“You’re not even trying to stop the pucks, mate.”
The assessment was delivered with the blunt, ungarnished directness that characterized everything Maddox said—no diplomatic packaging, no qualifying language, just the observation laid on the ice like evidence at a trial. And it was accurate. I’d been watching from the bench with the specific, technical, can’t-turn-it-off analysis that one goaltender brought to another’s performance, and what I’d seen was not a man having an off night. It was a manperformingan off night. The lateral slides arriving a beat late by choice rather than limitation. The glove drops timed to miss rather than catch. The positional adjustments that placed him six inches too far from the post on every shot—the kind of systematic, consistent misalignment that incompetence couldn’t produce because incompetence was random, and this waspatterned.
Renzo’s dark eyes narrowed. The green-haired forward releasing one hand from Kael’s chest to gesture toward the captain with the specific,explain-furthermotion of a man whose strategic mind was collecting data and required additional input before committing to a conclusion.
“Why do you think we’re being set up?”
Kael managed to shake free of both of them.
The release was explosive—the compressed, muscular detonation of a six-foot-four captain whose patience had exceeded its engineering tolerances and whose body had decided that further restraint was no longer an operational priority. Maddox stumbled back two steps. Renzo absorbed the shove with a backward glide that turned the displacement into a skating motion. And Kael—freed, vibrating, his frosted-pine scent broadcasting at a volume that could have been detected from the parking lot—reached into the interior pocket of his practice jersey and produced an object that he threw onto the ice between them with the sharp, deliberate force of a man slamming evidence on a courtroom table.
A phone.
The device skidded across the frozen surface, spinning, the screen lit and displaying a conversation thread that was visible from five feet away to anyone with functional vision and a willingness to read.
Volkov’s expression transitioned. The indignation mask dissolving, replaced by the specific, cornered,the-evidence-has-been-foundrigidity of a man whose contingency plans had not included the possibility of his locker being searched by a captain whose trust issues had been elevated to clinical levels by recent experience.
“You went through my locker.”
The accusation was deflective—an attempt to redirect the conversation’s moral compass from the content of the phone to the method of its discovery, a tactical maneuver that I recognized from years of watching players caught in violations try to litigate the investigation rather than the infraction.
“Yeah, I went through your fucking locker,” Kael said, andhis voice had dropped from the volcanic roar of his initial eruption to a register that was somehow more dangerous—low, controlled, the sub-bass frequency of a man who had moved past the explosion and into the cold, strategic, I-have-the-evidence-and-I’m-going-to-use-it phase that made him lethal in press conferences and terrifying in confrontations. “Where there’s a full text exchange in a group chat guaranteeing you a spot on the Canadian national team for the Winter Games.”
I was skating toward them before I’d consciously decided to move.
The goaltender’s instinct—not the reflexive, puck-tracking, save-making instinct but the deeper one, the one that read developing plays and identified the point on the ice where a presence was needed before the need became critical. My blades carried me across the surface with the measured, purposeful stride of a man whose body understood that the current formation required an additional element and whose position was at the center of it.
Coach Mercer’s face had undergone a transformation. The baseline frustration of a coach managing a mid-game incident giving way to the harder, colder,this-is-a-program-integrity-issueexpression of a man whose professional responsibilities had just escalated from game management to misconduct investigation. He looked at Volkov with the level, unyielding assessment of someone who had been coaching long enough to recognize guilt before it was confirmed.
“Is that true?”
Volkov huffed. The sound was compressed, evasive—the respiratory output of a man whose options were narrowingand whose defenses were being constructed in real time from materials of diminishing quality.
“They have no proof that—the texts could be anything. And you can’t just jump teams like that. There are transfer protocols, registration windows?—”
“Yes, you can.”
A voice from the cluster of teammates who had gathered at a distance that suggested they wanted to be involved enough to hear but removed enough to deny involvement if the conversation produced consequences. Jensen—a defenseman, third-year, whose knowledge of competition regulations was the product of a pre-law undergraduate degree and a constitutional inability to resist correcting procedural inaccuracies.
“As long as the host country’s hockey federation hasn’t finalized their roster submission—which doesn’t happen until thirty days before the Games—athletes are free to accept invitations from other national programs. It happened in the last Winter Games. Two forwards on the Swedish team were originally rostered with Finland.” Jensen delivered this with the flat, citational authority of a man reciting a regulation he’d memorized and who considered the accuracy of legal frameworks a higher priority than the social dynamics of the situation his accuracy was about to detonate. “The IOC doesn’t restrict cross-national transfers during the qualification period. Only after final roster lock.”
The information landed on the assembled group like a puck dropped at center ice—every player tracking its implications, calculating the angles, reading the play that was developing from the evidence.
Kael was going to jump him.
I could see it building in the architecture of his body—theweight shifting forward onto the balls of his feet, the shoulders squaring, the hands dropping from their crossed position to his sides where they could generate the forward momentum necessary to close the distance between himself and Volkov’s face. The frosted-pine scent had escalated beyond territorial into something rawer, more primal, the pheromone profile of an Alpha whose pack had been threatened and whose designation-level response was bypassing the strategic mind and routing directly to the combat circuitry.
I slid between them.
The positioning was instinctive—the goaltender’s crease instinct translated to a human context, my body reading the trajectory of the incoming collision and placing itself at the interception point with the practiced, automatic precision of a man who had spent fifteen years putting himself between dangerous objects and the things behind him. My chest met Kael’s forward momentum. My hands found his shoulders. The impact was considerable—two hundred and twenty pounds of enraged captain meeting two hundred and ten pounds of planted goaltender—and the force transferred through my arms into my core and through my blades into the ice, which held.
He growled in my face.
Full. Guttural. The designation-level, vibrating-in-the-chest-cavity, Alpha-to-Alpha territorial warning that I’d heard from him exactly twice before—once in the hallway at Olympia when he’d seen my arm around Octavia’s waist, and once through a wall in Stockholm when I’d done a thing with my mouth that had made him lose control of the sound his throat was producing. The growl was different this time. Hotter. Carrying less jealousy and moreget-out-of-my-way-I-am-going-to-dismantle-this-man, and the blast of his frosted-pine scent at point-blank range was intense enough to trigger a reflexive flinch in my shoulders that I suppressed through sheer professional discipline.
I rolled my eyes.
Because eye-rolling in the face of a six-foot-four Alpha’s territorial growl was my primary coping mechanism for Kael Sørensen’s intensity, and abandoning it now would have been a betrayal of every interaction we’d ever had.
