“No, it’s perfect.” My voice was calm. Conversational. Carrying the composed, almost pleasant register that I employed when I was about to say a thing that would be significantly less pleasant than my tone suggested. “Since you’re all so confident in your evaluation of this team’s leadership, you can go contact Canada’s program and hop on over there. Right now. Today. Before you waste another minute of your time on a roster you clearly don’t believe in and another minute ofourtime on teammates who are actively sabotaging our qualifying performance.”
I looked at Volkov specifically.
“And you can go work on all those technical flaws you clearly have,” I continued, and the diagnostic precision of the sentence was intentional—the goaltender evaluating the goaltender, the professional assessment delivered with the authority of a man who occupied the same position and knew exactly what competent crease work looked like and what the man in front of him had been producing instead, “before you try to come for someone because they take medication that was reviewed and approved by the same medical staff that clearedyouto play. Imagine being sofucking bitter about your own mediocrity that you’d weaponize someone’s health against them.”
I turned away.
The dismissal was physical—my back presented to Volkov with the deliberate, complete, you-no-longer-warrant-my-attention rotation that I’d learned from Octavia and that I deployed now with the same devastating, walk-away-and-don’t-look-back energy she’d used when passing Angelo Reyes after the audition.
I was skating toward the bench.
“Well, at least you’re here to defend him since you two used to fuck or whatever.”
Volkov’s voice reached me from behind.
Low. Aimed. The specific, calculated, last-resort ammunition of a man who had been cornered and stripped of every legitimate defense and was now reaching for the weapon that required no evidence and produced maximum damage: rumor, implication, and the exploitation of an intimacy that had been private and that was being dragged into the public arena not because it was relevant but because it wasvulnerable.
The arena went quiet.
Twenty-five bodies on the ice. Coach Mercer. The arena staff in the peripheral zones. The scouts in the upper gallery whose pens had stopped moving. Every person in the building processing the sentence, assigning its meaning, calculating its implications with the rapid, social-dynamics math that competitive environments demanded.
I was going to keep skating.
The plan was formed. The response calculated. Walk away. Don’t give the provocation oxygen. Let the implication hang in the air and die of exposure, because engaging with itwould elevate it from rumor to conversation and from conversation to narrative, and the narrative was a thing that, once established, could not be un-established regardless of its accuracy.
But Kael didn’t walk away.
“ForFUCK’Ssakes.”
The eruption was volcanic. Total. The full, unrestricted, maximum-volume, every-composure-mechanism-simultaneously-failing detonation of a man who had been containing a truth for years and who had just been pushed past the threshold where containment was physiologically possible.
“YEAH!” He was shouting. Not the controlled, captain’s-voice-projecting kind of shouting but the raw, stripped, designation-level roar of a man whose throat had stopped consulting his strategy and was now connected directly to the vault where he kept the things he’d been suffocating. “Me and Luka fucked!”
The words detonated across the ice.
I stopped skating.
Not by choice. By the involuntary, full-system arrest that my body produced when an input arrived that exceeded every prediction I’d generated for this interaction’s possible outcomes. My blades ceased their forward motion. My hands dropped to my sides. My head turned—slowly, the rotation operating at half-speed because the processing demand of what I’d just heard required resources that were normally allocated to motor function.
Kael was standing at center ice. Helmet ripped off. Platinum-blonde hair dark with sweat, the silver-white streaks catching the arena’s overhead lights. His pale gray eyes were incandescent—not cold, not controlled, not the permafrost-over-depth that characterized his standard expression.Burning. Carrying the specific, liberated,I-have-stopped-caring-what-this-costsfury of a man who had been maintaining a containment protocol for years and had just decided, in front of God and twenty-five hockey players and the IOC selection scouts in the upper gallery, that the containment was causing more damage than the release.
“I’m fucking gay!” he bellowed, and the wordgayechoed off the boards and the plexiglass and the rafters with a resonance that the arena’s acoustics amplified into a declaration that reached every corner of the building. “Bi! Whatever the fuck you want to call it! And so. Fucking.What?”
He rounded on the cluster of five who had separated. The eighteen who had stayed. Coach Mercer. The scouts. The arena itself.
“What does that do for us on the ice,huh?” His voice was raw. Stripped. The composure burned away, and what was left was the man—not the captain, not the strategist, not the frozen-pine exterior that kept the world at arm’s length. Theman. “What does who I fuck change about my ability to read a play? To set a formation? To put your ass in a position to score because I’ve spent fourteen hours studying the opposing team’s defensive patterns and designing plays that exploit their weaknesses? Does my sexuality affect my slap shot? Does it compromise my face-off percentage? Does it make the fucking puck slower when I pass it?”
Silence.
Absolute, crystalline,no-one-is-breathingsilence.
“I’m so fucking tired of this.” The volume dropped. The sentence delivered at half the decibels and twice the intensity of the shouting, the way a blade cut deeper when it moved slowly. “All of you are more interested in my pack’s businessthan I am. You spend more time discussing who I sleep with than studying your own goddamn game tape. You have a concern about it? Go to the dean of Olympia Academy. File a formal complaint. See what happens when you explain to the institution that recruited me, that gave me this roster, that positioned this team as its flagship Winter Games contender, that you’re more worried about me fucking an Alpha in my own pack and an Omega who probably doesn’t give ashitabout your opinions than you are aboutwinning.”
He huffed. The exhale carrying the residual, post-detonation vibration of a man who had emptied a vault he’d been filling for years and was standing in the aftermath surveying the debris.
“My life seems to be so fucking important to all of you. More important than the months and years we’ve sacrificed for this. More important than the training, the conditioning, the early mornings and the late nights and the injuries we’ve played through. And you’re going to sabotageall of itbecause I like pussyandcock?”
He turned. Skated toward the gate.
