Chapter 1 #2
"I was formally invited." Every consonant clipped and placed.
"I have an acceptance letter with this college's crest on it sitting in the front pocket of this bag.
So I'm going to ask one more time, like the sane adult I came here as: move aside.
" I tilt my head, and let a little honey drip into it—because if reasonable gets me mocked, I might as well show them the other gear.
"Or would you prefer I lean into my Omega gifts?
I can do this the girlie way. I can summon a quivering lip, a very loud cry, dramatics that'll bring a department head running.
I'm versatile. Your call, gentlemen. I just thought I'd offer, since asking nicely seems to be the funniest thing two grown Alphas have heard all season. "
The grins are gone now.
We have officially graduated to scowls.
I'm aware—peripherally, the way a goalie is always aware—that we've drawn an audience. A clump of Alphas has slowed near the lobby's edge, gear bags over their shoulders, watching the corridor like it's a fight that hasn't been called yet.
One mutters a name. Brennan.
Another answers. And Voss.
I file them away on reflex: Coffee is Voss. Clipboard is Brennan.
You learn the names of the people standing between you and where you need to be.
Brennan recovers first, lifting the clipboard like a tiny shield. "Look. Even granting you got an acceptance letter, and I'm not granting it, it'd have to be a clerical error. League regs make it flat-out impossible for someone like you to take a roster spot."
"Especially," Voss adds, and the word arrives soft and surgical, "an Omega who's unbonded. No pack." He spreads his hands, all false sympathy. "No team's touching that liability. So whatever paper you've got, princess, it's not worth the crest it's printed on."
They laugh again.
And this time it costs me something.
Because the thing is—I knew. Somewhere under the bravado, in the part of me that reads the play before it develops, I knew there'd be a clause.
A catch. Some bonding regulation coiled in the fine print, waiting.
You don't grow up an Omega in this sport without learning that the rulebook has a whole chapter that's really just about you.
But I was invited.
Personally. Hand-picked. Flown across an ocean.
Which means somebody at North Star Elite read every line of those regulations, looked at my unbonded, packless, pink-haired self…and sent the letter anyway.
So either it's the error they're so sure it is.
Or somebody knows something I don't.
I keep my face shut, my chin level, and my fists have curled tight enough that my taped wrists ache.
I'm working very hard to make sure none of that reaches my expression, because these two are starving for it.
They want the lip. They want the wobble.
They want to be able to say see, told you, Omega, and I would genuinely rather eat my own glove than feed them.
I'm still hunting for my next move when a voice cuts down the corridor from somewhere behind me.
"Move. Aside."
Two words. Low. Unhurried. Carrying the kind of authority that doesn't need volume because it has never, in its life, been ignored.
"She's clearly not the least bit intimidated by either of you fuckers playing tough. So quit embarrassing yourselves and let her through."
The floor drops out of my stomach.
I know that voice.
I know it the way I know my own glove hand. I have heard that voice count me through wall drills until my legs gave out. I have heard it say again, O'Shea, and everything is fine. I have heard it pitched low against my temple in a loud arena, telling me to hold.
I have spent five years not hearing it.
I do not turn around.
I physically cannot. My body has locked itself out.
Because if I turn, then it's real—then the man I once believed would personally escort me through the gates of the league, the man who built me and then vanished, no note, no call, no goodbye, nothing but a Declan-shaped hole where my whole future used to stand—that he's here.
In this corridor.
Breathing the same overpriced, Alpha-thick air as me.
I keep my eyes nailed to the administration door.
Voss and Brennan, predictably, fold like cheap lawn chairs.
"All right, all right." Voss steps back, hands raised, the laugh now sour. "C'mon, Declan. You never get in the middle of anything. Since when do you care?"
"Maybe he's being generous," Brennan says, sliding aside with a smirk I can hear without looking. "Sparing her the tryout. Real mercy, that—better she finds out now than in front of a crowd."
They both think that's tremendous.
I let them have the last laugh, because it's the last thing of mine they're getting today.
The doorway is clear.
I make my legs work. I walk—even, unhurried, the duffel riding my shoulder and the signed stick under my arm and my hometown written down the shaft of it in somebody's marker—straight between them and through the door, and I do not look back.
Not at Voss. Not at Brennan.
Not at him.
The door swings shut behind me. Heavy. Solid. A good, final sound.
And then, because I am only made of so much granite, and apparently the supplier shorted me, I let myself stop.
One breath.
Just one.
There's a window set into the door. A small rectangle of reinforced glass, the kind with wire mesh threaded through it, the kind every rink in the world seems contractually required to install.
I shouldn't.
I absolutely should not.
I look anyway.
And there he is.
Five years older and somehow not aged so much as deepened, the way good wood does. Six-foot-four, exactly as my memory filed him, except the silver at his temples has spread—won ground—and there are lines now at the corners of his eyes that the boy I remember didn't have to earn.
Black athletic jacket. Gloves in one hand. Snow still melting on his shoulders in dark, scattered stars, because the sky chose today, of all days, to come down soft and white and pretty over the worst reunion of my life.
Declan O'Rourke.
He isn't looking at Voss. He isn't looking at Brennan, who are already drifting off down the hall, their amusement curdling in the cold.
He's looking at the door.
At the window.
At me.
For one suspended, gut-twisting second, his eyes find mine through the wire-threaded glass, green, unreadable, and yet steady, always so maddeningly steady.
Every word I have rehearsed for exactly this moment over five years scatters like a broken play.
I step back from the glass, knowing damn well that those memories deserve to be burried in the past she left in the heart of Knottingley.
She takes a deep breath and let’s it out, turning away so her back is against the door and she has enough time to fix the weight of her duffle bag on her shoulder.
With a determined nod, she takes a deep breath and let’s it out.
No distractions. We’re not here to play.
Welcome to Minnesota, O'Shea.