The clipboard intern looks personally redeemed.
“So you’re saying we’ll be seeing you in the big leagues soon?”
“I’m saying you’ll be seeing me wherever Declan tells me to be next.” I shrug one shoulder, breezy. “He’s got the map. I just skate the route.”
“Iris, what would you say to all the young Omegas watching tonight who?—”
And there it is. The Omega Question.
There’s always an Omega question.
My smile doesn’t move because I’ve been training that smile for as long as I’ve been training my glove side.
“I’d say,” I answer sweetly, “that if some twiggy little Omega from a town nobody can pronounce can stand on her head between two pipes long enough to take down a team three divisions up, you can probably do whatever the hell scary thing you’ve been told you can’t.” I wink at the camera. “Now, please excuse me. I’m going to go drink something that will horrify my nutritionist.”
The reporters cackle. One of them claps.
Someone behind a camera literally says“print that.”
I drift back toward the bench, my skates dragging little curls of shaved white in their wake, and that’s when I see him.
Declan.
He’s standing at the boards near the tunnel, half in shadow, half in the cold mercury wash of the overhead rigging.
He is not smiling.
The hairs on the back of my neck stand up in a way that has nothing to do with arena temperature.
My coach is six-foot-four of disciplined Irish granite, and on a normal day, post-victory, he wears a small, locked-down smirk—the kind that says,Yes, you did well, do not let it go to your head.He saves the real smile for me, sometimes, when nobody else is looking.
A flicker. A twitch of the jaw.
A particular gleam behind those emerald eyes that I have spent six years cataloguing like an obsessive amateur scientist.
Today:nothing.
His jaw is set. His shoulders are squared.
Every muscle along the long line of his throat is pulled taut as catgut over a violin bridge.
And the man he’s talking to is the reason why.
I don’t recognize him.
That, by itself, is interesting. I know everyone’s coach, scout, agent, and dental hygienist; you spend enough years on a small-town team that punches above its weight, you become a low-grade conspiracy theorist about everyone in the building.
This guy is new.
Pressed charcoal suit. Slate-gray tie. Cufflinks that catch the rink light in cold, surgical little flashes. He’s older—my dad’s age, maybe—but his hair is razor-cut and dyed an unconvincing shade of midnight. His mouth is doing a thing that is technically a smile but reads, to anyone with even passable predator-detection skills, asexposed teeth.
His eyes are colorless.
Or rather, they’re a color the language hasn’t named yet. Some uncomfortable midway between gunmetal and seawater under cloud cover.
He smells, even from twenty feet away, wrong.
I can’t place it.
