Chapter 1
Welcome to Minnesota
Present Day
~IRIS~
The pamphlet in my hand has been printed on paper thick enough to stop a slapshot.
I know this because I have been clutching it like a security blanket since the airport shuttle dumped me at the campus gates forty minutes ago, and the thing has not so much as creased.
On the cover: a row of Alphas in pristine practice jerseys, grinning the way men grin when nobody has ever once told them no.
Sun on their cheekbones.
Sticks resting on shoulders like rifles in a recruitment poster.
NORTH STAR ELITE COLLEGE, the header trumpets, in a font that could bench-press my entire hometown.
WHERE LEGENDS ARE FORGED.
I flip it over.
Twelve faces. Twelve Alphas.
Not a single Omega among them—unless you count the photo on page four, tucked beside the figure skating spread, of a willowy girl mid-spiral, glittering and weightless and exactly what the world has decided an Omega on the ice is supposed to look like.
I am not willowy.
I am not weightless.
And I am very much not in the figure skating department.
I tip my head back and look up at the place that is, apparently, going to either make my career or chew me into garnish.
Bloody hell.
North Star Elite does not have a campus so much as a kingdom.
The main hockey complex rises out of the snow like something built to be seen from space—six stories of black glass and brushed steel, a roofline that catches the gray Minnesota light and flings it back colder. Banners drape the entrance, navy and white, each one stitched with a championship year.
There are so many championship years.
They go up the building like rungs on a ladder I am not yet allowed to climb.
Behind it, more rinks. Beside it, more rinks. A sports science wing. A recovery center with its own signage. A statue, an actual bronze statue, of some legend mid-stride, frozen forever in the act of being better than everyone.
The whole place smells like money, Zamboni exhaust, and the particular sharp mineral tang of industrial ice, pumped out through the vents in clouds that fog and vanish.
Back home, our rink had one banner.
We laminated it ourselves.
Lonnie spelled CHAMPIONS with two Hs the first time, and we kept it that way for three seasons out of pure spite and affection.
My throat does something complicated.
No getting emotional…there’s a time and place.
Because I already did the crying.
I did it last night, face-down in a hotel pillow that smelled of bleach and stranger, after a farewell party that had no business being as devastating as it was.
The whole team showed up. Pete made a speech and ruined it halfway through by sobbing. Lonnie gave me a hockey stick they'd all signed, and somebody—I still don't know who—had written bring us back something shiny, O'Shea down the shaft in marker, and I had to leave the room.
I wrung that pillow out like a dishrag.
This morning, I am made of granite, dry shampoo, and the dregs of a frosted strawberry protein shake I drank in the shuttle while a businessman watched me like I was eating a live pigeon.
This morning I am fine.
I sling my duffel higher on my shoulder, tuck the signed stick under my arm like a lance, and walk through the gates of North Star Elite College.
It takes the campus roughly nine seconds to start staring.
Now, I want to be fair. I am not a stranger to being looked at.
In Knottingley, I was constantly looked at.
A pink-haired Omega in goalie pads is not what the good people of West Yorkshire expect to see standing in a crease, and they made their feelings known with the subtlety of a foghorn.
Old men at the boards. Mothers in the stands.
That's not natural, that one. Should be home, that one. Who let her, that one?
Loud. Always loud.
I learned to skate through noise like it was weather.
This place is different.
This place is silent.
It's a quieter cruelty—a hundred small heads turning, a hundred conversations dropping half a degree, eyes tracking me across the frozen quad and then sliding away the instant I look back. Nobody says a word. Nobody has to. The disapproval here doesn't shout.
It hums, low and constant, like a fridge you stop hearing until it switches off.
I lift my chin and let them hum.
"Bonding services?"
An Omega in a North Star staff fleece has materialized at my elbow, arms full of glossy trifolds. Her scent is anxious chamomile, and her smile is the professionally exhausted smile of someone who has given this exact pitch four hundred times before lunch.
"The Heat Clinic offers confidential consultations," she recites, pressing a pamphlet into my free hand whether I want it or not.
"Suppressant calibration, scent-neutral housing referrals, emergency suite bookings—" Her eyes do a quick, automatic sweep of me, the duffel, the stick.
"The figure skating facility is the third building down, past the recovery center. You'll see the signage."
"I'm not here for figure skating."
"There's also a transitional support group on Thursdays," she continues, already retreating, already pitching the next person, "very welcoming, very—"
And then she's gone, swallowed by the navy-and-white tide.
I look down at what she's handed me.
OMEGA WELLNESS AT NORTH STAR: A GUIDE TO THRIVING.
Inside: a Heat Clinic with its own glossy two-page spread. Suppressant titration schedules. A diagram of a "scent-neutral emergency suite," which is a fancy way of saying a room with very good ventilation and a lock.
My stomach pulls tight.
My suppressants are calibrated for Knottingley.
For a town where the Alpha population could fit in a single pub and frequently did.
The dose in my bag was prescribed by a small-town doctor for a small-town saturation, and I am now standing in a kingdom built of Alphas—every breath I take is layered with them, cedar and smoke and bourbon and bonfire, a dozen rut-edged signatures braided through the cold.
Will my dose hold here?
That's a tomorrow problem…
I decide, folding the pamphlet into my back pocket alongside the first one. Today's problem is finding the hockey administration office before I lose my nerve, my fingers, or both.
The main building's lobby is a cathedral of glass and echo.
My boots squeak. Somewhere a whistle shrills through a far doorway.
The air in here is warmer, thicker—floor wax, fresh coffee, the rubber-and-tape perfume of a place where equipment lives, and underneath it all that ambient, unkillable note of Alpha, turned up to a volume my hometown never reached.
I find the corridor marked ADMINISTRATION.
I do not find an unobstructed door.
Two men stand square in the mouth of it.
Coaching staff, by the look of them—North Star polos stretched over the kind of shoulders that used to play and now mostly intimidate.
One's holding a clipboard. The other's holding a coffee.
Both are holding a conversation that does not include the possibility of my existence.
I stop, wait, and briefly, I attempt to be a model of patience.
Attempt…until I’m just wasting time.
"Excuse me." I shift the duffel. "Could I get through?"
Nothing.
Not a glance or a grunt. The clipboard one keeps talking about a defenseman's hip flexor like I'm a draft from a window.
I feel my eyebrow climb.
All right.
I plant my boots, square my own shoulders, built, thank you, from years of conditioning that would make their defenseman weep, and try again, pitching my voice with the carrying snap I usually reserve for waving off my own defense.
"Gentlemen. I need to get past. As administrative staff, is standing in the middle of a doorway, the look you're going for, or is that a happy accident?"
That lands.
Both heads turn.
The coffee one looks me over—duffel, stick, pink hair escaping its braid, the whole unlikely package—with the slow, cataloguing once-over of a man pricing a horse.
"You need something from hockey admin?" he says, like the words don't fit together.
"Figure skating's the other building," the clipboard one supplies, already turning back to his hip flexor.
"I'm aware of where figure skating is." I keep my tone pleasant. Pleasant is a weapon if you sharpen it right. "Three people have told me. I'm not here for figure skating. I'm here for the hockey department."
A pause.
And then they laugh.
Not a chuckle. Not a polite ah, the new girl's funny.
They lose it—genuine, doubled-over, wheezing hilarity, the clipboard man actually wiping the corner of his eye, as though I have delivered the finest joke this corridor has heard all winter.
I stand in it and let them have it. I've found that if you don't flinch while a man laughs at you, he runs out of laughs faster.
"Oh—oh, that's good." Coffee straightens, still grinning.
"Sweetheart. There are no women on the hockey roster.
Not in this department. Female participation at this college runs about one percent, and that one percent is not playing net.
" He leans in, and—God, here it comes—he sniffs.
A slow, theatrical pull of air, right off the line of my throat.
"And you, sweetheart, are very obviously an Omega.
So you're standing in the wrong building, in the wrong department, in the wrong story. "
The other one snorts into his clipboard.
I don't move or give them the snarl my back teeth are grinding toward. I just look at the coffee one, very steadily, until his grin develops a hairline crack.
"This is your chance," he says, quieter now, the humor cooling into something flatter. "Walk away."
I let the silence stretch one full, deliberate beat.