My voice—raw, loud, carrying the specific,I-am-not-donefury of a man whose protective instincts had been activated and whose body had not yet received the all-clear from the circuitry responsible for de-escalation:
“Now why don’t you go to the Canadian team withthatnosebleed and see if they wonder if you have fucking AIDS!”
The irony was poetic. Deliberate. The weapon the man had swung at Kael returned to its sender with compound interest, and the bloody nose that was currently decorating the ice beneath Volkov’s face was the physical, visible, permanently-documented receipt for the cost of invoking a dead woman’s name as a weapon against her son.
Six men held me. Maybe seven. The aggregate restraining force of a significant portion of the Ironcrest roster, deployed with the urgent, full-body commitment of teammates who recognized that the situation had escalated past verbal and were now managing the physical aftermath with the specific,don’t-let-him-go-or-someone’s-losing-teethgrip pressure that enforcement situations demanded.
Kael appeared.
Skating back from the gate with the rapid, decisive, captain-returning-to-manage-a-crisis stride that I’d seen him deploy a hundred times in game situations. His hand found my wrist. Wrapped around it with the firm, specific,you’re-coming-with-megrip of a man issuing a directive that was simultaneously a command and a rescue.
“Let’s go,” he said. Low. Close. For my ears alone.
His pale gray eyes met mine for a fraction of a second—and in that fraction, in the compressed, encrypted, Alpha-to-Alpha exchange that our dynamic had refined into alanguage that required no words, I received a transmission that was equal parts gratitude, exasperation, and the specific, devastating,you-just-defended-me-and-I-don’t-know-how-to-process-thatvulnerability that Kael Sørensen permitted approximately once per geological era.
I let him pull me.
Away from Volkov. Away from the blood. Away from the six men whose restraining grip loosened as the captain’s authority assumed jurisdiction over the goaltender’s fury. My hand throbbed—the knuckles swelling, the skin splitting across the second and third metacarpals where bone had met bone, the specific, delayed-onset pain of a punch thrown without padding arriving in waves that my adrenaline was managing but wouldn’t manage indefinitely.
We skated off the ice together. Side by side. The captain and the goaltender.
The man who had just publicly declared his sexuality to an arena full of people and the man who had just broken a face for invoking his dead mother’s name in the same sentence.
The gate closed behind us.
The corridor was dim. Cold. Carrying the institutional scent of concrete and rubber and the distant, muffled sound of Coach Mercer’s voice addressing the remaining roster in the tones of a man who was going to need approximately four hours and several strong drinks to process the incident report he was about to file.
Kael released my wrist.
We stood in the corridor. Breathing hard. Two Alphas in full hockey gear whose scents were colliding in the narrow space between them with the same devastating, harmonic, completing chemistry they’d produced in every previousproximity event, and whose shared silence carried more data than any conversation they’d managed in the years since Stockholm.
He didn’t say thank you.
Didn’t need to. The look he gave me—brief, raw, stripped of the composure and the captain’s mask and every layer of the performance—was the receipt. Received. Filed. Stored in the same archive where I kept Stockholm and the hallway at Olympia and the specific, complicated, refuses-to-resolve feeling that this man produced in my chest every time we occupied the same room.
I looked down at my hand.
The knuckles were split. Swelling. The red already blooming beneath the skin in patterns that would be visible for days and that the team physician was going to have opinions about.
All I know is I’m not only going to find out who the fuck is on the Canadian team that was recruiting our goaltender behind our backs—I’m going to make their lives a living hell outside these Olympics.
CHAPTER 28
Deal
~KAEL~
“Two men walked into a locker room with a war outside.They walked out with a plan.”
Ipulled Luka into the changing room and let the door slam behind us with the metallic, reverberating finality of a vault sealing shut.
The room was empty. The institutional, fluorescent-lit, bench-and-locker expanse that the Ironcrest roster occupied during every game and practice session—the space where jerseys were pulled on and tape was wound around sticks and the pre-game rituals that competitive athletes developed like superstitions were performed with the devoted, unchanging precision of men who believed the routine was load-bearing and that deviation invited disaster. The air smelled of equipment bags and deodorant and the residual, collective pheromone output of twenty-odd Alphas who had been occupying this space for the first half of a qualifying match, the scent signatures layered over each other in anolfactory palimpsest that my nose cataloged and dismissed in the time it took to exhale.
Twenty minutes. That was the intermission window. Twenty minutes before the second half demanded our return to the ice, and in that twenty minutes I needed to accomplish approximately four objectives that would have been ambitious for a week: calm the goaltender whose knuckles were splitting, process the public detonation I’d just conducted on my own privacy, develop a tactical response to the loss of five roster members including our starting goaltender, and prevent my cardiovascular system from completing the shutdown sequence it had been initiating since my mother’s name had been weaponized against me by a man who was currently bleeding on the ice I was supposed to be playing on.
“Calm the fuck down,” I said.
The instruction was directed at Luka, but the irony of issuing it while my own pulse was hammering at a rate that the team physician would have flagged as a medical event was not lost on me. I was standing with my back to the door, my hands braced against the metal surface behind me, my chest expanding and contracting with the rapid, shallow, too-fast respiratory pattern that I recognized from years of experience as the overture to a physiological event I had not experienced in a long time and was extremely motivated to prevent.
