The sky’s the limit for me…
And it’s only a matter of time before I reach my dreams and unlock the happy ever after I deserve in a world of pucks, goals, and the ultimate dream of the playoff championships and holding that massive cup in the midst of a screaming crowd of fans.
I’ll achieve it…nothing can possibly stop me.
CHAPTER 1
Welcome to Minnesota
Present Day
~IRIS~
The pamphlet in my hand has been printed on paper thick enough to stop a slapshot.
I know this because I have been clutching it like a security blanket since the airport shuttle dumped me at the campus gates forty minutes ago, and the thing has not so much as creased.
On the cover: a row of Alphas in pristine practice jerseys, grinning the way men grin when nobody has ever once told them no.
Sun on their cheekbones.
Sticks resting on shoulders like rifles in a recruitment poster.
NORTH STAR ELITE COLLEGE,the header trumpets, in a font that could bench-press my entire hometown.
WHERE LEGENDS ARE FORGED.
I flip it over.
Twelve faces. Twelve Alphas.
Not a single Omega among them—unless you count the photo on page four, tucked beside the figure skating spread, ofa willowy girl mid-spiral, glittering and weightless and exactly what the world has decided an Omega on the ice is supposed to look like.
I am not willowy.
I am not weightless.
And I am very much not in the figure skating department.
I tip my head back and look up at the place that is, apparently, going to either make my career or chew me into garnish.
Bloody hell.
North Star Elite does not have a campus so much as akingdom.
The main hockey complex rises out of the snow like something built to be seen from space—six stories of black glass and brushed steel, a roofline that catches the gray Minnesota light and flings it back colder. Banners drape the entrance, navy and white, each one stitched with a championship year.
There are so many championship years.
They go up the building like rungs on a ladder I am not yet allowed to climb.
Behind it, more rinks. Beside it, more rinks. A sports science wing. A recovery center with its own signage. A statue,an actual bronze statue, of some legend mid-stride, frozen forever in the act of being better than everyone.
The whole place smells like money, Zamboni exhaust, and the particular sharp mineral tang of industrial ice, pumped out through the vents in clouds that fog and vanish.
Back home, our rink had one banner.
We laminated it ourselves.
