A shot. A real, legitimate, no-more-hiding shot at their hockey league.
Why not?
Sage is risking everything to be there. Walking into a program that has never accepted an Omega, surrounded by Alphas who will question her presence, carrying the weight of every rejection that came before and the knowledge that this might be the last door she gets to knock on.
If she can risk that...
If a woman who has been told no by every institution, every coach, every clipboard-wielding gatekeeper in professional hockey can stand at center ice and demand to be seen...
Then maybe the kid who has been hiding behind glasses and silence and a carefully constructed nobody can stop hiding.
Maybe.
Sleep pulls at the edges of my consciousness, the exhaustion of the day finally overriding the restless circuitry that has kept me awake and alert and tormented by cherry blossom pheromones for the better part of three hours. My breathing slows. My muscles release their residual tension in increments, each fiber surrendering to gravity and the cool press of navy sheets against bare skin.
The ceiling crack blurs in my fading vision.
My last conscious thought is not about Sage.
It is about ice.
About the sound that skate blades make when they carve a fresh surface for the first time. The specific, crystalline whisper that exists nowhere else in the auditory spectrum, a frequency that lives in the narrow space between silence and music, between standing still and moving with a speed that makes the cold air burn.
I have been listening to that sound from the wrong side of the boards for my entire life.
Tomorrow, I am going to find out what it sounds like from the right side.
Why pucking not.
CHAPTER 8
Familiar Faces
~SAGE~
Valenridge University looks like a place that was designed to intimidate you into becoming a better version of yourself.
The campus sprawls across what has to be a hundred acres of manicured grounds, nestled between the foothills of a mountain range that serves as a permanent backdrop so picturesque it feels staged. Gothic stone buildings with arched windows and ivy-covered facades line the central quad, their architecture carrying the specific weight of institutions that have existed long enough to develop their own gravitational field. Modern additions punctuate the older structures: a glass-fronted athletics complex that glows aquamarine in the November sun, a performing arts center with a curved titanium roof that looks like it was designed by someone who asked "what if a hockey rink and a concert hall had a baby," and an arena whose steel frame rises above the treeline like a cathedral built for a sport rather than a god.
The air here smells different from the city. Pine resin and cold stone and the faint metallic bite of a rink operating somewhere nearby, its refrigerant exhaust threading through the natural scents with a familiarity that makes my hindbrain hum.
My nerves are a disaster.
They have been escalating in stages since Jeffrey loaded my gear into the Escalade this morning, intensifying through the three-hour drive, peaking when the iron gates of the campus materialized through the windshield like the entrance to a future I applied for and still cannot quite believe accepted me.
How the hell am I going to survive this?
The question has been rotating through my skull on a loop since the orientation packet arrived two days ago with a week-early move-in date and a campus map so detailed it included the location of every water fountain, fire extinguisher, and gender-neutral bathroom in a twelve-building complex. The packet specified that dorm arrangements at Valenridge are "integrated by design," which is institutional language foryour roommate could be an Alpha, an Omega, a Beta, or some chaotic combination thereof, and the university considers this a feature rather than a bug.
Just my fucking luck, right?
I would not be surprised in the slightest to discover that the Valenridge housing algorithm, in its infinite institutional wisdom, has assigned me to a suite occupied by three territorial Alpha males who shed pheromones like Labradors shed fur and consider personal space a concept that applies exclusively to other people. Three strangers who will fill the shared bathroom with body spray and the common area with testosterone and the refrigerator with protein shakes that smell like chalk dissolved in desperation.
Breathe, Sage. One crisis at a time. Find the dorm. Set down the bags. Assess the threat level. Adapt.
A member of the residence staff, a Beta woman with a clipboard and a lanyard holding more keycards than seemed structurally advisable, escorted me through the residential wing with the brisk efficiency of someone who has guided approximately four hundred nervous students to their rooms this week and has refined the process to a three-minute operation involving minimal small talk and precisely one reassuring smile.
The dorm building is newer than the academic structures. Clean lines, warm wood paneling, large windows that flood the hallways with natural light. Each suite has its own entrance, a heavy oak door with a brass number plate and an electronic keypad that the staff member demonstrated with the patient cadence of a flight attendant explaining seatbelt mechanisms.
