Chapter 28
Deal
~KAEL~
“Two men walked into a locker room with a war outside. They walked out with a plan.”
Ipulled Luka into the changing room and let the door slam behind us with the metallic, reverberating finality of a vault sealing shut.
The room was empty. The institutional, fluorescent-lit, bench-and-locker expanse that the Ironcrest roster occupied during every game and practice session—the space where jerseys were pulled on and tape was wound around sticks and the pre-game rituals that competitive athletes developed like superstitions were performed with the devoted, unchanging precision of men who believed the routine was load-bearing and that deviation invited disaster.
The air smelled of equipment bags and deodorant and the residual, collective pheromone output of twenty-odd Alphas who had been occupying this space for the first half of a qualifying match, the scent signatures layered over each other in an olfactory palimpsest that my nose cataloged and dismissed in the time it took to exhale.
Twenty minutes. That was the intermission window.
Twenty minutes before the second half demanded our return to the ice, and in that twenty minutes I needed to accomplish approximately four objectives that would have been ambitious for a week: calm the goaltender whose knuckles were splitting, process the public detonation I’d just conducted on my own privacy, develop a tactical response to the loss of five roster members including our starting goaltender, and prevent my cardiovascular system from completing the shutdown sequence it had been initiating since my mother’s name had been weaponized against me by a man who was currently bleeding on the ice I was supposed to be playing on.
“Calm the fuck down,” I said.
The instruction was directed at Luka, but the irony of issuing it while my own pulse was hammering at a rate that the team physician would have flagged as a medical event was not lost on me.
I was standing with my back to the door, my hands braced against the metal surface behind me, my chest expanding and contracting with the rapid, shallow, too-fast respiratory pattern that I recognized from years of experience as the overture to a physiological event I had not experienced in a long time and was extremely motivated to prevent.
Luka was not calm.
He was pacing. Three strides in one direction, pivot, three strides back—the caged, explosive, goaltender-in-a-space-too-small-for-his-energy movement of a man whose body had just executed a violence his brain was still processing and whose adrenaline had no viable outlet in a locker room whose dimensions did not accommodate the scale of his current emotional state.
His right hand—the one whose knuckles were splitting, swelling, the skin across the second and third metacarpals broken and weeping red—was flexing and clenching at his side with the involuntary, repeated, pain-registering rhythm of a fist that was recalibrating its relationship with the concept of consequences.
His rain-soaked-stone scent was agitated.
The clove note sharpened to a blade. The dark chocolate bitter beyond its usual depth—the olfactory profile of an Alpha whose protective circuitry had been activated at full power and whose body had not yet received the stand-down signal, the pheromone equivalent of a fire alarm that continued ringing after the fire had been contained.
“You’re telling ME to calm the fuck down?
” His voice was rough. Ragged. Carrying the specific, strung-wire vibration of a man whose vocal cords were operating under the sustained tension of unexpressed fury that the punch had partially but not fully discharged.
“When that bastard of a prick is out there insulting you and trying to create a division across your own team? When he’s been monitoring your medication and weaponizing your health and using your dead mother’s name as fucking ammunition? ”
He stopped pacing. Faced me. His green eyes were incandescent—not the warm, focused, analytical green that I’d cataloged in hallways and on hotel pillows and in the specific, devastating moments where our eye contact exceeded its allotted duration.
This was the other green. Darker. Hotter.
The color his irises produced when the designation-level Alpha circuitry was running the show and the man behind the eyes was a passenger rather than a driver.
“What the fuck do you want me to do? Sit here and pretend I’m not furious? Pretend that hearing him say that shit about your mother didn’t make me want to break every bone in his face instead of just his nose?”
I pushed off the door.
The motion was explosive—the compressed, forward-launching, every-muscle-engaging burst that my body produced when the containment protocol reached its capacity and the pressure required a physical valve.
I crossed the three feet between us with a single stride and met his incandescent green eyes with my own burning gray from a distance that was less conversational and more confrontational—close enough that our scents collided in the narrow airspace between our faces with the devastating, harmonic, pine-meets-stone chemistry that our proximity invariably produced.
“What the fuck do I want you to do?” I repeated his question back at him with the pressurized, bitten-off delivery of a man whose composure had been breached on national competition ice twenty minutes ago and who was now operating without the benefit of the mask he’d been wearing for twenty-five years.
“Get mad? Because guess what? I AM mad. I’m furious.
I’m so fucking furious that my teeth haven’t unclenched since that motherfucker opened his mouth, and the only thing preventing me from going back out there and finishing what you started is the strategic awareness that doing so would cost me the captaincy and the Olympic qualification and every goddamn thing I’ve spent fifteen years building. ”
My voice was climbing. Not in volume—I’d spent the volume on the ice, had emptied that particular reservoir during the declaration that had stripped my privacy bare in front of scouts and teammates and the institutional machinery of a program that would now have to process the information I’d provided whether it wanted to or not.
What was climbing now was the intensity.
The emotional density per word, increasing with every sentence the way pressure increased with depth, compressing the language until each syllable carried approximately three times its standard payload.
“My shit is being aired out like dirty laundry without my fucking permission.” I was in front of him.
My chest heaving. My frosted-pine scent broadcasting at a frequency that the locker room’s ventilation system was probably transmitting to adjacent rooms. “All of it. My sexuality. My health. My medication. My mother. Weaponized and deployed in public by a man who was supposed to be on my roster, and for what? We haven’t even officially started the Winter Games.
We’re in the preliminary qualifiers—the door, not the room—and this volume of sabotage and betrayal is already pouring through the cracks. ”
I took a breath. It shuddered.
“It’s as if someone is trying to dismantle us before we can even cross the threshold.
” The sentence arrived with a weight that exceeded the conspiracy it was describing, because the pattern—the embedded saboteur, the systematic undermining from within, the betrayal by someone who occupied a position of trust—was not new.
Was not unfamiliar. Was the exact architectural blueprint that had been used to isolate Octavia five years ago, replicated in a different context with a different target but the same devastating engineering.
“So yes, it pisses me off. Yes, I’m furious.
My heart is beating so tightly in my chest I feel like I’m going to fucking die, but I know what games are being played, and I am not going to entertain them by self-destructing in a locker room during halftime. ”
Luka’s jaw was tight. His green eyes tracking my face with the goaltender’s read—not the confrontational, we’re-arguing assessment but the deeper one, the analytical, I’m-watching-for-what-you’re-not-saying scan that he performed instinctively and that I’d learned, over years of being on its receiving end, to both respect and resent in approximately equal measure.
“They’re going to defect to Canada’s program,” he said.
The pacing energy redirected into strategic assessment, the man and the goaltender finding common ground in the territory where both operated best: the play developing in front of them, the formations shifting, the response requiring calculation rather than emotion.
I turned away from him. Walked to the lockers.
Braced my hands on the metal surface—the cold, institutional steel offering the same indifferent, non-judgmental support it had offered a thousand times before.
I dropped my head between my arms. Breathed.
The 3-7-8 pattern operating at about sixty percent efficiency, which was the best it could manage under current conditions.
“Let them go.”
The words were directed at the locker’s metal surface. Delivered with the flat, resolved, I-have-already-calculated-this finality of a captain who had been running the roster mathematics in the background of his fury since the moment the five had separated from the eighteen.