Mae's skates are wrong.
The wobble is subtle. A microsecond hesitation in her edge transitions, a fraction of over-correction in her hip alignment that someone without fifteen years of skating analysis would dismiss as nerves. But I grew up watching my father dissect technique from behind plexiglass, and I can read the difference between anxiety and equipment failure the way a mechanic can hear the difference between a nervous engine and a broken one.
She is wearing her spares.
The dull-bladed, loose-fitting emergency pair that she packed as a decoy while her competition skates sit twenty feet away in a locker, sharp and responsive and ready to transform her from wobbly to lethal the moment she decides the audience has been sufficiently deceived.
Mae Rose is sandbagging.
The realization cracks across my brain like a slap shot off the crossbar, and the grin that threatens my composure is so ferocious I have to physically bite the inside of my cheek to prevent it from erupting across my face.
She is deliberately wearing inferior skates to make them think she cannot perform. Making the entire arena believe that the woman who can read their formations like blueprints is barely capable of standing upright. Building the narrative of incompetence so that when she switches to her real equipment, the transformation will be so dramatic it rewrites every assumption in the building.
That evil, brilliant, magnificent bitch.
The sideline laughter reaches me before the words do. Vanessa and her figure skating entourage, their voices carrying across the ice with the targeted cruelty of people who have mistaken meanness for personality.
"Look at her ankles! She can barely stay upright!"
"And she's supposed to teach the hockey team? Please."
My jaw tightens. The protective fury that has been my default response to attacks on Mae since kindergarten surges through my chest with the familiar heat of an instinct that predates rational thought. I want to skate over to those girls and demonstrate exactly how stable my ankles are by using them to execute a crosscheck that sends their commentary into the boards alongside their dental work.
Not yet. Not here. Mae has a plan, and my job is to support it, not derail it with justified violence.
I glide up beside Mae during the drill, matching her pace, keeping my voice low enough that the rookies and the sideline audience cannot intercept the conversation.
"Why are you wearing those skates?" I nod toward her feet. "You have your competition pair in your locker. I saw you pack them this morning."
"Wanted to test the waters first. See how the ice felt before bringing out the real ones."
I laugh. Short, incredulous, carrying the specific delight of a woman who has just confirmed that her best friend is running a psychological operation on an entire hockey program.
"You're such an evil bitch. Making them think you can't skate while your actual blades are sitting twenty feet away."
Mae smirks. The expression is compact, private, shared only between us, and it carries the specific confidence of a woman who has been underestimated her entire life and has learned to convert that underestimation into tactical advantage.
"Let me switch out. I'll be back."
She skates toward the bench with deliberate unhurriedness, each stride communicating the casual departure of a player who is leaving to collect herself rather than weaponize.
I watch her go. Watch Cal approach the bench and hand over his jersey after a stumbling innuendo exchange that ends with Mae whispering "Can I borrow your stick, Alpha?" in a voicethat short-circuits the man's entire operating system. Watch the bench erupt in laughter as Cal's dignity exits the arena through the emergency doors. Watch Mae return to center ice wearing Cal's oversized jersey and her competition skates and a grin that could start wars and end them simultaneously.
She is ready.
And this arena has no idea what is about to happen.
Mae arrives at our position, her new skates cutting the ice with the responsive precision that her spares could not provide. The jersey drowns her frame. The helmet wobbles slightly with each stride. She looks like a child playing dress-up in professional equipment.
She looks like a secret weapon disguised as a joke.
"New wardrobe additions?" I raise an eyebrow.
"He doesn't want me to get sick."
"Righttttttt," I drawl, stretching the syllable past the boundary of reasonable pronunciation because the idea of Calvin Knox stripping off his jersey for purely medical reasons requires a suspension of disbelief I am not willing to perform.
"Bullshit," Archie mutters beside me, and the grin tugging at his mouth is the real one, the one that lives behind the mask and surfaces only when his guard drops for a fraction of a second.
