I refuse.
I refuse to let the doubt win. Refuse to let the rejections rewrite the truth that I have proven on the ice a thousand times over. Refuse to let my mother's cold pragmatism and the scouts' cowardice and the league's institutional fear of change convince me that I am chasing something impossible.
Because it is not impossible.
It is improbable. Unlikely. Statistically challenging.
But not impossible.
The Escalade turns onto the long, tree-lined drive that leads to the Holloway estate, and the familiar weight of homecoming settles over me. Not the warm, safe kind that other people associate with the word. The suffocating kind. The kind that reminds you that even your own house is not a space where you are allowed to be fully, unapologetically yourself.
I open my eyes.
Watch the iron gates swing open as Jeffrey enters the code.
Witness the manicured hedges blur past, each one trimmed to identical perfection, not a single leaf out of place. Like the house. Like the family. Like the image my mother has spent her entire life constructing and my entire life trying to force me into.
All I need is one opportunity.
One team. One coach. One scout is willing to look past the designation printed on my identification and see the player standing on the ice.
One chance to prove that skill matters more than biology. That heart weighs more than hormones. That an Omega girl with scarred knuckles and a stick in her hand and fifteen years of ice in her veins can do what no one like her has ever done before.
The car rolls to a stop in front of the estate's main entrance.
Jeffrey opens my door, his brown eyes offering the quiet solidarity that has sustained me through more bad days than I can count.
"Good day on the ice, Miss Holloway?"
I look up at him.
At the house looming behind him. At the life that has been chosen for me and the one I keep choosing for myself, knowing they will never coexist.
"The best one yet, Jeffrey."
He nods, because he always does. Because Jeffrey understands thatbestdoes not meangood enough for them.It meansgood enough for me.
And that has to be enough.
For now.
I grab my gear bag from the trunk.
Sling it over my shoulder.
Walk toward the front door of a house that has never felt like home.
And somewhere deep inside the furnace of my chest, beneath the fatigue, fury, and the fear that maybe my mother is right and maybe the world will never change and maybe I really am tilting at windmills made of ice and institutional resistance, a single thought glows like an ember that refuses to die.
All I need is one lucky shot.
CHAPTER 1
The Letter
~SAGE~
My father's office smells like home in a way the rest of this house never has.
