Chapter 13
Lone Wolf
~DECLAN~
I blow the whistle at twelve minutes past one in the afternoon, and the sound carries down a rink that has, over the last six hours, slowly transformed from a cathedral into a war room.
They have given me everything I asked them for, and most of what I did not.
Forty bodies dotted across the ice in the various postures of athletic collapse.
Hargrove on his back with both pads splayed and the small wheezing laugh of a man who is not certain he can stand again.
Petrov on his knees against the boards, helmet pushed back, jersey black at the chest and throat with sweat.
Linder folded over his own stick on the bench.
Brennan, at the far blue line, still vertical out of pure spite, breath fogging from his nostrils like a horse winning a long argument with itself.
The whole rink smells, finally, of the work I came for.
Salted leather. The thick wet musk of twenty Alphas at the bottom of their tanks.
The hot-rubber of overworked tape, the metallic of fresh blood from somebody’s split lip I will need to make a note about.
Even the cold-mineral air that ran clean through the morning is, by this hour, just one ingredient in a much larger and considerably more honest stew.
I let them have a beat to register the sound.
“Good work.”
I keep my voice level. I have, in two seasons here and eight elsewhere, learned that the praise that lands hardest is the praise that does not have to climb a wall to reach you.
“We have games on the calendar. One home, one out of state. Both inside the next two weeks. Those games will determine where this program ranks for the rest of the season, and ranking is everything. So we will not be playing around. We will not be distracted. If any one of you came under the apparent impression that I was joking my way through these six hours, you can enjoy a season of bench-warming and a great deal of free time on the weekends. Are we clear.”
A ragged chorus of clear, Coach.
Some of them will not even remember they said it.
My eyes find her without my permission.
She is the last thing on the ice that should still be vertical, and is.
White pinnie over the chest protector that was, six hours ago, immaculate, and is now darkened to a deep rose in the long stripe down her sternum where the sweat has soaked through.
Pink hair plastered to her temple where it has escaped the bun.
Mask off, dangling from one glove. Catching her breath in measured deliberate inhalations through her nose, the way I taught her at fifteen and she has, against everything, never abandoned.
She has always had stamina that frankly should not be legal.
I clocked it the first afternoon I ever watched her play.
A small Yorkshire ringette league I had not been invited to.
Some scout had sent me grainy footage of a teenage girl in inherited pads stopping pucks she had no professional business getting near, and I drove out unannounced because I do not trust scouting tape and never have, and I sat in the stands of a barn with bad lighting and watched a fifteen-year-old play the final twenty minutes of a third-period blowout with the same focus and the same economy of motion she had brought to the first shift of the game.
Dangerous on the ice. Dangerous off it.
That second part is the one I am not going to acknowledge today and will not, with luck, acknowledge tomorrow.
You had to change at five-thirty in the morning because of her. Walk of shame down a back corridor at the assistant-faculty residence with strawberry whey down your lapel and your jaw flecked with the same. Be honest about whose mess that was.
Mine.
Earned, frankly. I will give her that, in the privacy of my own skull, where there are no witnesses and no transcript.
I stood in a dark kitchen at five oh-five this morning and asked a woman I have not been within speaking distance of in five years to forgive me a betrayal she has every right to remain angry about for the rest of her life, and I did it with the five thinnest words available to a coward of my professional age, and she paid me back in the only currency that landed.
I would have done worse to a man who did less.
And yet.
And yet you did not, in the entire eighty-seven seconds between her question and her arm coming up with that bottle, find one extra word in your mouth to give her.
No. I did not. Because the entire architecture of the last five years is built on the precise absence of those extra words, and the entire reason I am still sleeping at night is that I have convinced myself, with the rigor of a man who has had nothing better to do at three in the morning, that it was for her own good.
She had to leave that town. She had to be wanted by a roster that did not have me on it.
She had to know, in her bones, that her career did not require the steady weather of my proximity to survive.
She has proved every one of those propositions correct. She is here. She is rostered. She is, at this moment, the last athlete standing on a sheet of ice that has felled grown Alphas around her like cut wheat.
And it has not made the choice easier to live with. Not by half a degree.
King of Avoidance. That is what the league office calls you when they think you have not heard it.
Wear the crown. You earned it.
There is also the smaller, more pragmatic problem of my own packlessness, which is a problem I refuse to think about until the league’s reissued conduct review forces me to.
Coach Whitlock and Coach Marek call me a lone wolf when they think it is collegial banter, and when they think it is private they call me considerably less generous things.
The institution has its position. The new conduct guidelines, the ones the Knot-Pucking League Organization has been quietly working into the staff contracts for the last eighteen months, are unambiguous.
A head coach who has not formalized pack status by the end of his fifth year on staff is, as of next season, ineligible for tournament-level promotion.
I am, by every objective measure, incompatible with everyone and everything.
There is no Omega in the world who is going to live with a man whose primary love language is the silence after a missed save.
The clock is ticking. I have been hearing it tick.
I am also, with admirable consistency, ignoring it.
Her eyes lift.
Across the cold length of the rink, between the white pinnie and the granite man at center ice, her storm-grey gaze lifts off her own pad and finds mine, and holds.
And the truth I have been refusing to write down for five years writes itself in the space behind my sternum in the flat, professional script of a man delivering bad news to himself: she is the only person who has ever ignited anything in me.
Not warmth, exactly. Warmth is the easy currency.
This is closer to combustion. A pilot light I have spent half a decade keeping at exactly the level required to heat a small empty house, and that the simple matter of being looked at by Iris O’Shea reliably blows wide open.
It is dangerous to know. It is more dangerous to admit.
Her face goes stoic, exactly the way it did this morning at the cabinet and last night in the corridor and every other moment of professional contact between us since she walked back into my building.
It is the wall she went up at fifteen the first time a referee told her she did not belong in a boys’ lane and that she has spent every year since making more efficient.
She pulls her eyes away.
I hate it.
I do not let myself acknowledge that I hate it.
“Wash up.” I lift my voice to the room without looking away from her crease. “Tomorrow morning, six sharp. Late means a wasted day of drills with no scrimmage, so unless you have a soft spot for skating in circles until your hamstrings file a complaint, do not be late. Dismissed.”
I turn before the team can read whatever else is on my face, and I skate.
My office is a small panelled room at the back of the staff wing, originally a faculty parlour in a building that has not been a parlour in fifty years.
Bookshelves I have largely failed to fill.
A desk that came with the room. A leather chair I bought myself the first summer I was hired.
The wall opposite the door holds the framed inventory I do not look at unless I have a guest, which is a wall of plaques and signed pucks and one yellowing newspaper page that calls me the youngest head coach in the league’s history to take a senior roster to the championship, and which now hangs there primarily as a reminder that you can win a great deal in this sport and still come home, every night for a decade, to a flat that smells of cedar and your own coffee and nothing else.
I sit. I open the next folder in the stack. I am four signatures into a stack of fourteen when the door does not knock so much as suffer a polite warning shot before opening.
Whitlock first. Marek a half-step behind him, the travel mug in his hand at last empty, which is itself an event.
“Declan.”
“Gentlemen.” I do not look up from the form. “You are aware I have a meeting in twenty minutes.”
“Which is why,” Whitlock says, in the carefully metered voice of a man who has rehearsed his entry, “we wanted to catch you first. Now exactly what strings did you pull to get the girl on the team.”
I lift my eyes.
They are both standing in front of my desk with the matched, faintly betrayed expressions of two men who feel a piece of household furniture has been rearranged behind their backs. The disappointment is rehearsed. The anger is real and lives lower in the chest than either of them would admit to.
I cap the pen. Set it down. Lean back.
“What exactly is the issue.”