Prologue One Lucky Shot #3
Her voice does not rise. It never rises. Eleanora Ashford-Holloway does not yell. She simply speaks with such calculated precision that every syllable lands exactly where it will cause the most damage.
"Hockey, of all the sports." She says it the way someone might say taxidermy or competitive eating.
With bewildered disdain. "Of all the arenas you could humiliate this family in, you chose the one filled with sweaty men hitting each other with sticks.
Your father's influence, no doubt. All those ridiculous ideologies he planted in your head about women in sports, about Omegas defying their nature.
Look where it got you, Sage. Twenty-four years old, unbonded, pursuing a career that will never happen. "
Your father's influence.
My jaw aches from clenching.
Because she is right…about that part, at least.
My father is the reason I picked up a stick instead of a figure skating costume.
The reason I spent my childhood in rinks instead of pageant halls.
The reason I believe, despite every rejection and every closed door and every clipboard that refuses to bear my name, that an Omega can do anything an Alpha can do on the ice.
Rick Holloway. Hockey coach. Eternal optimist. The man who knelt beside me when I was six years old, put a stick in my hands, and told me that the ice does not care about designations.
That speed does not know gender. The puck does not ask if you are Alpha or Omega before it obeys the laws of physics.
He believed in me before I had the vocabulary to believe in myself.
And my mother has spent every year since trying to un-teach that belief, replacing it with the particular brand of resigned pragmatism that governs the lives of wealthy Omega women who have accepted their place in the social hierarchy and cannot comprehend why their daughter refuses to do the same.
"Women in sports do not belong," she continues, and each word is a brick laid in a wall she has been building around me since I was old enough to disappoint her.
"Particularly an Omega. I do not understand how many rejections and refusals it is going to take before you understand that the world is not going to bend to accommodate your stubbornness.
Your talent is not the issue, Sage. It never has been.
The issue is that you are fighting a war that was lost before you were born. "
She glances at me. Brief. Clinical. The kind of look a surgeon gives a patient who has refused a recommended procedure.
"I have said my piece. Your father is home and has requested to see you, so do not keep him waiting as well."
"Yes, Mother."
The words scrape past the tightness in my throat. Obedient. Automatic. The conditioned response of a daughter who learned early that arguing with Eleanora Ashford-Holloway is an exercise in futility that only results in longer lectures and colder silences.
I bite the inside of my bottom lip until I taste copper.
My fists clench in my lap, the tendons in my forearms jumping visibly against skin that is still flushed from two hours of exertion.
The blisters on my right hand scream in protest, the raw skin pulling tight over swollen tissue.
My nails dig crescents into my palms, adding fresh marks to the collection of old ones.
Outside the window, the arena recedes as Jeffrey pulls the Escalade out of the parking lot with the smooth deference of a man who has perfected the art of driving as if the passengers in his backseat are not engaged in quiet emotional warfare.
My mother has already returned to her tablet. Her attention has moved on, the conversation filed away with the same brisk finality she applies to board meetings and personnel evaluations.
Done. Resolved.
Next item on the agenda.
But I am not done.
I am never done.
This is my life.
Constant rejection. Doors that open for everyone except the girl who trained harder, skated faster, and wanted it more desperately than any Alpha in the building.
A mother who views my passion as a pathology and my ambition as a character flaw.
A world that acknowledges my talent in the same breath it uses to tell me that talent is irrelevant when the body housing it is wrong.
The city scrolls past the tinted windows in a blur of streetlights and shadowed buildings. I press my forehead against the cold glass, letting the vibration of the road travel through my skull, and close my eyes.
But I am still here.
Still fighting.
Still lacing up my skates at four in the morning when the world is still dark, and the ice belongs only to me.
Continuing running drills until my body fails and then running them again because failure is just the space between attempts.
Always showing up to tryouts where the scouts will not look at me, and the players will laugh about me and the coaches will tell them maybe next year, with the tired compassion of men who know next year will look exactly like this year.
I am the Omega who will not stop.
The girl they cannot figure out how to get rid of because she keeps coming back, keeps getting better, keeps outperforming every Alpha they put in front of her, and then standing at center ice demanding that someone, anyone, have the courage to put her name on a fucking roster.
The thought is fierce. Burning.
A coal lodged in my chest that refuses to cool, no matter how many buckets of rejection they pour over it.
And I am terrified.
Not of the rejection. I have survived that. Survived it so many times that the sting has dulled into a permanent ache that I carry the way other people carry their phone or their wallet. Always present. Always accounted for.
I am terrified because I do not know how many more tryouts I have in me. How many more empty arenas can I stand in while my best performance goes unrecorded? How many more drives home with my mother's disappointment filling the car like perfume designed to suffocate.
I am terrified because I can feel the doubt creeping in.
Slow. Quiet. Persistent.
The voice that sounds like my mother's but lives in my own head.
The one that whispers she is right, you know.
The one that suggests, gently at first and then with increasing volume, that maybe the world is not broken.
Maybe I am... that the dream is not being denied because of prejudice but because it was never meant for someone like me in the first place.
No.
I shove the thought away with a violence that makes my whole body jerk.
My mother glances up from her tablet, one sculpted eyebrow arching in silent inquiry.
"Muscle cramp," I mutter.
She returns to her screen.
No.
I refuse.
I refuse to let the doubt win. Refuse to let the rejections rewrite the truth that I have proven on the ice a thousand times over. Refuse to let my mother's cold pragmatism and the scouts' cowardice and the league's institutional fear of change convince me that I am chasing something impossible.
Because it is not impossible.
It is improbable. Unlikely. Statistically challenging.
But not impossible.
The Escalade turns onto the long, tree-lined drive that leads to the Holloway estate, and the familiar weight of homecoming settles over me.
Not the warm, safe kind that other people associate with the word.
The suffocating kind. The kind that reminds you that even your own house is not a space where you are allowed to be fully, unapologetically yourself.
I open my eyes.
Watch the iron gates swing open as Jeffrey enters the code.
Witness the manicured hedges blur past, each one trimmed to identical perfection, not a single leaf out of place. Like the house. Like the family. Like the image my mother has spent her entire life constructing and my entire life trying to force me into.
All I need is one opportunity.
One team. One coach. One scout is willing to look past the designation printed on my identification and see the player standing on the ice.
One chance to prove that skill matters more than biology. That heart weighs more than hormones. That an Omega girl with scarred knuckles and a stick in her hand and fifteen years of ice in her veins can do what no one like her has ever done before.
The car rolls to a stop in front of the estate's main entrance.
Jeffrey opens my door, his brown eyes offering the quiet solidarity that has sustained me through more bad days than I can count.
"Good day on the ice, Miss Holloway?"
I look up at him.
At the house looming behind him. At the life that has been chosen for me and the one I keep choosing for myself, knowing they will never coexist.
"The best one yet, Jeffrey."
He nods, because he always does. Because Jeffrey understands that best does not mean good enough for them. It means good enough for me.
And that has to be enough.
For now.
I grab my gear bag from the trunk.
Sling it over my shoulder.
Walk toward the front door of a house that has never felt like home.
And somewhere deep inside the furnace of my chest, beneath the fatigue, fury, and the fear that maybe my mother is right and maybe the world will never change and maybe I really am tilting at windmills made of ice and institutional resistance, a single thought glows like an ember that refuses to die.
All I need is one lucky shot.