The two of them take their positions at the far end of the rink. Mae in Cal's jersey and competition skates. Rafe in full practice gear and the confidence of a man who has never lost a sprint on this surface.
The arena holds its breath.
Run him into the ground, MaeBell.
CHAPTER 17
Collision Course
~SAGE~
Mae and Rafe take their positions at the far boards, and the arena compresses into a single held breath.
I lean against the plexiglass beside Archie, my gloved fingers gripping the top of the boards with enough force to leave imprints in the padding. The adrenaline from the scrimmage has not fully metabolized, leaving a low-grade electrical current running beneath my skin that converts every sensory input into high definition. The fluorescent lights are brighter. The cold is sharper. The collective body heat of thirty-plus spectators lining the boards generates a fog of competing pheromones that my Omega hindbrain catalogues and dismisses in rapid succession because none of them matter right now.
Only the two figures at the far end of the rink matter.
Mae stands in Cal's oversized jersey, the KNOX stitched across her shoulders like borrowed armor, her competition skates planted wide on the freshly scraped surface. Her posture is relaxed. Deliberately, performatively relaxed, the studied casualness of a woman who understands that visible tensioncommunicates vulnerability and has decided to deny Rafe that particular intelligence.
Rafe is beside her in full practice gear, his broad frame coiled into a sprinter's stance, his gray eyes locked on the far boards with the tunnel-vision intensity of an Alpha who has staked his reputation on the next twenty seconds of his life. His scent, even from this distance, carries an edge of burnt cedar that tells me his pride is running hotter than his strategy.
He challenged her because she scored on his team. Because an Omega demonstrated competence in his domain and his ego could not absorb the information without converting it into a contest he is certain he will win.
And he has no idea what is about to happen to him.
Coach Mercer positions himself at center ice, his hand raised.
"On my signal! First one to touch the opposite boards wins. Clean race. No contact. No checking. Just speed."
I can see them talking. Mae and Rafe, exchanging words too quiet for the gallery to intercept, their mouths moving in the tight, clipped rhythm of competitors trading provocations before the whistle. I cannot hear the content, but I can read the body language. Rafe is projecting condescension through every line of his posture. Mae is absorbing it with the practiced patience of a woman who has been condescended to by men her entire life and has long since learned that the most devastating response is not rage but results.
"SET!"
Coach's hand climbs higher. The arena contracts. I can feel Archie's scent shift beside me, the cedarwood sharpening with anticipation, his body angling forward on the boards with the involuntary lean of a man whose analytical brain is already running trajectory calculations.
"GO!"
They explode off the line simultaneously.
Rafe's start is brutal. Powerful. The first three strides of an Alpha built for straight-line velocity, his blades gouging the ice with deep, aggressive strokes that launch his mass forward with the mechanical efficiency of a freight train leaving a station. He is fast. The kind of fast that earns captain's armbands and scholarship offers and the assumption that nobody on campus can match him in a straight sprint.
Mae matches him.
Stride for stride, she holds his pace through the first half of the rink, her blades cutting the surface with shorter, sharper strokes that sacrifice brute force for precision. Her body stays low, her center of gravity dropped into the skating posture that her father spent fifteen years engineering, each push building on the last with the compound efficiency of a machine designed to convert form into velocity.
She is holding back.
I know this because I have seen Mae Rose skate at full speed exactly once, when we were twelve, at a regional competition where the girl who was supposed to win tripped on a warm-up and Mae, the backup, stepped onto the ice and produced a performance that made three judges stand up from their chairs.
This is not that speed. This is the pace she uses when she wants her opponent to believe they are in a contest. When she wants them to commit their maximum effort to a race they think is competitive, exhausting their reserves in the first half so that the second half becomes a demonstration rather than a competition.
MaeBell is sandbagging. Again.
They cross the halfway line neck and neck. The crowd is screaming, voices colliding in the arena's acoustics, individual shouts piercing the wall of noise.
"Come on, Mae!"
"Let's go, Captain!"
