I took him in from head to toe, and every inch was a problem.
The platinum-blonde hair had been maintained with military precision. Cropped close at the sides, longer on top, those distinctive silver-white streaks spiking through the crown like frost lines on a frozen lake. The jaw was exactly as severe as I remembered—angular, uncompromising, the kind of bone structure that suggested his skull had been assembled by an architect who viewed curves as a weakness.His skin carried the pale, blue-undertoned complexion of his Russian lineage, contrasted by the sharp, dark slashes of his eyebrows and the faint, perpetual shadow of stubble that lined his jaw like an underline.
And the eyes.
Pale gray. Arctic. The color of overcast skies above frozen tundra, carrying a stillness that was less calm thancontrolled—the carefully maintained composure of a man who experienced emotions at full volume but had mastered the art of keeping the volume knob under his own hand. Those eyes could freeze a room. Could halt a conversation mid-syllable. Could strip the confidence from an opposing forward at face-off with nothing more than a three-second stare that communicated, with crystalline precision,I have already calculated how this ends, and it ends with me winning.
The Ironcrest crest sat stitched on his practice jersey in silver and navy. Captain’s designation. Because ofcoursehe was still the captain. Kael Sørensen would make himself the lead of any roster he was placed on, not through campaigning or politicking or the social maneuvering that lesser Alphas employed, but through the sheer, gravitational force of being undeniably, inarguably the most strategically lethal player on the ice. Ruthless. Unpredictable. The kind of captain who didn’t inspire loyalty through speeches but through the simple, terrifying reality that he would outwork, outthink, and outlast every person in the building, and if you chose to stand beside him, you’d better be prepared to match the pace or be left behind.
He looks different. More settled. More solid. Like five years have compressed him rather than expanded him—distilled whatever was loose and unfinished into something denser and more certain.
The bastard aged well. Unforgivable.
His eyes lingered on my face.
Not a glance. Not a scan. Alinger. Ten full seconds of unbroken, unblinking, gray-eyed contact that I felt in the lining of my stomach like a hand pressing against wet clay. His expression was unreadable in the way that tectonic plates were unreadable from the surface—everything happening beneath, the pressure building along fault lines you couldn’t see until the ground cracked. His jaw was set. His mouth a flat, neutral line. But his eyes—those pale, calculating, miss-nothing eyes—wereconsuminginformation. Cataloging every detail of my face the way his hockey mind cataloged opposing formations: rapidly, systematically, with the specific intent of identifying what had changed since the last scouting report.
Then his gaze lifted. Moved past me. Locked onto a point above and behind my left shoulder.
And I watched jealousy enter Kael Sørensen’s expression the way cold enters a room when a window breaks.
It was brief. Controlled. Immediately suppressed beneath the permafrost of his composure the way a dangerous fire is smothered before it can spread. But Isawit. A flash of territorial fury in those arctic irises—a primal, designation-level response to the reality that another Alpha’s arm was wrapped aroundmywaist, another Alpha’s chest was pressed againstmyback, and another Alpha’s scent was woven so deeply into the air aroundmethat separating the two of us by smell alone would have required industrial-grade ventilation.
And layered beneath the jealousy—barely visible, half-buried, the kind of thing you’d miss if you weren’t someone who’d once spent months studying this face at close range—was a flicker of pain. Raw. Unprocessed. The micro-expression of a man who had walked through a door expecting an empty corridor and had instead been confronted with physical evidence that the world had continued without him.
Am I overthinking that?
Probably.
But I’ve never been wrong about reading Kael Sørensen’s face, and I’m not starting now.
I looked over my shoulder.
Luka’s expression was its own form of atmospheric data. His green eyes were fixed on Kael with the flat, unwavering focus of a goaltender tracking a shooter during a power play—not hostile, not reactive, butreading. Calculating angles and trajectories and probable outcomes with the quiet, analytical intensity that made him dangerous between the pipes. But beneath the composure, displeasure radiated from him like heat from pavement. The set of his jaw. The slight flare of his nostrils as Kael’s dominant scent invaded his airspace. The arm around my waist that had tightened by approximately two degrees since the collision—a shift so subtle that only the woman enclosed within it would have registered the change.
They know each other.
They know each other, and they don’t like each other, and the way they’re staring at each other over my head has the specific, charged energy of a rivalry that predates this hallway by a significant margin.
Wonderful. Exactly the complication I needed at six-forty in the morning on audition day.
Kael spoke first.
His voice was exactly as I remembered—low, measured, carrying the faint, clipped cadence of someone who’dlearned English as a second language and had perfected it with the same ruthless efficiency he applied to everything else. Each word enunciated with the precision of a man who considered imprecise speech a personal failing.
“It’s far too early,” he said, his gray eyes still locked on Luka over the top of my head, “to deal with this fucker’s presence.”
Luka chuckled. The sound was relaxed, unbothered, carrying the easy warmth of a man who had precisely zero interest in being threatened and found the attempt more amusing than alarming. His arm hadn’t moved from my waist.
“Shouldn’t the captain,” he replied, his Irish-Canadian lilt thickening slightly the way it did when he was enjoying himself, “who’spraisedandworshippedfor being the cornerstone of this team’s first possible chance of entering the USA Winter Olympics—shouldn’t that man be spending his time wisely?” He tilted his head, the gesture carrying the deliberate, slow-burn provocation of someone winding a clock. “Instead of attempting to cruise in here knowing damn well this rink is relatively empty and not designed for bulky hockey players.”
Kael’s jaw ticked. A single, precise contraction of the masseter muscle that would have been invisible to anyone who hadn’t spent months learning the topography of that particular jawline.
“Look who’s talking.” His gaze dropped to Luka’s frame—a slow, deliberate assessment that carried the clinical disdain of a man evaluating equipment he’d already decided was substandard. “Guess you gained some weight. What—going to join the summer Olympic games and pursue shot put?That’s about the only event I can envision with how bulky you’ve gotten.”
Luka’s smirk widened. If the insult had landed, he’d absorbed it the way he absorbed slap shots—with his chest, without flinching, and with the quiet satisfaction of a man who knew that absorbing the impact was the first step toward controlling the rebound.
“I’m glad my physique is so much of your concern,” he said, and the warmth in his voice had dropped a register—lower, smoother, threaded with a subtext that was less defensive thanintimate. “Funny, when you didn’t want anything to do with me all those years ago. Guess that’s changed?”
