multiple selves that his own father warns people about.
Pretend you don't know me.
Fine. I'll pretend. For now.
But I have a feeling that Valenridge is going to make pretending very, very difficult.
I open my eyes.
Look at the acceptance letter propped against the lamp.
And for the first time since I pressed submit on a laptop in this room ten days ago, the coal in my chest does not just glow.
It ignites.
Because I officially got into Valenridge University for Alphas and Omegas. And this may be my future shot to getting onto the prestigious hockey team not as an observer, but a player.
CHAPTER 7
Cold Water
~ARCHIE~
The water is cold.
Not lukewarm. Not refreshingly cool. Arctic. The temperature of a mountain lake in February, each droplet arriving against my skin like a tiny, targeted punishment administered by a showerhead that has been set to its cruelest setting and left there for the duration of my ongoing psychological crisis.
I have been under this spray for eleven minutes.
Eleven minutes of cold water drumming against my shoulders and streaming down the planes of my chest and pooling around my feet in the drain with the indifferent efficiency of a plumbing system that does not care that the person standing beneath it is having a full-scale neurological emergency.
And my body is still hot.
Not surface hot. Not the kind of elevated temperature that cold water corrects through basic thermodynamics. This heat originates somewhere deeper. Somewhere beneath the muscleand the bone, in the wiring itself, in whatever neurochemical switchboard governs the boundary between rational thought and the primal, marrow-deep fever that an Alpha's body generates when its hindbrain has locked onto a scent and refuses to release the target.
Two and a half hours.
I have been out of the Holloway estate for two and a half hours. Drove home with my father in a silence that vibrated with the specific frequency of a parent who has many opinions and is strategically withholding all of them for deployment at a future date when they will cause maximum impact. Changed out of my clothes. Threw my undershirt into the laundry hamper. Ran three miles on the treadmill in the garage because my body was crawling with an energy that demanded expenditure and the alternative was putting my fist through the drywall.
None of it worked.
