Page 69 of Knottingley Ever After
He lets that sit.
“So suck it up, Alphas. If you cannot manage to play the sport you came here for in the presence of an Omega, that is a personal problem. This program will, going forward, in formal collaboration with the KPLO, be the first safe-space pipeline of its kind in the country for Omega and other underrepresented athletes in this league. More of them are coming. This year. Next year. The year after that.”
Brennan’s mouth opens.
“If any of that,” Coach Declan continues over him, without raising his voice or breaking eye contact with the room, “tickles your feathers — if any of you genuinely cannot stomach playing hockey alongside a person whose only deviation from the standard you grew up with is biological — the door is right there. There is no shame in admitting it. There is also no negotiation. Drop out.”
Nothing.
Not a single sound.
“Good.” Coach Declan brings the whistle to his lips. “Let’s start with stretching drills. Move.”
The whistle splits the rink.
The team moves. Forty blades begin their controlled grinding scrape, the rink filling again with the workmanlike sounds of a practice resuming on something approaching schedule. Jude peels off toward center, Rémi toward the blue line, Matteo — of course — winking at me across the cold as he glides past and pretends he was simply looking at a different part of the goal.
Coach Declan stays where he is for one beat longer than the rest of the staff.
His eyes find mine through the cage. Across the whole length of my crease.
And it is the same look as last night in the corridor outside the admin office. The same look as this morning at the cabinet before I lost my mind on his lapel. The same level,unreadable, professional-and-clean attention, with absolutely nothing underneath it for me to grip onto, and I do, in the small mean private chamber of my chest, hate it.
I hate it because I know, looking at him, that I still want it.
Not affection. Not warmth. Not the kind of thing a daughter wants from a father or a girlfriend wants from a man, though God knows I have spent five years deliberately not labelling whichever of those it was. What I want, plain and small and infuriating, is his approval. The nod. The
And the worst, the absolute worst of it, is that I still cannot read him. Five years of cold rooms and rehearsed conversations and not one of them prepared me for the simple infuriating fact that the man whose every micro-expression I once knew the way another girl might know the alphabet has, somewhere in the years I was not allowed to see him, locked the entire door. There is no tell to find. No flicker to seize on. Whatever Declan O’Rourke now feels about anything — about me, about this rink, about a strawberry shake down the front of a jacket eighty minutes ago — is, until he decides otherwise, a closed file.
Which means if I want it open, I will have to earn the key.
It is a problem I am not going to solve before the first whistle of my first official practice.
I take a long, level breath in through my nose. Out through my mouth. Cold air, sharp on the way down, warm on the way up. The breath drill Declan himself taught me at fifteen, the one I am too proud to abandon and too pragmatic not to use.
I tap each pipe with the toe of my stick. Left. Right.
I roll my shoulders. I drop my mask down off my forehead and clip the chin strap. The cage settles into the familiar grid in front of my eyes that has been the architecture of every important moment of my life, and the rest of the rink, the chirps and the coaches and the impossible green eyes, all of it dims to something I can shut out.
I press my forehead briefly against the inside of the mask and whisper it, quiet, mine.
It is time to lock in.
This is my chance to shine.
I will not fuck it up. By any means.
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 themorning is, by this hour, just one ingredient in a much larger and considerably more honest stew.
