Everett #2
It was a weird thing for me to do, but shock does that to a person. After everything, he was still my dad and the second I heard he was dead, all I wanted was to see him again. Like I was eight years old and still the second most important thing in the world to him.
I found the broadcast and watched it start to finish. The game focused mostly on the ice. Some on the crowd. Some on Dad as he watched, mostly because the cameras wanted a reaction shot to go with the gossipy commentators whenever someone down on the rink did something dumb.
In the second period I watched the captain of my father’s team skate up to one of his opponents, drop his gloves, and break his face in front of eighteen thousand people who stood up and screamed in excitement at the spectacle of it.
Callahan just smashed his fists into the guy’s face until blood splattered the ice between them.
And the crowd loved it. The camera kept cutting to children in the crowd with their hands over their mouths, thrilled.
I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with these people. They’re all a bunch of brutes.
I turned the volume off eventually. It’s worse with the sound off. You can see how practiced it all is: the referees hanging back at a professional distance, the linesmen choosing their moment to get that little bit more violence in. My father was fluent in it.
And then the camera found the owner’s box, and there was my father on his feet applauding. I paused the feed on his face. I closed the laptop and sat in the dark for a long time, and I have been furious at how happy he looked ever since.
They call it the code. Nobody writes it down. An insult is answered with violence. A hit is answered with violence. The violence is answered with more violence. The league sells the footage.
My father thought it was the soul of the game. I think it’s just brutality as entertainment.
Callahan could run this club. Sacco is the other option. One’s a brute. The other’s an asshole, but then that’s hockey for you.
I draft the week in my head while I wait. Tomorrow, I have a meeting with Sacco. I’ll take his measure then. Callahan will be here shortly.
I put my jacket back on and fix my cuffs. Alphas, especially the rough ones, tend to think they can walk all over me just because of my designation so I need to make it clear who I am the moment that they walk in the door.
I’m professional and I don’t take shit. I also make sure I have the full width of my father’s desk between me and the door.
I bury myself in boring sports paperwork, trying to assess which of my father’s outstanding tasks are important enough that I need to deal with them now.
Before long I hear heavy footsteps in the corridor, followed by a knock which surprises me.
“Come in.”
The door opens and the doorway fills.
He’s enormous. I knew that. I watched him fight. I’ve also seen the roster page. Six foot six is big.
He has dark blond hair, still damp from a shower. The split on his eyebrow has mostly healed but the scar is still red and angry.
His hand, the one that he used to beat Cade Dorn into the ice, is still taped.
He comes through the doorway at a slight angle, a big man’s habit.
He’s big enough that he’s clearly made a habit of trying deliberately to be unthreatening. It doesn’t work. There is nothing unthreatening about the size of him in this room.
“Mr. Rourke.” His voice is lower than I expected. “Brody Callahan. I’m so sorry for—”
That’s as far as he gets. It’s as far as either of us gets.
His scent reaches me mid-sentence. It goes through the room and then it goes through me. It goes past my nose entirely, straight down my spine, into other deeper parts of me.
My mouth floods. Heat rolls up my back and settles low in my body, and I have to put a hand on the desk.
Slick pools suddenly between my legs. The want is unmistakable. My body is preparing itself with a frankness that makes me want to walk into the sea. I lock my knees and breathe through my mouth, which helps with nothing, because now I can taste him.
Across the room, the big man has gone completely still. His pupils are blown black. His nostrils flare, once, twice, and his chest is rising. Underneath it all he is making a low sound, almost like a growl.
I know what this is. I’ve had scent matches before. Every omega has. This is something else. It’s deeper. It’s insane.
I grew up on the public-service ads, the glossy Bureau brochures, the one-in-a-hundred-thousand statistics.
Prime match.
No.
He takes a step toward me. I don’t think he decides to. I think it’s as involuntary a movement as the step I take toward him in response.
My hands are shaking.
But underneath the panic, something in me is pleased.
Some ancient, biological thing is taking him in: the size, the taped eyebrow, the split knuckles — and it feels deeply satisfied.
“Mr. Rourke,” he says again, rough now, wondering, and my name in that voice does something unforgivable to me.
“Get out,” I say. It comes out in a whisper.
He doesn’t move. He’s looking at me with his ruined face wide open and his scent is getting stronger. It’s almost as if there is an actual gravitational physical pull.
I make myself let go of the desk. I am not doing this. I am not mating with a fucking hockey player. “I said get out.” The words take every ounce of self-control that I have left.
“I—” He stops, swallows. He’s fighting it too and he is losing ground exactly as fast as I am. That is so much worse. I can’t take on a rampaging alpha. He is maybe three times my weight, head and shoulders on me. I’ve seen what the brute is capable of. I cannot win this.
I draw in a deep breath, taking him in with it and scream. “GET THE FUCK OUT.”
He blinks. He stares at me, then he goes.
He takes the first two steps backward, palms out like I’ve got a gun in my hand and I’m threatening to shoot him. Then the door clicks shut behind him.
The scent stays.