He is going to regret every syllable of that sentence.
Coach raises the puck.
Mae takes a breath. I watch her shoulders drop into the specific alignment that competitive athletes adopt in the fraction of a second before exertion. Her spine straightens. Her weight shifts to the balls of her feet. The borrowed helmet settles on her head with the gravitas of a crown worn by someone who earned it through suffering rather than inheritance.
The cold air fills the arena. The fluorescent lights buzz. And somewhere deep in my own chest, beneath the tomboy armor and the scarred knuckles and the years of rejection that have calcified around my ambition like scar tissue around a wound, the same spark that ignited in Mae catches in me.
We are Omegas on Alpha ice.
And we are about to remind every person in this building what happens when you underestimate the ones the world told to sit down.
Coach drops the puck.
And the switch flips.
For all of us.
CHAPTER 16
Full Throttle
~SAGE~
Coach Mercer drops the puck.
And Mae becomes a weapon.
The transformation is instant. No gradual warmup. No tentative first strides. The woman who spent the last five minutes giggling about manga and dodging matchmaking ambushes drops into a forward crouch I have only witnessed from professional centers on broadcast footage and wins the face-off so cleanly that the rookie across from her is still processing the puck's disappearance when Mae is already three strides deep into the offensive zone.
Three strides of pure, blistering separation.
The arena's atmosphere ruptures. I can feel it in my skin, in the sudden vacuum of noise that replaces the casual murmuring along the boards. Every spectator who was checking their phone or debating whether the Omega demonstration would be worth watching has just looked up and discovered that the answer is a violent, emphatic yes.
There she is.
The Mae I remember.
The girl who stepped onto a figure skating surface at seven years old and became a different creature entirely. The one whose blade work left patterns the Zamboni operator did not want to erase. The one whose body on ice operated with a precision and fury that her body off ice never permitted.
She does not skate the way hockey players skate. The brute-force chopping that generates speed through raw power is absent from her mechanics. Mae glides. She flows across the surface with a velocity that borrows its architecture from figure skating and applies it to hockey in a hybrid form that should not work and does, devastatingly, because no defensive formation in this arena was built to contain an attacker who moves like water over glass.
I am behind her before my conscious mind authorizes the pursuit, my legs engaging the competitive instinct that overrides everything else when the puck is in play. We move in tandem, a synchronization that has no rehearsal behind it and requires none because Mae and I share a language that the ice taught us independently and we are now speaking simultaneously for the first time.
She reads my position without looking. Sends the puck to the exact point on my stick where my forehand can receive it in stride, the pass arriving with the timing of a thought rather than a calculation. I catch it, pivot, and drive toward the gap in the rookie defense that has opened because two defensemen committed to Mae's trajectory and left the neutral zone unguarded.
I hit the puck with everything I have.
Not finesse. Not the surgical precision Mae employs. Raw, explosive, tomboy-hockey power that starts in my planted foot and travels through my hips and core and shoulders andterminates in a wrist shot that screams across the ice toward Archie's position.
He catches the pass cleanly. Transitions from stillness to motion with a fluidity that confirms every suspicion I have harbored about the athlete concealed beneath his academic camouflage. His slim frame is deceptive at speed, carrying him through the neutral zone with strides that are textbook-perfect and fast enough to leave his marker grasping at empty air.
Mae has already looped behind the net.
I did not see her go. One moment she was in my peripheral vision on the far wing, the next she has vanished from the offensive zone entirely, her figure skating footwork carrying her through a route that no hockey player would select because no hockey player possesses the edge control to execute a full-speed loop around the back of a goal without losing momentum.
Archie feeds the puck to the space behind the crease.
Empty space. Open ice. A pass aimed at nothing and no one, launched into a vacuum with the calm certainty of a center who has calculated the geometry three moves ahead and knows exactly who will fill the gap before anyone else in the building has processed that the gap exists.
