1. Chapter One
Chapter One
Lennon
“BITTCCHH, we are here!”
The combined shriek of Veronica and Bronte blasts through the speaker, loud enough that I have to pull the phone away from my ear.
The sound catches me so completely off guard that a laugh slips free before I can stop it, rich and unrestrained in a way that feels almost foreign after months of forcing every emotion behind carefully constructed walls and throwing myself into work.
Some things, it seems, survive absolutely everything.
“Hi!” I say, shaking my head. “How far away are you guys? I am just leaving work.”
“We just picked up the car, and we’re leaving the airport now. Fuck this traffic, by the way,” Veronica says before cursing someone out.
I snort. Somehow, despite everything that’s happened since we last stood in the same room together, Veronica is still unapologetically herself.
Loud. Foul-mouthed. Entirely unconcerned with whether the rest of the world approves of a single word that comes out of her mouth.
There is something oddly comforting about that.
While my own life has been flipped in every shade of upside down in recent months, Veronica has remained exactly who she’s always been.
“Okay, well, we should get to my apartment around the same time. Drive safely and V,” I say, weaving through the stream of people spilling from the office building, trying to pull the former Cardinals PR manager’s attention back to me as she continues to curse out the ‘sad excuse for an Alpha’ on exactly where he can shove his driver’s licence.
“Yes?” she chuffs, finally bringing her attention back to the conversation.
“Please don’t get yourself locked up on the way here.
I have spent far too long in police stations today.
” She laughs, loud enough that I have to pull the phone away from my ear again, and despite the weight of the case I’m working on strapped invisibly to my shoulders, a smile finds its way onto my face.
It’s small, but it’s there all the same.
“I make no promises.”
I don’t doubt that either.
If anything, leaving the Cardinals only stripped away whatever microscopic filter she’d possessed.
Years of smiling politely through marketing meetings and press conferences, pretending to tolerate executives and shark-like journalists, had finally caught up to her.
Now she seemed to take genuine pleasure in telling people exactly where to shove their opinions, and watching Veronica embrace complete and utter chaos has only made me adore her even more.
Hanging up the phone with a quiet sigh, I climb into my car and pull out of the parking garage, joining the slow crawl of afternoon traffic as the city slips past my windows in muted shades of gray.
People weave confidently between crossings with takeaway coffees in one hand and their phones in the other.
The traffic gives me a few moments to people-watch those daring to cross the street, like always.
Life continues exactly as it should for them, blissfully unaware that somewhere, someone is living through the worst day of their life while everyone else simply keeps moving.
It still amazes me how ordinary the world can look after yours has fallen apart.
It amazes me even more how easily people look past one another.
Maybe they don’t know. Maybe they don’t want to know. Either way, they keep moving.
I know all too well that struggle rarely looks the way people expect it to.
It’s half the reason I wanted to become a lawyer in the first place.
I wanted to stand beside people on the worst days of their lives, to shoulder the weight when they were no longer strong enough to carry it themselves, to fight battles they shouldn’t have to face alone.
To challenge a system that too often forgets the people trapped inside it.
Maybe that’s why coaching came so naturally to me.
Sure, I was nervous at first, but beneath it all, beyond their jerseys and their brands, I saw people.
Sons. Husbands. Brothers. Fathers. Friends.
They, too, carried insecurities of their own.
Grief and pressure that rarely made it to the surface.
The world only ever sees their highlights.
Rarely the sacrifices it took to get there.
I understood them because I knew what it was like to smile through the shitshow we call life and convince everyone around you that you were perfectly fine.
Compassion has broken my heart more times than I can count.
It’s made me care too much, give too much, and hold onto people long after they’ve let me go.
It’s the reason I believed in every player who walked through the Vadena locker room doors.
The reason losing all of it still feels like someone reached inside my chest and carved out pieces of me that I’ll never quite get back.
Not because I lost a career, but because somewhere along the way, the team felt like family to me.
And I seem to have less of that these days.
The girls haven’t arrived by the time I pull into my apartment complex, giving me just enough time to throw my work bag onto the kitchen island, kick off my heels and disappear into my bedroom to change into an oversized hoodie and lounge pants.
If tonight is going to be spent crying my eyes out over romance classics, I refuse to do it in corporate attire.
The sound of knuckles against wood echoes through the apartment sooner than I expect, bringing a bright smile to my face. I don’t even get the front door open fully before both Veronica and Bronte are pushing through, collecting me in their arms.
The warmth of them surrounds me instantly, familiar arms wrapping around my shoulders and waist as though no time has passed at all. It’s overwhelming in the gentlest way. Safe. Familiar. Home. A feeling I don’t quite get here anymore.
Maybe it’s something in their scent. The familiarity in Veronica’s perfume woven together with Bronte’s lavender body wash.
Scents that remind me of girls’ nights, road trips, celebrations, heartbreaks and every chapter of my life they’ve stubbornly refused to let me face alone.
Or maybe it’s because, after months of convincing myself I had to carry the weight of the world by myself, my village is finally here.
The people who’ve never expected perfection from me.
The people who’ve never asked me to earn their love.
And finally, after bottling up every emotion that has haunted me since the moment I got the call telling me my father was dead, I break.
It isn’t quiet. Grief never is.
It’s raw. Guttural.
A broken sound tears from somewhere deep inside me, quickly followed by another, each one ripping through my chest until hot tears blur my vision and drip down my face.
“Oh, Lenn. Let it out, babe. We’ve got you,” Bronte murmurs, her quiet reassurance splintering whatever fragile composure I have left.
I can’t stop it. Every emotion I’ve buried crashes over me in relentless waves, each one stronger than the last until I can’t breathe.
Every ugly thought. Every sleepless night.
Every impossible decision. Every unanswered question.
They’ve all been waiting for this moment, clawing at the walls I’d built around them until they finally tear their way free.
I’ve carried grief everywhere. I convinced myself that if I ignored it long enough, it would somehow lose its power over me.
That if I buried myself in my job, focused on everyone else’s problems instead of my own, eventually the ache would dull.
It never did. Grief doesn’t disappear simply because you refuse to acknowledge it, and I knew that, and still. I couldn’t face it. I wasn’t ready to.
I fought. Oh, did I fight.
For the Cardinals. I fought to prove I deserved my position, which everyone believed had simply been handed to me because of my surname.
Or what I thought was my surname. I fought every whispered accusation of nepotism, every sideways glance, every person who dismissed my hard work with a single word.
In the end, it still wasn’t enough.
I wasn’t enough.
I cry for the father I thought I knew. The man who tucked hockey sticks beneath the Christmas tree instead of dolls because he knew exactly where my heart belonged.
The one who spent my childhood reminding me that my designation would only define me if I allowed it to.
He never looked at me and saw an Omega. He saw his daughter.
A girl capable of becoming anything she wanted if she was willing to work for it, and God did I work for it.
He taught me that I was more than biology.
More than instinct. More than a warm hole for an Alpha to fuck.
He taught me a lie.
And somehow, despite everything, the collateral damage didn’t end with me.
Good people walked away from their careers they’d spent years building because of what happened.
Players, coaching staff, canteen workers, cleaners.
Fuck, even Veronica packed her things after being with the team since she was a teenager.
Not because any of them had to. They left because of me.
The cruelest part of all is that it was never truly mine to keep.
Not the Cardinals. Not the legacy. Not even the name I’d spent my entire life trying to honor.
Because the only name I’d ever known…isn’t mine. It never was.
Then I cry for the pack that should have been mine.
For everything that was stolen from us because of the hurt that they carried.
For the little boy who was never given the chance to become anything other than the product of his father’s cruelty.
For the Alpha shaped by fists instead of love, by fear instead of safety.
Until revenge became the only language he knew how to speak.
For their sabotage. Their violation of what should’ve been sacred.
And though every logical part of me knows they don’t deserve my tears, my heart has never been particularly interested in listening to reason.
I promised myself long ago that I would never cry over a man, yet here I am, mourning three of them.
Mourning the future I’d started to imagine before it was ripped away by their own ridiculous greed.
Because that is what it was. They couldn’t see past their own foolish vendetta.
They couldn’t see me.
And that makes them just like everyone else, if not worse. Definitely worse.
Veronica and Bronte keep me anchored between them as they slowly guide me toward my nest. The third one I’ve built for myself in less than a year. The third place I’ve painstakingly pieced together in an attempt to convince my instincts that I was safe, even when every part of me knew I wasn’t.
“Sleep, babe. We will be here for you when you wake up.” Bronte’s fingers continue to comb gently through my hair while Veronica strokes slow circles across my back, their whispered conversation fading into little more than comforting background noise.
And with them beside me, I finally surrender to the darkness, vowing to give myself this one day.
Just this one. One day to grieve everything I’ve lost before it stays where it belongs.
Behind me. Because when I wake, I won’t be the woman who walked through that front door. I won’t rise as the woman they broke.
I’ll rise as the woman who survived them. And God help anyone who mistakes my kindness for weakness ever again.