Because the seat beside me is not empty.
My mother occupies the opposite side of the backseat like a queen surveying a kingdom that perpetually disappoints her. Her legs are crossed at the ankle with surgical precision, one Louboutin heel bobbing in a rhythm that communicates impatience more effectively than any words. A tablet rests in her lap, its screen casting a cold blue glow across features that belong on the cover of a magazine and carry the warmth of a walk-in freezer.
Eleanora Ashford-Holloway.
Alpha. Socialite. CEO of Ashford Industries.
And the woman responsible for approximately eighty percent of my emotional baggage.
Her scent fills the enclosed space with white orchids, champagne, and cold steel. Expensive. Immaculate. Utterly devoid of anything resembling maternal warmth. The kind of fragrance that announcesI am in control of this room and every person in it, and your comfort is not a factor in my calculations.
"Finally," she says without looking up from her tablet, her manicured fingers scrolling through emails with the speed and disinterest of someone who considers human interaction ascheduling conflict. "Making me wait as if I don't have things to attend to."
"Mother." The word exits my mouth with the enthusiasm of a prisoner greeting a parole officer. "I didn't know you were coming."
"Clearly." Her gaze lifts from the screen long enough to sweep over me in a single, devastating assessment. Damp compression shirt. Sweaty hair escaping its messy bun. The reddened lines across my palms, where blisters have started weeping through torn tape. Her upper lip curls with a distaste so refined it could pass for a smile to anyone who did not grow up on the receiving end of it. "You look like you lost a fight with a gymnasium."
"I was on the ice for two hours."
"Mmm." She returns to her tablet, the syllable carrying the conversational weight of an entire argument she has decided is beneath her to articulate. "Let me guess. Only to be rejected. Again."
I say nothing.
My silence is the loudest possible confirmation, and we both know it.
She shakes her head, the motion small and controlled, not a single strand of her honey-blonde chignon shifting from its architecturally precise position. Her perfume sharpens with irritation, the white orchid notes turning brittle.
"I could arrange your placement in an elite pack within the week, Sage. Seven days. One phone call to the Beaumonts, another to the Castellano estate, and you would be bonded, secured, and positioned in a lifestyle that most Omegas would commit felonies for." She taps something on her tablet, dismissing the idea of my autonomy with the same casual efficiency she uses to dismiss quarterly earnings reports. "Instead, you insist on this charade. Pretending you wereborn Alpha instead of Omega. Chasing a sport that does not want you, will never want you, and has made that abundantly clear through every rejection letter and every turned back and every scout who cannot be bothered to write your name on a clipboard."
Her voice does not rise. It never rises. Eleanora Ashford-Holloway does not yell. She simply speaks with such calculated precision that every syllable lands exactly where it will cause the most damage.
"Hockey, of all the sports." She says it the way someone might saytaxidermyorcompetitive eating.With bewildered disdain. "Of all the arenas you could humiliate this family in, you chose the one filled with sweaty men hitting each other with sticks. Your father's influence, no doubt. All those ridiculous ideologies he planted in your head about women in sports, about Omegas defying their nature. Look where it got you, Sage. Twenty-four years old, unbonded, pursuing a career that will never happen."
Your father's influence.
My jaw aches from clenching.
Because she is right…about that part, at least.
My father is the reason I picked up a stick instead of a figure skating costume. The reason I spent my childhood in rinks instead of pageant halls. The reason I believe, despite every rejection and every closed door and every clipboard that refuses to bear my name, that an Omega can do anything an Alpha can do on the ice.
Rick Holloway. Hockey coach. Eternal optimist. The man who knelt beside me when I was six years old, put a stick in my hands, and told me that the ice does not care about designations. That speed does not know gender. The puck does not ask if you are Alpha or Omega before it obeys the laws of physics.
He believed in me before I had the vocabulary to believe in myself.
And my mother has spent every year since trying to un-teach that belief, replacing it with the particular brand of resigned pragmatism that governs the lives of wealthy Omega women who have accepted their place in the social hierarchy and cannot comprehend why their daughter refuses to do the same.
"Women in sports do not belong," she continues, and each word is a brick laid in a wall she has been building around me since I was old enough to disappoint her. "Particularly an Omega. I do not understand how many rejections and refusals it is going to take before you understand that the world is not going to bend to accommodate your stubbornness. Your talent is not the issue, Sage. It never has been. The issue is that you are fighting a war that was lost before you were born."
She glances at me. Brief. Clinical. The kind of look a surgeon gives a patient who has refused a recommended procedure.
"I have said my piece. Your father is home and has requested to see you, so do not keep him waiting as well."
"Yes, Mother."
The words scrape past the tightness in my throat. Obedient. Automatic. The conditioned response of a daughter who learned early that arguing with Eleanora Ashford-Holloway is an exercise in futility that only results in longer lectures and colder silences.
I bite the inside of my bottom lip until I taste copper.
