Hold The Line (North Lake Wolves #2)

1. Syllabus Week

Syllabus Week

The rink air bit clean and metallic at the back of Noah Mercer’s throat, cold enough to make every breath feel honest.

Skates carved white spray under the morning lights. Pucks rattled off the boards. Someone on the freshman line overskated a turn and crashed hip-first into the glass with a curse that bounced around the mostly empty arena.

Noah caught the rebound off his stick, dragged it left, and snapped a shot top shelf before the goalie had his glove all the way up.

The red light flashed in practice mode anyway, dull and unnecessary. A few guys whooped. Noah coasted hard through the circle, lungs burning, left thumb tight under its familiar spiral of tape.

“Again,” Coach barked.

Noah was already turning.

That was the thing about being “the heartbeat of the locker room,” as one columnist had called him last spring with enough sentiment to make his teeth ache.

Heartbeats didn’t get to stop because the program had lost its star.

Heartbeats didn’t get to say they were tired of answering for departures, rumors, younger players, alumni expectations, and every microphone shoved toward their face with Can North Lake survive this season? dressed up as concern.

Heartbeats just kept the body moving.

He took the next pass in stride, drove the lane, got hooked a little at the elbow, and still managed to shovel the puck toward the crease. It died in traffic. A rookie winger hacked at it late. Whistle.

“Mercer,” Coach called. “Talk to him.”

Noah coasted over, pulling up beside Dylan Avery, who looked nineteen and furious and red-cheeked beneath his helmet. “You’re reaching because your feet stopped.”

“I got tied up.”

“You stopped skating before that.” Noah kept his voice low, even. Correct in private, save the kid in public. “You want that puck, move your feet through contact. Again.”

Dylan swallowed, jaw tense, then nodded. “Yeah.”

“Good. Again means again.”

He tapped the kid’s shin pad with his stick and peeled off before the embarrassment could settle too hard.

That had been Ethan’s thing, once. Managing the room like every mood in it belonged to him.

Ethan had done it louder, rougher around the edges, but with the same instinct Noah understood too well—take the hit yourself before anybody else has to.

Only Ethan was gone now. Graduated, signed, moved on, taking his gravity with him.

And Noah had inherited more than an A on his chest.

Practice ended with bag-skate punishment because Coach said sloppy habits in September became losing habits in March. By the time they filed toward the bench, sweat chilled under Noah’s pads and his quads trembled with that satisfying kind of exhaustion he trusted more than almost anything.

He hooked a finger under the neck of his practice jersey and pulled it away from his skin as he bent over, breathing hard.

“Media outside,” their SID, Lauren, called from the tunnel entrance. “Mercer, Ruiz, Coach.”

A couple of groans. One dramatic fake gagging noise from the back. Noah straightened, rolling his shoulders.

Ruiz smirked as he skated past. “Smile pretty, alternate captain.”

Noah bumped him with his hip. “That your best chirp?”

“It’s syllabus week. I’m conserving.”

They went in through the tunnel together, the sudden relative warmth of the corridor making the sweat under Noah’s equipment feel clammy. He stripped helmet, then gloves, then pressed his knuckles briefly to the cinderblock wall while nobody was looking.

Just one second.

Centering.

His thumb hurt. Not enough to matter. Enough to notice every time his stick twisted wrong in his grip.

“You good?” Ruiz asked.

Noah looked up. “Yeah.”

Ruiz studied him with the irritatingly familiar expression of a guy who’d known him since they’d both been too young and too dumb to understand NCAA paperwork. “You’ve got that face.”

“What face?”

“The one where you’re pretending everything’s fine so hard it circles back around to looking insane.”

Noah huffed a laugh. “That specific, huh?”

“Extremely.”

He should have said something true. That he hadn’t slept well.

That the rumors around campus had turned ugly over the last forty-eight hours.

That a staffer in academic support had been escorted out of an office yesterday and half the team had heard three different versions of why.

That there were whispers about tutoring logs, phantom hours, easy signatures, coursework too polished to belong to some of the guys turning it in.

That every upperclassman with a pulse knew if an audit blew open in-season, it wouldn’t matter who had cheated and who had just been too willing not to ask questions. The program would bleed either way.

Instead he peeled the tape from one glove finger with his teeth and said, “I’m fine.”

Ruiz’s expression said liar without moving.

Lauren opened the media room door. “Please tell me one of you remembered the approved talking points.”

Ruiz immediately pointed at Noah. “Captain America did.”

“Alternate captain,” Noah corrected automatically.

“Not emotionally,” Ruiz said.

The reporters were already set up, laptop screens glowing, camera lights hot. Noah stepped behind the table and got hit with the familiar shift—private body to public image, man to symbol, sweat-sticky reality to polished representative of the Wolves.

He smiled because that part was easy.

Questions came fast.

How did the locker room plan to replace Ethan’s production?

Did Noah feel pressure to become more of a vocal leader?

What did he make of preseason predictions putting North Lake third in conference?

Had the team been distracted by online discussion about “possible institutional review”?

That one sharpened the room by a degree.

Coach cut in first. “We’re focused on hockey.”

The reporter, a young guy from the local paper who always wore ties too tight for his neck, didn’t back off. “Sure, but student forums are circulating allegations of irregular tutoring records tied to athlete coursework. Does that concern players?”

Noah felt Ruiz go still beside him.

Coach’s jaw locked. “I just answered that.”

The reporter looked at Noah. “Noah?”

There it was. The ask behind the ask. Give us the calm face. Tell us the house isn’t on fire.

He folded his hands on the table. His taped thumb brushed the edge of a stat sheet. “What concerns players,” he said, “is being where our feet are. We’ve got a younger roster, a lot of work to do, and a first road trip coming up. If the university has processes, they’ll handle them. We trust that.”

It was a good answer. Clean. Protective. Useless.

He knew that as soon as it left his mouth.

The reporter opened his mouth again, but Lauren intervened, redirecting to line combinations and penalty kill. Noah answered, smiled, deflected. Did what he always did. Took care of his people first.

By the end of it, his shirt had gone cold under his polo and the space behind his eyes pulsed.

Back in the locker room, the younger guys had gotten louder, like the mere end of practice had given them permission to be twenty.

Music thudded from someone’s speaker. Freshman defenseman Cole was trying to explain a parking ticket to two teammates as if the meter maid had committed a personal betrayal.

Noah made his usual loop of the room, touching each stall with two fingers as he passed.

Old ritual, superstitious and stupid and grounding all at once.

His gear. Ruiz’s stall. Dylan’s. The empty one that used to be Ethan’s had already been reassigned, but some part of Noah’s hand still registered the difference.

“Mercer,” Dylan said from his bench, tugging at a skate lace he should have loosened ten minutes ago. “Coach says I’ve got mandatory writing support at one. You know where that is?”

Half the room groaned again.

“Condolences,” Ruiz said.

Noah unlatched his helmet bag. “Second floor in Halcyon Academic. East wing.”

Dylan frowned. “You have to go too?”

“Everybody flagged from last semester check-ins goes.” Noah kept his tone easy. “You miss a benchmark, they make sure you can string a paragraph together before they let you embarrass the institution on paper.”

“I can write.”

“Then congratulations, this’ll be a short meeting.”

Dylan looked unconvinced. “What’s with all that, anyway? They’re checking everybody.”

Noah tossed his shoulder pads into his stall a little harder than necessary. “Because when people start asking questions, departments like paperwork.”

And because somebody, somewhere, had been sloppy or dishonest or both. Because everyone in athletics lived one administrative decision away from becoming a cautionary tale in a campus op-ed. Because “support” could turn to “oversight” fast.

He scrubbed a towel over his hair, then reached under the bench for the dented metal tin he’d brought that morning.

Ruiz saw it and snorted. “You brought the peace offering?”

“They’re stress brownies.”

“They’re overbaked coping mechanisms.”

“Still brownies.”

Noah popped the lid. Burnt sugar and cocoa rose up, rich and a little bitter.

He’d made them too long again last night, distracted by game film and a call from his mother that had turned into forty minutes of mediating a fight between his younger brother and his uncle over whether family dinner Sunday counted as mandatory attendance.

“Those look illegal,” Cole said, wandering over with wet hair and no understanding of boundaries.

“Back off, freshman.”

Cole stole one anyway and yelped because the middle was still faintly warm. “Hot. Worth it.”

Noah closed the tin before the whole team descended. “I’m taking these to academic support.”

Ruiz stared. “You bake for mandatory meetings now?”

“I bring morale where morale is needed.”

“You bring baked goods where honesty should be.”

Noah glanced at him.

Ruiz didn’t look away. He said it lightly, but there was an edge under it.

Noah snapped the tin shut. “Good talk.”