“Follow the math,” Rémi continues, in the patient cadence of a man laying tools out in order. “An Omega cannot play unless she is packed. She cannot be housed unless she is packed. Which means she cannot exist on a roster unless the men around her, on that roster, agree to be her pack before she has played a single sanctioned minute.”
“No wonder there has never been an Omega on this team,” Jude says, quiet, the captain doing the math in his own voice.
“No wonder there has never been an Omega in this league.” Rémi’s pale eyes flick to Jude, then to Matteo, then back. “How many Omega applications has Coach Declan flagged this past year?”
“He’s mentioned it,” Jude says. “More than once. He cannot understand why the program never advances them through.”
“The other two coaches dismiss it every time we bring it up,” Matteo adds, the lazy edge dropping clean out of his voice. “Wave it off as a paperwork issue. We move on.”
“Or,” Rémi says, and the single word is a screw turning slowly in a piece of wood, “those two coaches have made the rules themselves, and would rather none of us ask.”
The kitchen at the back of the house is humming faintly to itself, the oven timer ticking down on whatever Rémi has in there. Cinnamon and butter are still in the air, threaded now with the cooler honey-spice of Jude’s beeswax candles. The whole room smells, absurdly, like home, while three Alphas calmly work out that the institution housing me has been quietly built to expel me before I have laced a skate.
Are we sure this is happening, O’Shea, or have you finally hit your head one too many times on a crossbar.
Rémi turns to me.
“So,” he says. “We sign your form as a temporary pack. You get your housing. You get to play. We get to do quietly what no one in this program seems willing to do out loud, which is find out whether those rules sit with administration, with the other two coaches, or with someone higher.”
“We go in under the radar,” Matteo says, picking up the thread, brightening as a plan takes shape. “Let the other team think we’re indulging the pink-haired walk-in. Let the other coaches assume we’re a stunt. Let everybody underestimate the entire arrangement until we have receipts and a goalie with a pulse on the roster.”
“Element of surprise,” Jude says, and the corner of his mouth, the one I have been catalogued long enough now to know moves at a discount, lifts a millimeter. “Which, professionally, has never not worked in our favor.”
All three of them look at me.
Three Alphas. Three different scents banking together in the warm air of the common room — amber bourbon, pine and snow, burnt-orange smoke — a chord I have not consented to anyone playing in my chest, and that my body has decided is, ona strictly involuntary basis, the most reassuring chord it has ever heard.
I have spent my entire adult life around Alphas. Locker rooms. Long bus rides. Cold rinks at five in the morning. I have never, not once, had three of them turn the full weight of their attention onto me at the same time and watched my own body react like a tuning fork that had been waiting all afternoon to be struck. The base of my spine has gone warm. The small hairs on my forearms are doing a thing I am refusing to acknowledge. The part of my brain in charge of professional composure has filed a polite complaint and gone to lie down.
“You,” I manage. “Are you sure?”
“Sure,” Rémi says.
“You three are not even slightly worried,” I press, looking between them, “about your reputations. Your draft prospects. The fact that the entire campus will, by dinner tomorrow, be telling each other a version of this story that does not flatter any of you?”
Matteo laughs. He pushes off the couch arm and ambles across the rug, dropping into a crouch in front of me until his face is level with mine, hazel eyes lit gold at the edges and far too close, the burnt-orange of him spilling warm over my shoulders.
“Pinky.” Soft. Almost fond. “Did you forget you’re the grand prize here.”
I feel my face heat. There is no governing it.
“You’re a jeweler,” I mutter, holding his stupid gold-flecked stare because backing down has never been an option I budget for. “Showing off a collection.”
His grin breaks open.
“Honestly, sweetheart? Yes. And if I am, you’re the rarest stone in the tray.”
“Oh my God.” Jude, from the other side of the room. “Romantic smooth talker. We are housing a romantic smooth talker. Get up off the rug, Santori.”
Matteo does not get up off the rug.
He winks at me first, slow and unrepentant, and then he gets up off the rug.
And I, the unfortunate idiot, yawn.
It betrays me before I can clamp my jaw shut. A long, undignified, full-body yawn, the kind that arrives without permission and tells the entire room exactly how long it has been since I last sat down.
Rémi straightens up off the bench.
