“So that was you two in the bathroom last night.”
The deduction was immediate. The goaltender’s mind connecting dots with the rapid, instinctive, play-reading efficiency that made him dangerous between the pipes and infuriating in conversation—assembling the fragments (bathroom, Octavia, Olive, weaning off blockers) into a narrative that required no additional confirmation because the pieces fit with the specific, audibleclickof a puzzle completing itself.
I blushed.
Again.
The heat climbing my neck and invading my cheeks with the persistent, unwelcome,why-does-this-keep-happeningefficiency of a physiological response that the rut blockers had apparently been suppressing along with everything else and that the dose reduction was now permitting to operate at levels I hadn’t experienced since my early twenties. The blush on a man whose skin was designed by Scandinavian genetics to display every blood-flow event inhigh definition was, as always, approximately as subtle as stadium lighting.
“We didn’t fuck.” The denial was rapid. Defensive. The verbal reflexes of a man whose privacy was the last fortification still standing and who was deploying every available resource to prevent its breach. “She fell in the ice rink. Went through a weak patch and ended up in the water—the annual subscription my rink has to humbling that woman, which happened every year she came over and which I’d honestly missed.” I was talking too fast. Oversharing. The post-panic vulnerability loosening the verbal restraints I normally maintained. “I took her to my bathroom so I wouldn’t wake the rest of you, since you were all sleeping like you’d entered fucking hibernation after all that sex sh?—”
Luka’s hand found my jaw.
Both hands, actually. One on each side of my face, fingers pressing against the bone with the firm, deliberate,hold-still-I-need-to-look-at-youpressure that a goaltender applied to a mask he was adjusting—practical, focused, carrying zero tolerance for the restless, deflection-driven head movements I’d been producing. My face stilled in his grip. My rambling collapsed into silence. His green eyes held mine from six inches with the concentrated, unblinking,I-am-going-to-ask-you-one-question-and-you-are-going-to-answer-itintensity that characterized every important conversation we’d ever had.
“You’re actually going to stop those blockers,” he said, and the sentence was framed as a statement but delivered as a question—the inflection rising at the end, the green eyes searching mine for the confirmation that the words alone hadn’t provided. “And try to have Octavia as an Omega?”
I stared at him.
For a long time. The kind of sustained, unbroken,neither-of-us-is-blinking eye contact that we’d produced in every proximity event since the day he’d arrived at Olympia Academy—the loaded, dense, frequency-saturated exchange that the rest of the team had been commenting on with increasing volume and decreasing subtlety and that I’d been dismissing as rivalry when it was actually the thing I’d been too afraid to name for three years.
I whispered.
“The bastard never gave her my letters.”
Luka blinked.
The processing time was brief—three seconds, maybe four. His analytical mind receiving the sentence, cross-referencing it against the archive of available context (the letters, the hospital, the lack of communication during Octavia’s recovery), and arriving at the conclusion with the rapid, pattern-matching efficiency that made him an elite goaltender and a devastating interpreter of human behavior.
The click was audible.
I watched it happen behind his eyes—the moment the information resolved from fragment to picture, the expression transitioning from processing tocomprehensionto the specific, hot, Alpha-protective fury that knowledge of deliberate betrayal produced in a man whose protective circuitry was already running at elevated capacity.
“Does she know?”
I nodded. Slowly.
His teeth clenched. The jaw tightening into the rigid, structural,I-am-restraining-a-violent-impulseconfiguration that I’d seen him produce approximately twenty minutes ago before his fist had overridden his jaw’s containment protocol and rearranged a goaltender’s nasal architecture. His hands were still on my face. The grip intensifying by a degree as theimplications of the disclosure assembled themselves in his awareness with the gathering, compounding,this-is-bigger-than-I-thoughtmomentum of a realization that was expanding its scope in real time.
He grit his teeth. Released my face. The hands dropping to his sides where they clenched into fists—the swollen, split-knuckled right and the undamaged left—with the unified, ready-to-deploy energy of a man who had identified a new target and was calculating the logistics of reaching it.
Then he stopped.
The fists unclenched. The jaw loosened by a fraction. The green eyes—which had been cycling through fury, protectiveness, and the specific,I-am-going-to-find-this-man-and-end-himfocus of a goaltender tracking a shooter—developed a new expression. Slower. More analytical. The look of a man whose pattern-recognition system had just detected a connection that the emotional response had been obscuring.
“That motherfucker.”
The words were quiet. Carrying not the explosive, volume-driven fury of the ice-surface confrontation but the cold, calculated,I-have-just-identified-the-playintensity that made him lethal in the crease—the recognition that arrived when you saw the shot developing before the shooter released it and your body began moving toward the save point before the puck left the stick.
I arched an eyebrow. “What?”
He looked at me. His green eyes locked on my gray with the specific,I-need-you-to-follow-this-thought-with-mefocus of a man who was about to present a hypothesis and who required his audience’s full cognitive participation.
“Who do you think,” he said, and his voice had dropped to the sub-conversational register that we used when theinformation was classified and the walls were potentially compromised, “is the captain of the Canadian team?”
I frowned.
The question sat in my awareness for approximately two seconds. My strategic mind—the sector that analyzed formations and predicted opponent behavior and constructed game plans from incomplete intelligence—received the query and began processing it against the available data: a Canadian team actively recruiting defectors from our roster, text exchanges guaranteeing roster positions, the systematic, coordinated,someone-is-orchestrating-thisquality of the sabotage we’d just experienced.
