Chapter 27
Set Up
~IRIS~
Jude’s hand is warm around mine.
My free hand is, around the small waffle cone of vanilla-bean ice cream I bullied him into letting me buy at the small kiosk in the lobby, currently doing the small focused work of getting the last melting curve off the lip before it sacrifices itself to the patterned carpet of this hotel hallway.
His own cone, in his free hand, is, by my professional assessment, eighty percent untouched.
Stop staring at his cone.
It is, by every measure, the better cone. He got salted caramel. I should have gotten salted caramel. The vanilla was a strategic error executed under the duress of menu paralysis.
Stop. Staring.
Jude, beside me, walking down the wide carpeted second-floor hallway at the precise unhurried captain stride of a man who has, in the past hour, decided that a small pre-game walk with his goalie is an effective use of his Saturday afternoon, glances down at me.
His eyebrow lifts the small captain millimeter.
“O’Shea.”
“Mm.” Innocent face. Innocent face. “Yes, Captain.”
“You have, in the past sixty seconds, looked at my cone four times.”
“I have not.”
“Five times.”
“Slander.”
He shakes his head. The slow, fond, restrained shake of a captain who has, in the past four weeks, established the personal policy of not denying his goalie anything she has visibly wanted in the past sixty seconds, and he hands his cone, with the small unhurried surrender of a man who has known the outcome of this small interior negotiation since the moment he placed his order, over to me.
I squeal. Properly. The undignified vocal squeal of an Omega receiving salted caramel.
“THANK YOU.”
“Mm.”
“You are, on the record, the best Alpha currently produced by the entire human gene pool.”
“Two days ago, on this exact metric, you ranked Matteo first. Twenty-six hours ago you ranked Rémi first. I would like to flag the rotation for the official record.”
“You,” I inform him, around a triumphant lick of his salted caramel, “are, by the rule of the cone, the leader of the rankings for the next eighteen minutes.”
“Fair.”
He tugs me along by the hand toward the elevator at the end of the corridor.
“Iris.”
From behind us. Down the hall.
The voice is unfamiliar at the surface, the smooth professional carry of a man pitching across an open space without raising his voice.
But somewhere on the small inner inventory of my own brain, the voice does the precise small ring of a long-buried filing cabinet sliding open without prior consultation.
Oh.
Oh, no.
Oh, no, that voice is from a different life.
Jude stops. He turns me, gently, by my hand, the precise unhurried hundred-and-eighty of a captain executing the small protective rotation of a man who has, in the half-second of the call, already decided where to put his body in the next image.
Down the hall, walking toward us at the unhurried pace of a man who has, in the small private chamber of his career, never had to hurry, is a tall man in a charcoal wool suit cut by a tailor who would have charged the price of my entire spring tuition for the cut alone.
His hair is the polished iron-grey of a man approaching fifty.
His tie is the precise red of a person who knows precisely what red is going to do in any negotiation he is about to walk into.
His shoes are, by the small unmistakable shine of them at this distance, the kind of shoe my mother used to call a London shoe, with the small dry implication that London shoes were worn by men who had not, in any visible way, earned them.
And I have, on the small inner ledger of an Omega who has not allowed herself to remember the small unwanted face in question in five years, in fact seen him before.
Marcus Vance.
Marcus Vance who, when I was nineteen, came to the rink behind my parents’ corner shop in Yorkshire after a small-town conference championship and offered me, in the small unhurried voice of a man making a fortune, my first ever piece of professional representation.
Marcus Vance who, three days after that offer, was gone.
Marcus Vance who, by all available accounts to my nineteen-year-old self, vanished, because my hometown coach had, in the kind of single quiet conversation Iris O’Shea was not, at nineteen, in the room for, told him I was —
Jude shifts.
The shift is, by the small physical accounting of an Omega who is, at this exact moment, holding the captain’s left hand with her right and an ice cream cone with the other, the precise quarter-step half-pivot a captain executes when the body in front of him is, on the small inner gauge, in a different category than the body next to him.
He steps a half-inch ahead. His shoulder squares.
His chin lifts the small captain micron.
The amber-bourbon of his scent layers itself, fractionally warmer, over the line of my own.
Dominance posture. Filed.
Captain Kavanagh, defending.
“Marcus Vance,” Jude says, evenly.
I look up at Jude, very fast.
Jude does not look back. He keeps his eyes on Vance.
He knows him. The captain knows Marcus Vance by name.
Of course he does.
Vance, ten feet away now, smiles. The smile is the small unhurried approving smile of a man who has, on his own private gradient, been waiting some time for this exact corridor moment.
“Captain Kavanagh,” Vance says, warmly. “It is, on the record, a pleasure to see you in the flesh again. The last time was, what — two springs ago, the alumni gala? You have, since then, made an extraordinary jump. Your tape from October alone is, on my desk, the most analyzed I have run in eighteen months.”
Jude nods. The captain nod, neutral.
“I appreciate the praise. What do you need from O’Shea, Vance.”
“Oh.” Vance laughs. A small soft laugh, the kind a man uses to ease the temperature in a corridor down a notch. “Nothing tactical, Captain. I wanted, simply, to reintroduce myself. I do not believe Miss O’Shea, on the day we last met, was old enough to have committed my full name to memory.”
“We last met,” I say, carefully, finding my voice, “five years ago.”
“Indeed we did. I came to your rink in Yorkshire, the small one behind the old corner shop, the week after your conference championship. You were nineteen. You had, on every piece of available tape, just produced the cleanest forty-save game I had seen out of any Omega in any league in the country. I offered you, at that age, professional representation.”
“Okay,” I breathe.
“Your coach at the time,” Vance continues, the small considered cadence of a man laying out a careful set of cards on a small table, “Coach Declan O’Rourke, met with me at the rink office the morning after the offer was delivered.
He told me, in a clear professional voice, that you were not interested.
I confirmed the response with him three separate ways.
He was clear. He was final. He was, on the body language alone, a man I respected enough to take at his word. So I backed off.”
My breath stops, briefly, somewhere on the inside of my ribs.
Not interested.
Not. Interested.
“Not interested,” I repeat, slowly.
Vance’s brow gathers, briefly. The small considered pull of a man who has, in the half-second between my two-word repetition and his own next sentence, identified that the sentence he just delivered has, in fact, been new information to one of the two parties in the corridor.
“Miss O’Shea.”
“Yes.”
“You did not know.”
“I did not, in fact, know.”
He sighs. The small honest sigh of a professional considering the small private cost of having just delivered, in a hotel corridor, a piece of biography to the person whose biography it was.
“I assumed, for half a decade,” Vance says, more carefully now, “that the message had, in some form, made its way back to you and that the response was, in fact, yours. I see, now, that it did not, and that it was not. I apologize for the assumption. Please understand that I had no reason, on the day, to question the man.”
Jude, beside me, has not moved. The captain breath through his nose is, at the periphery of my hearing, exactly level.
“Coach O’Rourke,” Vance adds, almost conversationally, “was, of course, also forcibly transferred out of your town within months of that conversation. There was, I am given to understand, a dispute of some kind, and the new coach assigned to your team was a man who, on his own professional record, had stated publicly that he was not interested in representing Omega athletes to the senior leagues. I assumed, again, that the chain of events was, in some form, communicated to you.”
Jude’s voice, when it comes, is the precise low captain register.
“You are saying,” he says, “that Coach as in the man currently coaching her old town’s roster.”
“Yes, Captain. That is the man I am saying.”
“He was the one who forced Coach Declan’s transfer.”
“To the best of my professional understanding, yes.”
Vance sighs, again. He shifts the small leather folio in his left hand to his right, the small careful tell of a man weighing what to disclose next.
“I will say,” he adds, slower now, “that I was, on reflection, not in a position at the time to fully judge Coach O’Rourke’s decision-making. He was, professionally and personally, not in a recovered place. After his Omega passed, he was, I imagine, simply doing what he believed was protective.”
Silence.
A small unhurried beat of silence, in a hotel corridor, on a Saturday afternoon, that I am going to remember for the rest of my career.
Jude’s eyes, beside me, go very still.
“His,” Jude says, very carefully, “Omega. Passed.”
Vance’s brow gathers again, the same small considered pull as before, but slower now. The careful clinical recalibration of a man who has, in the past forty seconds, twice delivered a piece of established fact to people who were not, in fact, in possession of the established fact.
“Captain.”
“Yes.”
“You did not hear, at any point, about the skating incident.”
“No.”
“Miss O’Shea.”