FIRST PRACTICE

[ Scarlett POV ]

There is a specific kind of silence that settles over a room full of athletes when they've collectively decided to wait for you to fail. I'd grown up inside that silence. I'd learned to skate in it, learned to read the ice through it, learned to locate exactly where it lived in my body, just below my shoulder blades, a tightening that I breathed through until it became nothing, just air, just background. I'd been doing it since I was the only girl at my first hockey camp at age nine and every boy in my group had looked at me with that same particular expression: patient, almost kind, absolutely certain.

First full team practice. Eleven skaters plus Cade Harlow, who had said exactly nothing to me since the locker room and was currently running drills on the far end of the ice with the focused intensity of a man performing the very specific act of pretending I did not exist.

Fine. I didn't need his acknowledgment. I needed ice time.

I found my place in the line drill and matched the pace of the player ahead of me, Kowalski, number 18, who had given me a single nod in the locker room that I was choosing to interpret as neutral rather than hostile. I did what I'd been doing my entire life: I worked. Crossovers first, wide and clean, the way my dad had drilled me before I was old enough to read a clock. Zone entries. One-touch passes off the boards. The cold came up through my blades in that particular way it always did, sharp and clarifying, like the ice was the only place in the world where the air made complete sense, and for the first time since I'd arrived on this campus I felt like I could take a full breath.

The team kept their distance, mostly. Not rudely. More like they were waiting to form an opinion and hadn't yet gathered enough data. That was fine. I could work with waiting.

Coach Briggs called a puck retrieval sequence, two forwards converging on a loose puck off the boards, pressure drill, first one to it sets up the play. Standard. I'd run it ten thousand times. I knew my line before he'd finished calling it.

The puck came off the boards fast and wrong, too much angle, kicking wide, and I adjusted without thinking, two steps of correction that were just instinct, just my body doing what twelve years of drills had trained it to do. I drove toward the net with the puck on my stick before I'd consciously decided to move.

Cade was there.

He'd been cutting toward the same puck with the absolute certainty of a man who had never, in four years of Division I hockey, arrived late to a read. His edge was hard, his speed real, his angle correct. Under normal circumstances he would have got there first.

I got there first.

Not by much. Half a stride, maybe. But the puck was mine and we both knew it and the ice went very, very still around us. The kind of still that means everyone has noticed and no one is going to be the first to say so.

He pulled up. His skates cut clean. He looked at me with an expression that had been carefully emptied of everything except the surface layer of professional neutrality.

Then he skated toward me. Slow, deliberate, unhurried in the way of a man who had decided to make a point and wasn't in any rush because the point would land whenever he chose. He stopped close enough that I could see the exact temperature behind his eyes, which was roughly the same as the ice under my blades.

"Lucky read, " he said. Quiet. For me only.

I looked at him. Let the silence sit for a beat. Then: "Run it again."

Something moved across his face. Brief, gone before I could name it. He held my gaze for one more second, then skated back to position.

We ran it again.

Same puck. Same redirect. Same half-stride of margin. I got there first.

He was faster than most players I'd ever shared ice with, long stride, efficient power transfer, nothing wasted. His edges were exceptional. He was also, clearly and without qualification, not faster than me. I had known this from his film. Now he knew it too.

I skated to the net, tapped the post, my ritual, the one I'd had since my dad started it with me, the one that had come with me through every team and every level and every room that hadn't wanted me in it, and turned back toward centre without looking at him.

Practice moved on. Nobody commented on the exchange. Briggs called the next drill like he hadn't watched every second of it, which meant he absolutely had.

For the next forty minutes I ran every sequence they threw. I didn't try to shine. I didn't push beyond what the drill required. I just did the work cleanly and correctly and without making it about anything other than the work. That was how you built a case. Not one loud moment but a hundred quiet ones, stacking up until the question of whether you belonged stopped being a question at all.

***

He didn't say anything after the second run. Didn't acknowledge it, didn't revise his expression, didn't give me even a word's worth of something to hold onto. But for the rest of practice, every single time I looked up from a drill, he had stopped looking away.