The Price of Ice

Cracking Ice （sample）

Prologue: Keenan

T here was no sex in the world as good as the feeling of your puck hitting the back of the net. Keenan stood still for a moment, feeling the rush hit his bloodstream all at once, his heartbeat speeding and his cheeks flushing. There was simply nothing like being enveloped in the sweaty embrace of men whose bodies had worked so perfectly with yours that it was almost as if you were one person. And they had accomplished this without even touching.

Compared to that, there was little merit in fucking, even if the ladies smelled so much nicer. Keenan expected sex with an omega woman to be different, but he wasn't about to risk hockey for a chance at bonding. There wasn't really any other way for an alpha to find his way to an omega's bed.

Bonding was a nice dream to have for retirement, but too dangerous for a young successful player. It was unfortunate, but once a soulbond was established, a lot of omegas found it too hard to be away from their alphas for the prolonged periods of time required of a hockey player. Keenan didn't want to do that to someone, keep something they needed from them, and he definitely didn't want to do that to someone he had a psychic bond with. So hockey won, like it usually did in any competition where Keenan was judge, and if he was tempted... well, it was worth resisting.

It was hard, but that didn’t mean he had any rational objections to having an omega in the team, he thought as he opened the door to get out of the rink and into the bench area and the sticky sweet smell of caramel filled his nose.

Or he hadn't until he had met Cartwright Johnson. Johnson had smelled like he had bathed in a bakery until he’d caught sight of Keenan and the sweetness had turned bitter like burnt cake. He had pretended for the beta managers and teammates, said all the pleased-to-meet-yous and even talked about some of Keenan's moves on the ice with admiration that wasn't, Keenan thought, completely faked.

But he couldn't act over his unease, and Keenan couldn't stop smelling it. He was an alpha and he was meant to keep omegas safe: the presence of an omega that was so profoundly uncomfortable with him was hard to take, and it was just plain hard to like someone who disliked you so much. That was rational enough for Keenan, even if he didn't really believe it was rational enough to bring up to the managers and coaches.

After weeks of playing together, Johnson had stopped jumping every time Keenan entered a room he was in. He seemed to get that Keenan wasn't going to try and order him around or whatever other prejudices against alphas he was holding, but it still wasn't anywhere near comfortable.

More than anything, Keenan wished he didn't have to lose the rush of the goal to the wave of longing that hit him every time he was around Johnson. It was just pheromones, compatible pheromones, which Keenan had never experienced with a male omega, making the situation all the stranger and more unfortunate . It wasn’t unpleasant, exactly, but it was... unsettling. He didn’t like men sexually—as much as he had been teased for it, he was as monosexual as could be. And here came this guy who hated his guts and his body started trying to convince him it would be an excellent plan to eat him up.

Worse still, his own scent had to give him away to Johnson . He could hardly think of anything more awkward than having a teammate who despised him thinking Keenan wanted... He swallowed, pretending he couldn’t feel the almost unbearable tension between them even with his gaze firmly planted on the bench and Santiago's grinning face.

He imagined them as two predators carefully circling each other, not planning to attack but prepared for it nonetheless. Never able to relax in the other's presence.

It was exhausting.

And he still couldn’t say anything. Not just for Johnson’s sake, but because once the door to the rink closed with Johnson's line on the other side facing the ?iaur?s Audros, it was impossible to look away from the figure cutting across the ice almost faster than the eye could track. The sheer difficulty of moving so deftly at such high speed was compounded by the other nine moving bodies on the ice. It would have been impressive on an empty rink, but seeing Johnson speed between the Northern Storms’ players left Keenan spellbound to the point where he sometimes forgot to follow the progress of the puck in favour of watching the left winger.

Johnson actually twirled, then twisted his body in the opposite direction with the same impulse and got around a defender twice his size, then made a perfect pass like he hadn't noticed the abrupt movement in front of his eyes at all. Keenan’s alternate, Mike Patel, fumbled the reception—having just got free from his own defender—and the shot hit the post and bounced off.

There were groans and barely muffled curses on the bench, but Keenan couldn't make a sound. He was biting his lip too hard to keep his fury at bay. He forced himself to take a deep breath, confused. Why was he so angry? He had scored, and they were still winning. There would be other chances, like there always were.

It was just that it had been such a perfect pass ; it seemed sacrilegious that Mike hadn't turned it into an equally perfect goal. Johnson wasn't taking it much better; he saw, his movements stiff and stilted where they had been smooth and flawless before. The way Johnson acted around him, Keenan could have been glad on some level, but he felt even sorrier for Johnson than he did for Mike, who must have been feeling the failure more personally. It was utterly unfair that someone could do something so beautiful and have to see it destroyed.

Chapter 1: Cartwright

CARRY FELT BETTER AS soon as the door closed behind him. The ice felt almost like a separate world, a colder universe in which none of the stupid rules and protocols that governed his life on solid ground applied. In hockey, there was only one rule: win. Well, there might have been something about penalties in the book as well, but Carry was fast enough and small enough that most referees tended to decide he had startled his rivals into falling on their arses even when he had got too close. Not that he was trying to; sometimes he just forgot how slowly other people moved. And he needed the silver linings too much to feel bad about the few penalties from which he got off scot-free. He was a small guy, for one thing, in a sport where it was common to try to bulk up as much as possible even if you were a giant so you could get on top of others and force their play.

But the joy of skating didn’t last long; barely a minute into the play, his new centre failed to score off Carry's next pass, and Carry had to grip his stick hard to keep himself from actually smashing it against the floor, or the defender. Or Patel's head. This was only his third game with the Hell’s Flames, and he hadn’t scored yet. He had to prove he was doing good work here, or they might decide to send him back to the reserves. Or trade him.

He couldn't handle another move; he had barely made it through the last one.

HIS SIZE COULD BE OVERLOOKED , the real deal breaker was that Carry was an omega and according to popular belief, he should have been dreaming of babies, nurseries, and worrying about colour schemes. When he had been drafted for a professional team; people had congratulated him on using classic omega stubbornness to accomplish a goal as different from parenthood as a contact sport. That was stupid enough, but it was only the beginning of throwaway comments and off-colour jokes about omegas craving physical contact, and about how the Trinity Titans had taken him in because they had an alpha captain Carry would instinctively do anything to please.

Still, Carry had known to count his blessings: the Trójcy Tytanowi were mid-listers in the league, but more importantly, they’d made it clear right away they’d recruited him for his exceptional speed and stuck to it. There had been stupid questions the couple of times it had been his turn to talk to the press, but nothing unusual—it hadn't been a publicity stunt like he had been warned might happen. The Titans had wanted him , Cartwright Johnson, the fastest forward in the youth league. By the end of training camp, he had been called up to play with the team. It was probably because the Titans didn't have any alphas in their management, even though alphas 'naturally' excelled at a sport as aggressive and domineering as hockey and tended to enjoy it so much that they hung about after their glory years as players were over.

Even with how common alphas were, most players—like most people—were betas, and betas tended to assume omegas were one of them unless told otherwise. Alphas—who were taught to be commanding and assertive—were harder to overlook, but people who were raised to be quiet and unobtrusive weren't a particular concern if you were anosmic and couldn't smell they were possessors of a very particular genetic variation.

Carry liked betas just fine. Sometimes he thought being surrounded by them was a bit like being alone. But that suited him fine. Alphas tended to assume they had to take care of him, and he didn't want anybody's protection or pity. If the alternative was being alone, he'd take it.

Of course, that had only lasted so long because the Titans did have two alphas in the team itself. Unsurprisingly, one of them was Captain Jack Lerroux, a thirty-five-year-old veteran. The guy exuded such a strong air of self-confidence that Carry had barely kept himself from flinching when they’d shook hands—a modern take on protocol he’d have rather not participated in and couldn’t get out of without looking like a prude. The Titans’ Captain turned out to be alright, though, maybe because he was so sure of himself he felt the least he could do was be a real gentleman about the fact that he was a hockey superstar, adored by both his team and the public, and happily bonded and with his third kid on the way. People who were that lucky didn't have any bones to pick, Carry guessed. He'd never had any issues with Lerroux, but then again, a bonded alpha might think an omega who wasn’t his mate was easy on the eyes, but they wouldn’t be affected by the omega’s pheromones or his touch.

Not that Carry thought his former captain had given his existence outside the ice a single thought—in all likelihood, they wouldn’t have been compatible even if Lerroux had been unbonded. Carry figured his genetic make-up had to be quite particular because it was rare for him to find an alpha whose scent he was enticed by.

Of course, he hadn’t needed scent to notice the other alpha on the Titan’s roster, Ali Puccio...

AND NOW HE WAS HERE , with a new centre who didn’t see his passes coming, in a new city, and—

Their line was called out and Avali's sent in. Carry kept his gaze and attention firmly on the empty bench, where at least he could rest a little.

It took him a moment to process that Patel wasn't cursing the referee for stopping the game but speaking to him.

Carry actually looked away from the game to stare at him. “What?”

“That pass was a beauty,” Patel commented ruefully. “But you are just so freaking fast, man. Sometimes it's like you teleport or something.”

“Thanks,” Carry told him, feeling like he was letting him down by not teasing him somehow, but he didn't know Patel that well and he was very much not ready to joke about Patel wasting his shot. If he had seen it was beautiful, why hadn't he used it to score? “Next time,” he added, trying to be friendly.

Patel seemed to take his awkwardness in the spirit in which it was intended, and they both went back to watching the game. The Northern Storms had just loss possession to, who else, Keenan Avali. He sped through the ice, a fast player in his own right even if he was not quite as fast as Carry, the puck stuck to his stick as if magnetically attached.

His handling was impressive even in practice, during a game it was like he didn't even have to think about where the puck was for his stick to find it, for his body to follow, putting itself between the puck and his rivals as if out of some protective instinct. Journalists talked about Avali's protective posture, but when they called him a typically alpha, there was always some sign that they were joking and they thought it was kind of cool that Avali was using his instincts to win.

And win he did. He scored another goal, the last one of the game and the fourth the Northern's goalie had let through. Avali had scored twice, and his linemates once each. And Carry not at all. Neither had either of his own linemates and Patel and Diego were both more experienced players. It was obvious their line wasn't working, but the coaches hadn't wanted to mess with the perfect formula that was Siuf Bauer, Keenan Avali and Thomas Kiau.

Carry knew he was in no position to make demands of the Flames. He was new and he hadn't earned it, but it was driving him crazy—it was torture to play a team sport with a line who couldn't read you. It wasn’t their fault, they were both good players, but they’d lost their centre to an injury and it had been decided Patel could do it instead.

Carry respectfully disagreed.

He closed his locker and threw his uniform onto the rapidly growing pile in the corner of the changing room while trying to come up with something on TV he really wanted to watch when he got back to his flat. But he’d run out of episodes of Spinning during the hellish month of trade negotiations. He’d needed it too badly to ration it. Sadly, fiction couldn't keep up with the awfulness of Carry's reality any more than he could.

“You coming out with us?” Patel asked from where he was pushing something into his own locker.

Carry glanced his way, already shaking his head. “Nah, just—" He waved his hand around to give some weight to his rather poor excuse. "Just tired, you know.”

Patel nodded. “You will get used to it soon,” he promised with a sympathetic smile.

Carry shrugged, unable to come up with anything to say that wasn't offensive or dismissive. He didn't need to get used to hockey: he had taught himself to play until his body couldn't hold him upright a long time ago, and a month off hadn't changed that. He had kept up with his training. In fact, he had been so antsy he had added reps to the point where he’d needed to take a day off for fear that he had pulled a muscle in his right arm. Anyway, it wasn't stamina that he was low on, but spirits.

He wanted to feel like he belonged on the ice, like he was meant to be there. He knew he was, but when he wasn't scoring, surrounded by a team that wasn't really his, it just got hard to remember, to believe .

Patel wished him a good night and a couple of other guys nodded, Kiau gently patting his shoulder as he walked by. Carry hated the gentleness; nobody had been gentle with him in the Titans, not even the alphas. Did they forget he played the same contact sport where people ended up concussed and with broken bones all the time? Players had died on the ice; why did Carry need gentle pats instead of the rough noogies and pushes everybody else got from teammates?

He didn't, of course, but it wasn't like people ever listened to what Carry told them he needed. If he wanted something, he had to take it. And right then, what he needed was to be alone with a beer and a show and decompress.

At least nobody expected him to talk to the press anymore.

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