I hold out anyway.
I hold out because I have spent five years proving to a world that did not ask for the demonstration that I belong on this ice, in this sport, in this exact crease, and a person does not lay that down just because the venue got colder, the Alphas got prettier, and the cupboard they changed me in still smelled of mop.
So. The ball. The carriage. The clock.
Game face on, O’Shea.
The North Star practice rink is a cathedral with the heating turned off.
The cold here is a different species from the cold back home, engineered, industrial, pumped clean and merciless through vents the size of dinner tables, and it carries that sharp scorched-mineral bite of fresh ice straight down the back of my throat the second I push through the bench door. My blades bite. My pads slap a familiar percussion against my thighs. For one clean breath, before anyone has the chance to ruin it, the rink is just a rink, and I love it the way I have loved it since I was four years old.
Then the smell of the team arrives, and the breath is over.
Twenty-some Alphas at the start of a session is a wall you walk into rather than a thing you merely notice.
It hits in layers. Topmost, the honest stuff, sweat soaked into jerseys that have been pulled on damp one too many times, the rubber-and-tape perfume of fresh stick work, the chemical pine of whatever Jimmy mops the floor with.
Beneath that, the gear itself, leather and foam gone faintly feral. And threaded through all of it, impossible to file underequipment, the scent signatures of the men, cedar and smoke and bourbon and bonfire and cold steel, a dozen rut-edged Alpha registers braided together until the air itself has a pulse.
Back home, the entire Alpha population could fit inside one pub and frequently did.
This is a saturation my hometown never reached. I make a careful, clinical note of it, the way I would note a slick patch near the blue line, and I file the small private worry,will my suppressants hold in this, under problems for a version of me who is not currently being watched by forty eyes.
Because I am being watched.
The skate to my net is the longest commute of my life.
Coach has not arrived. That much is clear at once, and it changes the chemistry of the room the way a missing referee changes a faceoff, everyone a fraction looser, a fraction more willing.
The team has organized itself into drills without him, pucks already cracking off the boards, and it takes me roughly four seconds to understand two things. The first is that the rink has split. Not by line, not by drill, but cleanly, instinctively, into two distinct knots of men who orbit each other like wary planets, and the gap between them is the kind of gap you could lose a body in.
The second thing I understand is that whatever the drill is supposed to be, the target is me.
They funnel toward my end.
Shots come in, and not the lazy warmup floaters a decent team feeds a goalie cold, these have intent stitched into them, rising, snapping, aimed at the shoulders, the mask, the spots that saywe are testing whether you flinchrather thanwe are testing whether you save.
I do not flinch.
I have been “not-flinching” professionally since I was sixteen.
I drop into my stance, low and wide and ready, and I let the old machine take over, the one with no feelings in it, just angles and edges and the gorgeous mathematics of shrinking a net.
And then I make the mistake of breathing in.
Because one of those two knots of men has drifted into my peripheral vision, and at the heart of it, unmistakable, is a crimson hoodie I last saw vanishing down a corridor after handing me a nickname I did not consent to.
Santori.
He is not even doing anything. He is leaning on his stick, listening to someone, laughing at something, the picture of a man for whom the world has always been a comfortable temperature, and the genuine injustice of it is that I clock him by scent before I clock him by sight.
Blood orange and burnt sugar and espresso reach across the cold and find me with the ease of something that has done it before.
Worse.
Catastrophically worse.
The men standing nearest him smell good, too.
