Chapter 27 #2
“Yeah, I went through your fucking locker,” Kael said, and his voice had dropped from the volcanic roar of his initial eruption to a register that was somehow more dangerous—low, controlled, the sub-bass frequency of a man who had moved past the explosion and into the cold, strategic, I-have-the-evidence-and-I’m-going-to-use-it phase that made him lethal in press conferences and terrifying in confrontations.
“Where there’s a full text exchange in a group chat guaranteeing you a spot on the Canadian national team for the Winter Games. ”
I was skating toward them before I’d consciously decided to move.
The goaltender’s instinct—not the reflexive, puck-tracking, save-making instinct but the deeper one, the one that read developing plays and identified the point on the ice where a presence was needed before the need became critical.
My blades carried me across the surface with the measured, purposeful stride of a man whose body understood that the current formation required an additional element and whose position was at the center of it.
Coach Mercer’s face had undergone a transformation.
The baseline frustration of a coach managing a mid-game incident giving way to the harder, colder, this-is-a-program-integrity-issue expression of a man whose professional responsibilities had just escalated from game management to misconduct investigation.
He looked at Volkov with the level, unyielding assessment of someone who had been coaching long enough to recognize guilt before it was confirmed.
“Is that true?”
Volkov huffed. The sound was compressed, evasive—the respiratory output of a man whose options were narrowing and whose defenses were being constructed in real time from materials of diminishing quality.
“They have no proof that—the texts could be anything. And you can’t just jump teams like that. There are transfer protocols, registration windows—”
“Yes, you can.”
A voice from the cluster of teammates who had gathered at a distance that suggested they wanted to be involved enough to hear but removed enough to deny involvement if the conversation produced consequences.
Jensen—a defenseman, third-year, whose knowledge of competition regulations was the product of a pre-law undergraduate degree and a constitutional inability to resist correcting procedural inaccuracies.
“As long as the host country’s hockey federation hasn’t finalized their roster submission—which doesn’t happen until thirty days before the Games—athletes are free to accept invitations from other national programs. It happened in the last Winter Games.
Two forwards on the Swedish team were originally rostered with Finland.
” Jensen delivered this with the flat, citational authority of a man reciting a regulation he’d memorized and who considered the accuracy of legal frameworks a higher priority than the social dynamics of the situation his accuracy was about to detonate.
“The IOC doesn’t restrict cross-national transfers during the qualification period. Only after final roster lock.”
The information landed on the assembled group like a puck dropped at center ice—every player tracking its implications, calculating the angles, reading the play that was developing from the evidence.
Kael was going to jump him.
I could see it building in the architecture of his body—the weight shifting forward onto the balls of his feet, the shoulders squaring, the hands dropping from their crossed position to his sides where they could generate the forward momentum necessary to close the distance between himself and Volkov’s face.
The frosted-pine scent had escalated beyond territorial into something rawer, more primal, the pheromone profile of an Alpha whose pack had been threatened and whose designation-level response was bypassing the strategic mind and routing directly to the combat circuitry.
I slid between them.
The positioning was instinctive—the goaltender’s crease instinct translated to a human context, my body reading the trajectory of the incoming collision and placing itself at the interception point with the practiced, automatic precision of a man who had spent fifteen years putting himself between dangerous objects and the things behind him.
My chest met Kael’s forward momentum. My hands found his shoulders.
The impact was considerable—two hundred and twenty pounds of enraged captain meeting two hundred and ten pounds of planted goaltender—and the force transferred through my arms into my core and through my blades into the ice, which held.
He growled in my face.
Full. Guttural. The designation-level, vibrating-in-the-chest-cavity, Alpha-to-Alpha territorial warning that I’d heard from him exactly twice before—once in the hallway at Olympia when he’d seen my arm around Octavia’s waist, and once through a wall in Stockholm when I’d done a thing with my mouth that had made him lose control of the sound his throat was producing.
The growl was different this time. Hotter.
Carrying less jealousy and more get-out-of-my-way-I-am-going-to-dismantle-this-man, and the blast of his frosted-pine scent at point-blank range was intense enough to trigger a reflexive flinch in my shoulders that I suppressed through sheer professional discipline.
I rolled my eyes.
Because eye-rolling in the face of a six-foot-four Alpha’s territorial growl was my primary coping mechanism for Kael S?rensen’s intensity, and abandoning it now would have been a betrayal of every interaction we’d ever had.
“Are you gonna get temporarily suspended,” I said, my voice level, my hands steady on his shoulders, my green eyes holding his pale gray ones with the specific, I-am-the-one-person-in-this-building-who-is-not-intimidated-by-you directness that our dynamic required, “for being an arse to your own team player mid-break during our tryouts? Because that’s the play you’re running right now.
You assault him on competition ice during a qualifying match, and the IOC review committee suspends you for conduct violations, and instead of him being disqualified for sabotage, you’re disqualified for assault, and Canada gets both a goaltender AND the satisfaction of watching the Ironcrest captain eliminate himself. Is that the outcome you want?”
Kael said nothing.
His jaw was clenched. His teeth grinding at a pressure that I could hear at this proximity—the specific, enamel-threatening compression of a man whose body was being told no by his brain while every designation-level instinct was screaming yes.
His chest heaved against my hands. His eyes burned—not with the controlled, cold intensity of his usual stare but with the hot, volatile, barely-contained fury of a man who had spent the last week having his world rearranged by revelations about intercepted letters and manipulative ex-Omegas and sabotaged skating partners, and who was now watching the same pattern—someone in his orbit deliberately undermining the people he was supposed to protect—repeat itself in a different context with a different betrayer.
He’s seeing Garrison. Not Volkov. He’s seeing the pattern—the embedded traitor, the trusted position exploited for sabotage, the systematic dismantling of a team’s chances by someone who was supposed to be on their side.
And the rage isn’t proportional to Volkov’s betrayal alone.
It’s proportional to the ACCUMULATED betrayal.
Every lie. Every intercepted letter. Every year of isolation that was engineered by someone who smiled while they operated.
The tension between us—Kael’s chest against my hands, my face inches from his, our scents colliding in the narrow airspace between us with the same harmonic, devastating chemistry they’d produced in every previous proximity event—was taut enough to vibrate.
Green on gray. The loaded, dense, frequency-saturated exchange of two Alphas whose history included a hotel room in Stockholm and whose present included a shared Omega and an unresolved everything and a confrontation on competition ice that was being witnessed by approximately twenty-five people.
The silence stretched for three beats.
Then, from the cluster of spectating teammates, a voice—young, uncertain, carrying the specific, poorly-timed curiosity of a man whose filter was still in development:
“Are you two…like…something? Because fuck, the tension is sizzling.”
Kael’s response was immediate.
“Fuck no.”
I smirked.
Couldn’t help it. The reflex was embedded too deeply in my response pattern to suppress—the automatic, amused, you-keep-telling-yourself-that expression that Kael’s denials consistently produced in my facial muscles and that I made no effort to conceal because concealing it would have required a level of deference to his comfort that our dynamic had never included and that I had no intention of introducing now, on competition ice, in front of twenty-five witnesses and a coach whose expression suggested he was reconsidering every career decision that had led him to this specific coordinate in space-time.
I turned away from Kael.
Faced Volkov.
The goaltender was standing in his crease with the rigid, cornered posture of a man whose escape routes had been systematically eliminated by evidence, testimony, and the physical presence of two Alphas whose combined displeasure was producing a pheromone output that the arena’s ventilation system was struggling to process.
“Straight up,” I said. My voice was calm. Level. Carrying the analytical, fact-finding tone of a man whose professional existence was defined by the ability to read situations accurately and who was now applying that skill to a human being rather than a puck trajectory. “Is it true?”
Volkov shrugged.