Chapter 3
Checking
~IRIS~
There is no gentler way to be welcomed into an elite institution full of Alphas than to be shoved onto a freshly cut sheet of ice and told to demonstrate, in front of everyone, exactly how rusty you are.
I have decided this is what Cinderella felt like.
Not the part with the gown and the orchestra.
The other part.
The part where a girl who has spent her whole life sweeping cinders is suddenly bundled into a carriage that was a vegetable an hour ago and hurled toward a ballroom she was never built for, the whole ride underscored by the awareness that a clock somewhere is winding itself up to ruin her.
In the story, the magic chooses her.
In mine, I climbed into the pumpkin myself, both hands on the wheel, because the alternative was staying in a town that fit me like a coat two sizes too small.
The clock is real, though.
I will give the fairy tale that.
I have at best three months to prove my worth here, unless its like a month in their books. Currently with no pack, no contract, a invite to an elite college that’s already judging me or better yet, thinking I’m just another figure skating hoping prodigy ready to spring to life.
A deadline ticking somewhere behind my ribs in a rhythm I have learned to skate to.
I hold out anyway.
I hold out because I have spent five years proving to a world that did not ask for the demonstration that I belong on this ice, in this sport, in this exact crease, and a person does not lay that down just because the venue got colder, the Alphas got prettier, and the cupboard they changed me in still smelled of mop.
So. The ball. The carriage. The clock.
Game face on, O’Shea.
The North Star practice rink is a cathedral with the heating turned off.
The cold here is a different species from the cold back home, engineered, industrial, pumped clean and merciless through vents the size of dinner tables, and it carries that sharp scorched-mineral bite of fresh ice straight down the back of my throat the second I push through the bench door.
My blades bite. My pads slap a familiar percussion against my thighs.
For one clean breath, before anyone has the chance to ruin it, the rink is just a rink, and I love it the way I have loved it since I was four years old.
Then the smell of the team arrives, and the breath is over.
Twenty-some Alphas at the start of a session is a wall you walk into rather than a thing you merely notice.
It hits in layers. Topmost, the honest stuff, sweat soaked into jerseys that have been pulled on damp one too many times, the rubber-and-tape perfume of fresh stick work, the chemical pine of whatever Jimmy mops the floor with.
Beneath that, the gear itself, leather and foam gone faintly feral.
And threaded through all of it, impossible to file under equipment, the scent signatures of the men, cedar and smoke and bourbon and bonfire and cold steel, a dozen rut-edged Alpha registers braided together until the air itself has a pulse.
Back home, the entire Alpha population could fit inside one pub and frequently did.
This is a saturation my hometown never reached. I make a careful, clinical note of it, the way I would note a slick patch near the blue line, and I file the small private worry, will my suppressants hold in this, under problems for a version of me who is not currently being watched by forty eyes.
Because I am being watched.
The skate to my net is the longest commute of my life.
Coach has not arrived. That much is clear at once, and it changes the chemistry of the room the way a missing referee changes a faceoff, everyone a fraction looser, a fraction more willing.
The team has organized itself into drills without him, pucks already cracking off the boards, and it takes me roughly four seconds to understand two things.
The first is that the rink has split. Not by line, not by drill, but cleanly, instinctively, into two distinct knots of men who orbit each other like wary planets, and the gap between them is the kind of gap you could lose a body in.
The second thing I understand is that whatever the drill is supposed to be, the target is me.
They funnel toward my end.
Shots come in, and not the lazy warmup floaters a decent team feeds a goalie cold, these have intent stitched into them, rising, snapping, aimed at the shoulders, the mask, the spots that say we are testing whether you flinch rather than we are testing whether you save.
I do not flinch.
I have been “not-flinching” professionally since I was sixteen.
I drop into my stance, low and wide and ready, and I let the old machine take over, the one with no feelings in it, just angles and edges and the gorgeous mathematics of shrinking a net.
And then I make the mistake of breathing in.
Because one of those two knots of men has drifted into my peripheral vision, and at the heart of it, unmistakable, is a crimson hoodie I last saw vanishing down a corridor after handing me a nickname I did not consent to.
Santori.
He is not even doing anything. He is leaning on his stick, listening to someone, laughing at something, the picture of a man for whom the world has always been a comfortable temperature, and the genuine injustice of it is that I clock him by scent before I clock him by sight.
Blood orange and burnt sugar and espresso reach across the cold and find me with the ease of something that has done it before.
Worse.
Catastrophically worse.
The men standing nearest him smell good, too.
Not the ambient locker-room fug or the generic Alpha hum.
Specific. Distinct.
There is one throwing off something deep and resinous, pine and snow-laden cedar, and a clean, cool note like air at the top of a mountain, the kind of scent that makes your shoulders come down from around your ears without your permission.
There is another, closer to Santori, layered and warm, amber smoke and bourbon vanilla and a low spice that reads, somehow, like a kitchen at the exact moment dinner is ready.
Concentrate, you absolute traitor of a nervous system.
This is going to be a problem.
I knew the scent-match thing with Santori was going to be a problem.
I did not budget for a second and third complication standing two feet from the first, and I am still wrestling my own nose into submission, still telling my body in firm interior italics that we are working, that this is a job interview with skate blades, when the universe sends its customary correction.
A puck slams off my mask.
The sound is enormous and intimate at once, a hard hollow crack that lives somewhere between my ears and detonates outward, snapping my head a few degrees and rattling my teeth in their sockets.
White light blooms and clears. The cage held.
But for one ringing half-second, the rink tips sideways, and when it rights itself, the laughter has already started.
It rolls in from the far knot of men, the planet that does not contain a crimson hoodie, loose and delighted and entirely unbothered.
“Damn, Goalie.” One of them coasts a slow circle, stick across his shoulders like a man crucified by his own comedy. “Serious question. Is the rust permanent, or did you simply never have the skills to begin with?”
More laughter.
A pointed finger or two, aimed my way, like the gesture itself is a punchline. They are watching for the reaction, all of them, leaning into the silence the way you lean over a pond to see if it is frozen solid.
I keep my chin level and let them have the quiet.
Here is the one mercy of the mask. It is a cage that helps hide a face. My face. They cannot see that my jaw has gone tight enough to crack a tooth, cannot see the flat, furious line of my mouth, and cannot harvest a single drop of the wounded little flinch they are fishing so hard for.
I am grateful for the helmet in the specific way you are grateful for a locked bathroom door.
It buys me a place to keep my expression while I decide what to do with it.
They line up the next one. I watch the shooter’s hands settle, watch the blade load, and I am already dropping low, already doing the math, when a body slices into the lane and kills the shot before it is born.
Crimson.
Santori has skated directly into the firing line and stopped there, a spray of shaved ice fanning off his edges, and the surprise of it lands in my chest harder than the puck did.
He is not looking at me. He is looking at them, easy and unhurried, and when he speaks his voice carries the whole width of the rink without once climbing into a shout.
“All right. All right.” He pats the air, a man calming a dog he is not afraid of.
“I genuinely could not care less what we get up to off the ice. Off the ice, be feral, I’ll bring snacks.
But maybe don’t be a pack of complete douchebags to the goalie who might end up minding the net for your half of this team. ”
A whistle goes up from somewhere in the crowd, long and lewd and grinning.
“Oh, that’s sweet.” The crucified comedian again, gliding closer, scenting blood of an entirely different flavor now. “Not even an hour, Santori. Not even one. And you’re out here white-knighting for the wilting little bubblegum special? She bat her lashes at you in the hallway?”
It is a good jab.
I will give them that, professional to professional. It is built to land twice, once on me and once on him, designed to make defending me cost him something so the next man thinks twice before trying it.
Santori does not pay the price.
He simply lets the joke hang there in the cold and go stale, and he says nothing at all, and the nothing is the loudest thing he has done since I met him.
I have known this man for the length of one conversation and one near-miss, and even on that thin acquaintance, I can tell his silence is rare currency, because the laughter falters against it almost immediately.
It is one thing to bait a man who fires back. It is quite another to bait a wall.