LOGINMaeve’s POV Six months into our life together in Providence, the dishes became the physical manifestation of every unspoken pressure in the room. It was never actually about the plates or the forks left soaking in grease. That was the hidden tax of sharing a tiny apartment with another person when you both possessed a biological connection that had no off switch. The dishes were simply the breaking point at the end of a brutal Tuesday evening. I had been at the legal aid clinic since eight o’clock in the morning, followed immediately by three consecutive seminars from noon until six. By the time I boarded the cross-town bus, my eyes were burning from reading forty pages of Palsgraf versus Long Island Railroad Company by the dim, flickering overhead light. The text had barely registered, maybe sixty percent retention at best, which was completely unacceptable for someone trying to prove she belonged in a courtroom. When I finally unlocked the door at eight-thirty, the first thin
Declan’s POV The apartment was dark except for the blue and white glow of the streetlamp filtering through the blinds. Maeve was lying with her head on my chest. Her finger traced idle and absentminded patterns against my skin, circling the place where my heart beat a steady rhythm for her. The boiler in the basement was doing its usual clank and hiss. It was a noisy and unreliable piece of machinery, but it had become the soundtrack to our new life together. In the silence of the room, every sound felt magnified. "Declan?" she whispered. Her voice was small and fragile, the way it only got when we were completely alone in the quiet hours of the morning. "Yeah?" I asked, my voice thick with sleep and the comfort of her weight against me. "Do you ever regret it?" she asked suddenly. "The career path and the fact that the big agencies aren't calling back anymore. The Providence locker room instead of the big league stage in Boston." She paused for a long time, and her finger stopp
Maeve’s POV The jersey was massive on my frame. It had the name HAYES stitched across the shoulders in bold block letters, and the number seventeen was a white and gold weight against my back. Declan had handed it to me this morning with a shy and uncharacteristic hesitation. He had told me to wear it only if I wanted to, but the bond had already made that decision for me. It hummed with a fierce and protective pride that demanded visibility. I was done with the shadows and the carefully curated disguises. Today, I was going to be exactly who the universe intended me to be. The arena in Providence was a sharp contrast to the high-gloss spectacles of the NHL rinks I had visited as a child. It was smaller and grittier. It felt more intimate, almost like a community center with a high-stakes secret hidden within its cold walls. You could hear the puck thud against the boards like a heavy heartbeat. You could see the ice shavings and the sweat flying off the players' helmets when
Maeve’s POV The first rejection arrived from Yale on a Tuesday in August. It came in the form of a sterile, automated email that landed in my inbox precisely at ten o'clock in the morning. I had been sitting on our secondhand sofa, the fabric slightly scratchy against my legs, waiting for the notification with a sense of impending doom that I had tried to disguise as pragmatism. I told myself that I expected it. I told myself that Yale did not just admit students, but rather curated a legacy, and the Collins name was currently draped in the kind of loud, messy tabloid noise that Ivy League admissions committees treated like a contagious disease. I read the paragraph about the unprecedented strength of the applicant pool and the careful consideration of the committee. I knew exactly what it actually meant. It meant that I was a liability they did not wish to manage. It meant that my mother’s reach was long, and her silence was more damaging than her voice could ever be. I closed t
Declan’s POV The apartment in Providence was a masterpiece of architectural compromise. It was on the third floor of a building that smelled like floor wax and old radiators. The boiler in the basement had a rhythmic, clanking heartbeat that shook the floorboards at two in the morning. The bedroom window looked directly into the kitchen of the building next door, offering us an unasked-for intimacy with a neighbor who liked to eat cereal in his underwear at midnight. It was also eight hundred dollars under our maximum budget, which meant we could breathe. It had windows that caught the afternoon light in a way that turned the peeling paint into something golden and ethereal. It was small, cramped, and entirely ours. We moved in on a Saturday in June, the kind of day where the humidity makes everything feel twice as heavy. Marcus arrived at nine AM, his truck idling at the curb. He looked at the mountain of boxes on the sidewalk and then at the three flights of narrow, twisting s
Maeve’s POV Morgan arrived the afternoon after graduation, smelling of expensive perfume and the cold air of my mother’s office. I had walked across the stage that morning in the May sunshine with the particular, hollow feeling of something finished. My mother’s seat—front row, center, reserved by name—had remained a velvet-clad void. I had prepared for that absence, built a fortress around the expectation of it, yet it still landed like a physical blow when I looked out and saw the gap in the crowd. But then I found Declan. He was three rows back, his massive frame barely fitting into the folding chair, wearing the one good shirt he owned. He was making more noise than anyone else, a localized riot of pride that filled the empty space my mother had left behind. The bond had surged then, a warm, golden thread of I see you that made the lack of a Senator’s approval feel like a small, manageable grief. When Morgan knocked at four o’clock, I knew it wasn't a social call. She was
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
Maeve's POVThe first thing I noticed about Tyler was that he was easy, and in my current situation, easy was the most attractive quality a person could have. He didn't make the bond do anything. He didn't make my omega sit up and take notice. He was just a boy in my study group who was funny and s
Maeve's POVI knew the moment he found out who I was. I was in the library when the bond went sharp with shock first, and then it grew into heat, and before I knew it, I was partially blinded by the rage Declan was feeling. It hit me so suddenly that I knocked my highlighter off the table and had
Declan's POVI hit the field at six forty-five, which was forty-five minutes before anyone else was expected, and I ran drills alone until the first of my teammates showed up and had the good sense to read the air before they got anywhere near me. Marcus was the first. He came through the gate wit







