I push the thought away with the physical effort of a woman shoving furniture against a door that keeps opening.
The athletics complex emerges from the predawn gray, its glass facade reflecting the first amber threads of sunrise along its eastern wall. The entrance is unlocked for early access, the lobby dark except for the glow of vending machines and the green pulse of the security panel by the door.
The rink is through a corridor that smells like rubber mats and industrial disinfectant, a combination that triggers a Pavlovian surge of anticipation in my chest because those scents have preceded every meaningful moment of my athletic life. Tryouts. Games. The thousands of solitary practice sessions where the only audience was the empty stands and the only sound was the whisper of my blades against fresh ice.
I push through the double doors.
And the peace hits me like a held breath finally released.
The arena is empty. Cavernous. The overhead lights are on their dawn setting, a dimmed, honey-gold glow that transforms the ice surface into a sheet of amber glass stretching from boards to boards. The air is cold and clean and carrying that specific rink fragrance: the metallic sweetness of frozen water mixed with the ghost of rubber pucks and the faint chemical trace of the Zamboni's last pass.
I smile.
Genuine. Unguarded. The expression arriving before my social filters can intercept it and apply the appropriate layer of cool detachment that Sage Holloway wears in public like a jersey number.
This is the only place on earth that feels like home without requiring me to be anyone other than who I am.
I lace my skates on the bench beside the players' entrance, my fingers working the patterns by touch rather than sight, each crossed lace and tucked loop executed with the automatic precision of muscle memory carved into my tendons across fifteen years of repetition. The compression tights end just above the boot line, the skate guards click free, and I step onto the ice.
The first stride is always the one that rewrites the world.
My blade bites the surface and the friction converts to velocity and velocity converts to flight and for one clean, perfect second, I am not an Omega fighting for ice time or a daughter disappointing her mother or a woman who kissed a stranger and cannot stop tasting cedar on her tongue. I am motion. I am speed and edge and the specific, crystalline freedom that exists only here, on this surface, in this body, doing the one thing it was designed to do.
I warm up with basic drills. Forward crossovers, tight turns around the face-off circles, backward skating along the blue linewith the lateral agility that my legs remember even when my schedule does not provide adequate opportunity to practice. My edges are sharp. My balance is centered. The rust of disuse flakes away in increments with each stride, revealing the machinery beneath, oiled and functional, ready.
The stick comes next. I grab one from my bag, tape already applied in the crisscross pattern my father taught me when I was eight, and begin puck-handling drills along the boards. Forehand, backhand, toe drag. The rubber disc obeys my blade with a responsiveness that makes my hands sing, the vibration of contact traveling up the shaft and into my wrists and filling my forearms with the specific, buzzing satisfaction of a tool being used for its intended purpose.
I escalate to shooting drills. Wrist shots from the slot, the puck leaving my blade with a snap that echoes through the empty arena like a whip crack. Slap shots from the point, my body coiling and releasing with the full-chain kinetic transfer that generates velocity: legs to hips to core to shoulders to arms to stick to puck. The net catches each shot with a satisfying bulge of mesh, the sound of rubber hitting twine reverberating through the silence.
Sweat begins accumulating along my hairline, dampening the navy strands that have escaped my elastic band. My breathing elevates. My heart rate climbs into the training zone. The world outside the boards dissolves into irrelevance, replaced by the pure, focused clarity that competitive athletes describe as flow and I describe as the only state of consciousness in which I do not hate myself.
I chase the puck along the far boards, my edges carving a pursuit angle that will intercept its path at the hash marks. My stick extends. The blade reaches for the rubber disc with the confidence of fifteen years of practice telling my hands exactly where to be and when.
The puck vanishes.
One instant it is there, gliding along the boards on a trajectory my brain has already calculated to three decimal places. The next instant it is gone, redirected by a stick blade that materialized in my peripheral vision with the silent precision of a predator intercepting prey mid-stride.
I gawk at the empty space where the puck was.
Then I look up.
Archie glides past me on the opposite edge, the stolen puck cradled on his forehand with the casual possessiveness of a man who has just pickpocketed someone in broad daylight and sees no reason to be discreet about it. He is wearing black compression tights and a fitted tank top that displays the lean architecture of his arms and shoulders in a way his previous outfits only suggested. His ginger hair is pushed back from his face, slightly damp at the temples, indicating he has been here long enough to build his own sweat.
And he did not make a single sound on the approach.
No blade scrape. No breathing shift. No pheromone announcement preceding his arrival the way Alpha scents typically broadcast their location to every Omega in a fifty-foot radius. He materialized on the ice beside me like a figure stepping out of fog, present only when he chose to be perceived.
"Your puck pursuit angle was two degrees too wide." His voice carries across the rink with the measured cadence I have been replaying in my memory for days. Clinical. Analytical. The verbal equivalent of a red pen marking corrections on a term paper. "You committed your outside edge before the puck reached the hash marks, which opened a passing lane on your inside hip. Any forward with decent hands would have stripped you at the exact point I just did."
"Where the hell did you come from?!" The question erupts with the indignation of a woman whose private practice sessionhas been invaded by an uninvited analytics department. "And how come I didn't hear you? Or smell you?"
He smirks.
The asymmetric curl at the corner of his mouth, dimple ghosting beneath the freckles, green eyes carrying that specific blend of amusement and intelligence that makes my cardiovascular system behave in ways my cardiologist would find concerning.
He skates toward me. Closing the distance with smooth, unhurried strides that eat the ice between us with an efficiency that tells me he is not showing off his speed but is not hiding it either. He stops when our faces are level, close enough that the wall of air between us becomes a membrane through which our scents negotiate a truce.
And his scent hits me.
