Prologue #2
Pads. Glove. Sweaty, bracing my weight against the boards.
Apologies, sir, my hands are occupied.
Internally, I am preening.
Externally, I am the picture of polite confusion.
“And you are…?”
The suit makes a small, indulgent noise like isn’t she darling without actually moving his lips.
“We’ll have time for introductions. I was just speaking with Coach O’Rourke about your future. Such a promising future.”
His tongue lingers on the word promising like it’s a bug he caught between his teeth.
The hair on my arms goes up under my chest protector.
“She’s aware,” Declan cuts in.
Flat. Mild. Glacial.
I have heard my coach use that exact voice exactly twice. Once at a referee who missed a call that nearly ended my career. Once at my father, the morning after Dad came home reeking of pub regret and tried to give Declan parenting advice about an Omega he’d barely raised.
Both times, the recipient went very, very quiet.
The suit’s smile thins.
“Of course,” he says. Pivots. “Forgive me. You’ve had a long night. I’m sure you want to go celebrate.” His eyes slide over me in a single, professional sweep—pads, jersey, name on the back, lingering, just barely, on the pulse point at my throat where my scent gland sits.
Twenty feet away, in a crowded arena, with my coach standing right next to him.
I have never, in my life, wanted to slap a man harder.
I don’t.
Because Declan’s hand has just landed on the boards next to mine, large, steady, and quietly furious, his thumb very deliberately positioned to brush against the cuff of my glove.
Not enough to look like anything.
Enough to anchor me.
Hold, the touch says.
“Coach.” My voice comes out admirably normal. “Anything you need me to do? Should I stick around for any other interviews, or can I get out of these pads before I marinate in my own glory?”
Declan’s mouth twitches.
Barely.
“You did phenomenally,” he says.
A simple sentence in the simplest possible voice, and somehow it crashes through my sternum like a Zamboni.
His palm leaves the boards and lands on my shoulder, broad, warm even through the chest plate, and squeezes once.
He leans in.
His scent finds me before his mouth does.
Cedarwood. Black coffee, hours old. Winter whiskey, even though I know he hasn’t had a drink tonight; it just lives in him.
Cold leather. The clean, bracing bite of fresh snowfall lifts off a wool coat.
It hits my reptile brain, and I have to actively, consciously not lean my whole face into the line of his throat like a feral idiot.
“Everything is fine,” he murmurs against my temple, voice pitched for me alone. “I’m handling some inquiries. You go enjoy the night. Have a drink on me.”
I tilt my head a fraction so my temple nearly grazes his jaw.
“One drink, or, like, several drinks?”
“If you get drunk,” he warns, with that buried-pride tone I have been borderline obsessed with since I was eighteen, “you are in considerable trouble.”
“So you’re telling me I’m getting shit-faced.”
The exhale that ghosts past my ear is almost a laugh.
“O’Shea.”
“O’Rourke.”
He pulls back, just enough to give me his eyes. Emerald, exhausted, and proud, with that flicker behind them that no camera will ever catch.
“Thanks, Coach,” I whisper, dropping my voice so it stays between us, “for believing in me.”
His jaw works.
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to.
He just nods, taps the boards once like a benediction, and tips his chin toward the tunnel.
Go.
Behind me, I hear his voice drop back into that low, glacial register as he turns to the suit.
I don’t catch the words, and truthfully don’t feel the need to.
The cold-eyed man can stew in whatever Declan’s about to feed him.
The rink ice is rougher now after sixty-plus minutes of carnage—chipped to hell near the crease, slushy at the blue line—and my blades chatter over it like teeth in a cold mouth.
I aim for the tunnel. My pads slap my thighs with every stride.
My braid swings against my back, half-disintegrated, releasing whiffs of pink cotton candy body mist and the vanilla protein powder I dry-shampooed into my roots that morning when I overslept.
I am twenty pounds of gear and one hundred and ten pounds of glitter-pink Omega and absolutely electric want.
The tunnel mouth swallows me into echoey concrete and fluorescent buzz.
The team is just ahead, a knot of shoulder pads and ringing voices, the locker room belching its specific bouquet into the corridor: industrial laundry soap, mildew, melting ice, the chemical pine of the cleaning solution Jimmy the equipment manager uses to swab the floor, and the unkillable, ambient ham of twenty-three Alphas’ sweat.
Pete spots me first.
“THERE SHE IS,” he howls, like I haven’t been on the ice this entire time.
He surges forward and grabs my mask off my head despite my squawk of protest, ruffles my pink hair into something resembling a startled chrysanthemum, and crows, “Damn, O’Shea.
We’ll be seeing you in the official playoffs in some big-league city before we know it. ”
He says city like it’s a foreign word he’s tasting for the first time.
Like Knottingley, Wakefield, West Yorkshire, isn’t a town so much as a freezer with a postal code.
Lonnie throws a sweat-damp towel over my head from behind.
“Big-league! Big arena! Big sponsorship deals! Big endorsement money! Big—”
“Big chance of getting a concussion if you don’t take this towel off my face, you absolute menace—”
“IRIS O’SHEA SPONSORED BY GATORADE,” Pete bellows down the corridor at no one in particular. “IRIS O’SHEA SPONSORED BY RED BULL. IRIS O’SHEA SPONSORED BY THAT ONE brAND OF FRUIT SNACKS SHE EATS ON THE BENCH—”
“Welch’s,” Lonnie supplies.
“WELCH’S FRUIT SNACKS, BABY—”
“I will sue both of you,” I declare, peeling the towel off my hair.
My braid is now genuinely, terminally lost. Pink strands corkscrew in every direction. I look like a startled flamingo. I do not care.
“I will sue you for slander, defamation, and dragging my name through the fruit-snack mud.”
“The sky’s the limit, baby,” Pete says, and he means it. He grabs my shoulders and shakes me, gentle this time, his huge dumb grin lighting up the tunnel’s sallow fluorescents.
“Tonight is just the start. You hear me? Whatever Coach has cooking, it’s gonna be massive.”
I look back over my shoulder, down the long tunnel of cold concrete, toward the rink mouth I just skated through.
I can’t see Declan from here. Just the bright slice of ice and the lingering blur of pale-blue movement behind the glass.
Somewhere out there, my coach is handling something I don’t understand yet, with a man whose smile didn’t reach his eyes and whose scent crawled across my skin like static.
But Declan gave the impression that everything is fine.
And Declan does not lie to me.
He has never lied to me.
Not yet, anyway.
I turn back to my boys, my big, loud, ridiculous, brotherly mess of teammates, and I let Pete sling his arm around my neck and march me toward the locker room and whatever gloriously horrifying cocktail Lonnie has illegally pre-mixed in his hockey bag.
The corridor smells like rubber, sweat, sugar, and victory.
My ribs ache in the best way.
And as the locker room door swings open and the noise hits me—hits us—like a wall of pure, deafening, blue-and-white joy, I think:
The sky’s the limit, O’Shea.
I am nineteen years old, the best Omega goalie my town has ever produced, and tonight my coach looked at me with pride in his eyes like he was carrying it for both of us.
The sky’s the limit for me…
And it’s only a matter of time before I reach my dreams and unlock the happy ever after I deserve in a world of pucks, goals, and the ultimate dream of the playoff championships and holding that massive cup in the midst of a screaming crowd of fans.
I’ll achieve it…nothing can possibly stop me.