MasukMaeve's POVI closed the laptop and sat there for a moment. Then I stood up, put my things in my bag, and walked out of the library. I had been sitting with the decision for two weeks in the same way I sat with difficult legal arguments, turning it over, examining it from every angle, looking for the flaw that would make it untenable. Looking for the reason that outweighed all the other reasons. I had been thorough about it, the way I was thorough about everything that mattered, and the conclusion I kept arriving at was the same one every time. I was done waiting for a readiness that was never going to feel clean. There was no version of ready that came without the weight of September and the weight of my family and the weight of everything that sat between us. I had understood that on the river path last Tuesday when I had felt him watching from his usual point and had felt, alongside the familiar complicated pull of the bond, something that was simply tired. Tired of managin
Declan's POVThe confirmation came on a Thursday afternoon by email, which was not how I had imagined it. I had imagined a phone call. Dan's voice, that contained excitement of his that he kept professional right up until it wasn't. A moment with weight to it. Instead it was an email with a subject line that read Formal Scouting Confirmation - D. Hayes and three paragraphs of language I had to read twice before it resolved into what it was actually saying, which was that I was being formally considered for the upcoming NHL draft and would be included in the official scouting pool. I sat at my desk and read it three times. This was it. This was the thing I had been building toward since I was twelve years old watching my dad flip through old game footage and telling me stories about what the game could give you if you gave it everything first. This was the thing my father had sat across from me and made me promise not to jeopardize. This was the point, the whole point, the reason
Maeve''s POV"Are you being stalked?" Alana asked me on a Wednesday morning. I looked up from my coffee. "What?" She was looking at me with genuine curiosity, no alarm in it, just the focused attention she brought to things she found interesting. "You keep looking over your shoulder," she said. "When we walk to class, when we're on the path, when we're in the dining hall. You do this thing where you check a specific direction like you're expecting to see someone." "I do not," I said. "You do," she said. "You did it three times yesterday walking to the law building and twice in the dining hall at lunch. I've been watching you do it for two weeks and I finally googled the behaviour pattern and stalking came up first so I thought I should ask." I looked at my coffee. "Maeve." "I'm not being stalked," I said. "Then what is it?" I thought about how to explain something I had not fully explained to myself yet. The bond had always given me his geography, that much was familiar, the
Declan's POVDan called on a Tuesday with the kind of news that was supposed to change everything. "Boston wants to move forward," he said. "Formal offer on the table by end of February if the February meeting goes the way I think it's going to go. We're talking numbers that are going to make you want to sit down Declan." "Good," I said. A pause on his end. He had learned my particular brand of underreaction by now and had mostly stopped taking it personally. "I'm going to need you present for the February meeting. Not performing. Present. You remember what we talked about." "I remember," I said. "Good. How's the season going?" "Well," I said, which was true. The season was going exceptionally well by any objective measure. We were on a winning streak that had the kind of momentum that coaches talked about in terms of building something, and my numbers were the best of my career, and Coach Jerry had stopped looking at me with that particular expression of concern and started loo
Maeve's POVSpring semester started on a Monday and I signed up for everything. Moot court, which I had been planning since October and which had a tryout process apparently brutal enough that half the freshmen who attempted it dropped out before the first round. The law review junior committee, which took two freshmen per year, both spots available, and Adeyemi had looked at me at the end of last semester with that expression of his that wasn't quite a recommendation but functioned as one. A Wednesday evidence law group run by a third year named Priscilla who had a reputation for reducing people to their component parts and then making them put themselves back together, which sounded like exactly what I needed. If I was occupied enough I wouldn't have to sit with the thing I was not yet ready to sit with. That was the theory anyway. "You've signed up for seventeen things," Alana said on Tuesday morning, looking at my desk with genuine concern. "Sixteen," I said. "The environment
Declan's POVI let her go and then I stood at the barrier for a while after the door closed. My alpha did not receive it quietly. It had opinions, loud and specific, about the fact that she had just walked back out into the cold and I had stayed on my side of the barrier and let her do it. I stood there and managed the opinions until her scent faded back to the background register of someone on the same campus rather than in the same room, and the bond settled into its close warm version, and I breathed. She was back. She was on campus and close and the bond knew it like a fact that had always been true and had just been temporarily obscured. I went back to my drills. I ran them until the team started filing in for the afternoon session. Marcus came early the way he sometimes did and found me at the far end of the ice and skated over with that look already on his face, the one that meant he had done most of the thinking and was just waiting for the conversation to catch up. "Your
Declan's POVCoach Jerry's office smelled like coffee and old trophies. The air was thick with the tension a man held when he had something to say but didn’t yet know how to put the words down.I have been in this office enough times to know the coach’s moods. Post-win, he felt loose and warm. Post
Maeve's POVThe bond had exploded on Sunday, and I had spent all of Monday thinking about what that meant. He had felt Tyler. That was the only explanation. Something had come through from my side, Tyler's name maybe, or the mood I was in during that conversation with my mother, and Declan had felt
Declan's POVI smelled him on her before I saw them together. It was a Monday, and I was cutting across the east side of campus on my way back from the athletic facility. I had no reason to be on the east side except for the fact that I found any excuse to find a way to run into Maeve even when I
Maeve's POVMy mother called on Sunday at noon as usual. I was ready for her this time. I had spent the week building the version of myself that sounded settled, productive and completely fine, so when her contact photo lit up my screen, and I answered on the first ring. "Maeve." Her voice was pl







