Chapter 3 #2
When the rink has gone properly, awkwardly quiet, when he has their attention by the simple violence of withholding his own, Santori finally speaks again, and this time it is level and flat and stripped of every ounce of performance.
“Jude said no executive decisions until the coaches see what she’s got.” A beat, while that name does whatever work it apparently does. “So how about we wait and see. Like adults. With jobs.”
It is enough.
That is the part that interests me, watching from inside my cage, filing it away with the rest.
He does not threaten anyone. He does not raise a hand or his voice. He invokes a name, lets it sit, and the temperature of the entire room obeys it, and two men peel away from the far knot and skate over to take up position at Santori’s flanks like the sentence summoned them.
The first to arrive is the source of that amber-and-bourbon warmth I caught earlier, and now that he is close I get the rest of him to go with the scent.
Tall, though everyone here is tall, built thick through the shoulders and carrying it like furniture he has owned for years.
Dark blond hair shoved back off his face.
A nose that has been broken at least twice and never once apologized for it.
He does not hurry. He does not posture. He simply arrives and is, somehow, the most settled object in the building, and I find I have looked at him a half-second longer than I looked at anyone else, cataloguing, the way you catalogue weather you will have to skate in.
“Jude.” One of the far-knot men spreads his arms, all wounded reason. “Come on. It can’t be that serious.”
So. That is Jude.
He shrugs. It is an unbothered roll of those furniture shoulders, and yet it carries more authority than the comedian’s entire monologue managed, and when he answers, his voice has that low, even gravel of a man who has simply never needed to be loud to be obeyed.
“Whether it’s serious or not isn’t up to me,” he says.
“It’s up to you. This Omega situation might be part of the new government initiative.
You all heard the same noise I did over the summer.
So if you don’t want to believe she could’ve been sent here to watch how this team behaves, fine, don’t believe it.
But then act like a fool on that theory and find out.
” He lets it settle. “You know how the league treats conduct flags. That’s your future you’re gambling with out here. Not mine.”
That does what Santori’s silence started.
It finishes the laughter off entirely.
The tension that drops over the ice in its place is thick enough to lean on, and I stand in my crease inside it and turn a new question over slowly. Captain. He has to be the captain. Nobody redistributes the mood of a room that fast without a letter stitched on his chest to back the withdrawal.
Jude pushes off without waiting to be agreed with, gliding back toward center, the conversation over because he has decided it is.
And as he goes, Santori’s head turns, and his eyes find mine across the cold, and the corner of his mouth tips into something small and unmistakably pleased with itself.
There it is.
The man wants his brownie points. The man wants a gold star, a ribbon, and possibly a small ceremony for the act of being decent in public.
He has defended me twice in one morning, and he would clearly like that noticed, logged, and entered into the great running tab of what Iris O’Shea allegedly owes him.
And the irritating thing, genuinely, is that I cannot even fault him for it.
He stepped into a live shooting lane for a stranger. I have been on this ice for ten minutes, and he is already the only person in the building who has spent anything on my behalf. So, fine. Privately.
Behind the cage where no one can use it against either of us, I give him the point. One point. For effort. He is not getting a ceremony.
The third man arrives last, and quietest, and I still do not have a name for him.
He is the source of the pine and the mountain air, and up close he is, frankly, enormous, the kind of tall that rearranges a room’s sense of scale, a wall of pale-blond Alpha who moves with a startling, careful economy, as though he has spent his whole life learning not to knock things over.
He does not say a word. He does not sweep the far knot with a glare or plant himself in a pose.
He simply comes to a stop a stride off Santori’s shoulder and exists there, immovable, and the cold around him reads quieter than the cold anywhere else, like he carries a hush with him the way other people carry cologne.
Shy, maybe.
Or merely a man who has nothing to prove and therefore says nothing.
I cannot tell yet, and I dislike not being able to tell.
From the sheer architecture of him, the breadth, the low planted weight of his stance, I would put money on a defenseman.
The body of a man built to stand between something fragile and something fast. But I am guessing, and I do not like to guess, so I file him too, under unknown, observe further, and return my attention to the ice before anyone catches me studying the scenery.
A clap cuts the rink in half.
Sharp, flat, two palms meeting once with intention, and every head turns toward the bench doors at the far end, where three men have appeared and stand waiting for the noise of the room to come to them rather than chasing it.
I know the one in the middle before my eyes have finished focusing.
My body knows him first. There is a particular cold readiness that climbs my spine whenever Declan O’Rourke enters a space, a thing my nervous system files under his name and refuses to let me unlearn, and it climbs now, vertebra by vertebra, while the rest of me catches up.
Cedarwood. Black coffee gone hours cold.
Winter whiskey and leather and the clean bracing bite of snow lifting off wool.
Even here, even drowned under twenty Alphas and a building’s worth of industrial chill, his scent finds the back of my throat and sets up residence, and I hate, with a precision I have spent five years sharpening, exactly how much my body still considers that smell a synonym for safe.
To his left and right stand the two coaching-staff men from the administration corridor.
The clipboard. The coffee. The pair who stood square in a doorway this morning and laughed until they had to wipe their eyes, performing their level best to keep me from getting where I was invited to go. They have not improved with the passage of a few hours.
They look at me now with the flat, faintly inconvenienced expression of men confronted with a clerical error that has learned to skate.
Declan does not look at me at all.
Not yet.
He looks at his team, and when he speaks, his voice does the thing it has always done, lands quietly and carries total, the temperature of authority that has simply never been raised because it has never needed to be.
“We’re short on ice today,” he says. “Figure skating’s running tryout rotations, and they’re at double capacity, so we share the sheet, and we don’t waste a second of it. Sloppy gets you nothing but a shorter session.”
“They forgot one more,” somebody calls from the far knot.
The laughter starts up again, shorter this time, testing the new ice, and a few fingers swing toward my crease, and the snickering threads through the cold looking for a place to land.
I notice who does not join in.
Jude. Santori. The enormous quiet one whose name I still do not have.
All three stand silent through the entire performance, faces unreadable, and the realization arrives slowly and certain, settling into me like a held note. They are not laughing because they are timing it.
They are watching how long the rink lets the joke run, the way you watch how long a man holds a cheap shot before the referee decides who he is.
Declan lets the laughter spend itself.
Then he kills it with eleven words.
“O’Shea is here on special invitation.” A pause, deliberate, a man placing a puck exactly where he wants it. “Which was approved by me.”
The rink goes airless.
My eyes widen behind the cage before I can stop them, and I am abruptly, furiously grateful for the mask all over again, because my face has lost the plot entirely.
Approved by him?
He approved it. He read the regulations, looked at the unbonded, packless, pink-haired catastrophe of me, and signed his name to the bottom of the invitation that dragged me across an ocean, and the question rises up so fast and so loud it nearly knocks me off my edges.
Why.
Why would the man who walked out of my life five years ago without a note, without a call, without so much as a backward glance, the man who left a Declan-shaped hole where my whole future used to stand, why in God’s name would that man reach back across half a decade of silence and personally open this door for me?
I do not have an answer.
I have the opposite of an answer.
And I am not the only one ambushed by the sentence.
The two staff coaches flanking him have gone visibly, satisfyingly still, the clipboard one’s head turning a slow degree toward Declan as though the news has only just reached him too. Whatever Declan approved, he did not appear to consult the men beside him before he approved it.
He does not give any of us a moment to recover.
He simply walks straight into the open space, his own announcement made.
“So you can keep talking,” he says, and the word talking comes out scrubbed clean of any patience.
“You can chirp her, point at her, run your mouths all morning. But I approved her attendance, and I approved the possibility of her being on this roster, and if any one of you has a genuine problem with that, here is your invitation to settle it the only honest way there is. Prove to me on the ice that I made the wrong call.”
He lets that hang.
“Three full game rounds,” he goes on. “Don’t get cocky.
Before any of you decides she’s a charity case the building took pity on, get this through your helmets.
O’Shea was the only female Omega in her town ever scouted out of it.
She is sitting on a full-ride scholarship to this college.
” His gaze tracks the bench, unhurried, landing on faces.
“A scholarship. Which I’d wager a fair number of you have never had the displeasure of needing, because you either signed up for a decade of debt to be here or you sweet-talked a trust fund and watched generational money drop fifty grand a year like loose change.
She did neither. There is no version of that scholarship that gets handed to a girl, or to an Omega, out of kindness.
It gets won. With talent and with brains.
So when you find yourselves being douchebags to her, and you will, I want you holding that fact while you do it. ”
His eyes come to me then.
Finally.
Green and level and unreadable, finding the slit of my cage across the whole cold length of the rink, and every cell in my body wants to do something with it, flinch or soften or burn, and I refuse all three. I make myself an emotionless plank of wood.
A goalie. A locked door with a person somewhere behind it.
I give him my stance and my focus and not one molecule more, and after a moment, something I cannot read passes behind his face, and he lets me go.
“Now, then.” He turns back to the team, brisk, the lecture filed and finished.
“Let’s see what this team’s actually got.
And don’t any of you make the mistake of thinking the tryout is hers alone.
It isn’t. Last season means nothing to me.
A letter on your chest means nothing to me.
Every position on this roster is open ice as of this morning, and every one of you is going to spend the next three rounds earning the right to keep standing where you’re standing. ”
He sweeps the rink one last time, a slow, total accounting of every man on it, and gives a single short nod.
“Game on.”