“Now, then.” He turns back to the team, brisk, the lecture filed and finished. “Let’s see what this team’s actually got. And don’t any of you make the mistake of thinking the tryout is hers alone. It isn’t. Last season means nothing to me. A letter on your chest means nothing to me. Every position on this roster is open ice as of this morning, and every one of you is going to spend the next three rounds earning the right to keep standing where you’re standing.”
He sweeps the rink one last time, a slow, total accounting of every man on it, and gives a single short nod.
“Game on.”
CHAPTER 4
Thirty Seconds
~MATTEO~
An hour into the rounds, the entire team is breathing like a busted radiator,and not one of us has put a puck past her.
Not one.
I want that on a plaque somewhere.
We have thrown everything the playbook has at that right-side net, and a fair amount the playbook would frankly disown, and every single attempt has come back to us in pieces. Wristers, snipes, a slap shot from Hargrove that could have demolished a small shed.
They all die the same death.
Against a goalie who treats her crease like a country with closed borders and absolutely no interest in tourism.
The rink smells like our failure, which is to say it smells incredible and terrible at once. Sweat gone sharp in the cold. Wet leather. The hot-rubber stink of overworked tape and the chemical pine of whatever Jimmy floods the floor with, all of it stirred together with the scorched-mineral bite of fresh ice that scrapes down the back of your throat with every breath.
Twenty-some Alphas running hard for sixty minutes makes a perfume you could bottle and sell to no one. Add the particular tang of a team being quietly, methodically embarrassed by a stranger, and you have the exact air I am currently choking on.
I check the bench.
Coach Declan stands at the boards with his arms folded and his jaw set in a line. I have learned, over two seasons, to read like a weather report, and the forecast is not good.
He is not impressed.
Not impressed withourhalf of this team, the sector that is supposed to be the polished one, the one with the captain, system, and depth he’s invested time and skills in training, only for us to be failing so fucking hard in his face.
Pure mockery clearly…
His expression alone shows the specific stillness of a man deciding how many laps the afternoon owes him.
That should bother me more than it does.
It would, on a normal day.
Today, my attention has a defect, and the defect has pink hair.
I am not the only one with the defect. That is the part I keep circling back to, the way your tongue keeps finding the chipped tooth. Jude is locked on her. Rémi is locked on her. The three of us, the men who are supposed to be running this scrimmage like a clinic, keep drifting our eyes to the same fixed point on the ice.
The way compass needles drift north, and the point is her: and she has no idea, because she is too busy using her entire body as a weapon against us.
And I mean her entire body.
All of it.
Two minutes ago, she took a puck off the top of her own head.
On purpose.
That is the thing I cannot get my brain to fold up and put away. The shot was rising, headed for the top corner, in a spot her glove was never going to reach in time because she is, under all that gear, not a tall woman, and instead of conceding the goal like a sane person, shetipped her chin up into it, let the cage take the hit, killed the puck stone dead with her skull. The crack of it rang the whole rink like a struck bell. Impressive does not cover the move. That’s simply a word you reach for before you seek an honest one, which isdangerous, a word that put a cold little drop in the pit of my stomach and left it sitting there to rot.
