He’s good.
He’s really, really good at this.
The answer was plausible. More than plausible—it wasreasonable. The kind of institutional logic that federation officials encountered regularly and accepted without excessive scrutiny, because the underlying premise was sound: athletes in high-profile programs had legitimate reasons to delay public disclosure of their affiliations until their competitive status was confirmed. It wasn’t a loophole. It was a recognized practice. And Maddox had delivered it with the calm, factual confidence of a man reciting a policy he’d memorized rather than a story he’d invented.
Coach Fontaine’s lips pressed into a thin line. The expression of a woman whose bullshit detector was registering ambiguous signals—not a clean positive, not a cleannegative, but the frustrating middle zone where professional judgment was required and the margin for error was significant.
“Very well.” Her eyes dropped to the tablet. “However, packs participating in the Olympia Academy Winter Games program are required to consist of four Alphas and one Omega. As currently registered—” She scrolled. Frowned. The crease between her brows deepened by a millimeter. “Your pack, the Ironcrest line, shows three Alpha members. Sørensen, Viteri, Hale.” Her gaze lifted. “That’s three. The academy requires four.”
Maddox’s composure didn’t crack. But the pause that preceded his response was a fraction of a second longer than his previous answers—a gap so small that only someone trained to read micro-behaviors would have detected it.
He didn’t know about the four-Alpha rule.
Which means this wasn’t fully scripted. Kael sent him with a mission and a cover story, but the specifics of Olympia’s pack regulations weren’t in the briefing. They’re improvising.
“Nothing in the IOF guidelines states a member limit for pack composition,” Maddox said. His voice remained level, but the cedar note in his scent sharpened—the pheromone-level equivalent of a body tensing beneath a calm exterior. “Pack structures vary by region, culture, and designation dynamics. A minimum of three Alphas is standard for IOF recognition.”
“The IOF guidelines and Olympia Academy’s internal regulations are separate documents, Mr. Hale.” Coach Fontaine’s tone had cooled by approximately three degrees Celsius. “If you’d read the academy’s pack affiliation requirements—Section 4, Subsection B of the competitor handbook—you’d have confirmed that every pack registered throughthis institution must consist of four Alphas and one Omega. No exceptions.”
Silence.
The kind that lasted exactly long enough for the Montreal brunette’s expression to brighten again—that barely suppressed, trying-to-look-neutral joy flickering back to life behind her composed mask like an ember catching a draft.
Coach Fontaine returned her attention to me. “Well, in that case, I’m afraid?—”
“I’m part of their pack.”
Luka’s voice cut through the sentence with the clean precision of a blade through fresh ice. Not loud. Not aggressive. Delivered with the measured, absolute certainty of a man who had assessed the situation, calculated the required intervention, and executed it with the same timing he brought to every critical save—not early, not late, but at the exact millisecond when the difference between a goal and a stop was determined.
I turned to look at him.
Slowly. The rotation of my head operating at approximately half its normal speed, as if my neck had decided that the visual information awaiting me on the other side of this turn was sufficiently consequential to warrant a measured approach.
Luka’s expression was composed. Utterly, infuriatingly, goaltender-still composed. His green eyes were locked on Coach Fontaine with the unwavering focus of a man who had positioned himself in the trajectory of the shot and intended to absorb it. No smirk. No charm. No trace of the flirtatious, playful energy he’d deployed in every previous interaction. This was Luka in competition mode—the version that existed between the pipes when the game wason the line and the only thing standing between catastrophe and survival was his ability to read the play faster than it developed.
Maddox looked at him.
The enforcer’s dark eyes tracked to Luka with a sharpness that belied the stillness of his body. I couldn’t read the expression—couldn’t determine whether the look contained surprise, approval, calculation, or some alchemical combination of all three—but the assessment was unmistakable. Maddox was evaluating. Running the same threat-and-asset analysis that his position on the ice demanded:Is this man a liability or a solution? Does his presence strengthen the structure or compromise it?
Whatever conclusion he reached, he kept it behind those impenetrable dark eyes.
Coach Fontaine adjusted her glasses. “And you are?”
“Luka Petrov. Goaltender. I transferred to Olympia Academy at the beginning of this session by special invitation.” His voice was steady, calibrated, carrying the institutional fluency of a man who had spent enough time navigating bureaucratic systems to understand that the language of authority was specificity. “My visa approval was finalized this morning. The processing delay prevented the pack registration from being completed through the standard administrative channels, as the system requires confirmed residency status before permitting pack affiliation updates.”
He’s lying. Partially. The visa detail might be true—I have no way to verify—but the pack registration excuse is constructed in real time, built from institutional logic and delivered with the confidence of fact.
And he’s doing it for me.
Luka continued. “The pack confirmation was contingent on the visa clearance. We wouldn’t have been able to finalize the registration without it, and the timeline wasn’t communicated to us as conflicting with the audition schedule.” A beat. The slightest shift in his posture—shoulders squaring, chin lifting by a degree. “No one emphasized that pack dynamics would need to be formalized before the audition evaluations. If that had been made clear, I would have prioritized a conversation with the headmaster to ensure a notation was placed on Miss Moreau’s file.”
He paused. Let the wordheadmasterfill the space between them.
“Seeing as she’s the one who personally requested my invitation and approved it.”
The headmaster card.
The effect was immediate. Coach Fontaine’s frown deepened—not in skepticism but in the particular, cautious discomfort of a mid-level authority who had just been reminded that the chain of command extended above her and that the person at the top of it had a vested interest in the outcome of this conversation. Invoking the headmaster wasn’t a threat. It was arepositioning. A reminder that the decision about to be made would exist not in a vacuum but in the institutional context of an academy whose leadership had taken specific, documented steps to recruit the man standing in front of her.
