3. FATE ON ICE

🤍RAV🤍

"You are Rav Steele, is that correct?"

The intimidating look on the coach's face when I gave him my letter from the admin the following day made my palms sweaty. He held the paper like he was inspecting it for lies and I supposed he was because every single word on that document was forged and every single letter could send me to jail if he looked too close.

"Yes sir," I said, hoping my voice sounded manly enough.

He looked at me from head to toe and I tried not to shake under his gaze. This was like the final screening test. The last door between me and everything I had worked for. One wrong word and he would call security and security would call my father and my father would look at me with that familiar disappointment and ask how I had managed to shame the family again.

"You look so soft to be an alpha," he said. "How old are you again?"

Nineteen, I wanted to scream. It is right there on the paper you are holding. But I swallowed the panic and kept my face neutral and my voice low.

"Nineteen."

He did not say anything again. He just closed the file and began walking to the arena and I followed him because what was I supposed to do, stand there like an idiot and watch him disappear around the corner and lose my chance before I had even stepped on the ice?

No thank you.

I prayed that bastard did not recognize me for what he did to me last night. I had used concealer to cover the mark on my neck this morning, patting and blending until my skin looked flawless. I had taken my suppressant and my scent blocker and I had checked myself in the mirror three times before coming here.

Now I was an alpha. A male alpha. And I needed to act like one.

I raised my head high and kept my face blank.

"What position did you play?" the coach asked.

"Defender."

I walked faster to catch up with him because his legs were longer than mine and everyone's legs were longer than mine and I was the shortest person in this entire school and that was not going to change no matter how much I wished it would.

"Get on the ice."

"Huh?" I asked like a fucking idiot, looking around to see the other new students waiting to prove themselves today. They were all tall and well built, shoulders broad and jaws sharp, the kind of alphas who had never been told they were too soft or too small or too female to belong anywhere.

The coach turned to look at me. "Get on the ice or go home. You are playing now."

I did not wait for him to even finish the statement before I dropped my duffel bag and ran to the rink.

The cold hit my face the moment I stepped through the door and something in my chest unlocked at the feeling. This was where I belonged. This was the only place I had ever belonged. The ice did not care if I was an omega or a female or a disappointment to anyone. The ice just waited for me to prove myself.

The game started and it was rough in the way that games between alphas were always rough, physical and aggressive and completely without mercy, and within the first two minutes someone had checked me so hard into the boards that my teeth rattled and the cold metal rang through my whole body and the boy who did it skated off without looking back because he had already decided I was not worth looking back at.

I pushed off the boards and got back into position and I stopped thinking about anything except the puck and where it was going and where I needed to be before it got there, and that was the thing about hockey that had always saved me, the way it emptied everything out and left only the ice and the movement and the next decision and the one after that.

My dream and my future were on this ice right now and every single person in this rink was trying to send me home and I was not going home.

The first goal I scored came off a turnover in the neutral zone and I did not celebrate it.

The second one came twelve minutes later off a scramble in front of the net and this time the boy beside me shoved my shoulder in something that was almost acknowledgment and I took it and kept moving.

I blocked three shots that had no business being blocked by someone my size and I could feel the other students recalibrating around me in real time, the way their bodies adjusted and their eyes started tracking me differently, and that feeling was better than anything I had felt in months.

I belonged on this ice and they were starting to understand it whether they wanted to or not.

Then the last minute came.

I was in position to defend and the play was coming toward me fast and I had my eye on the puck and my body was already moving into the right angle when I made the mistake of glancing up past the boards to where the coach was standing.

And I saw him.

Black hair with red tips and a face I had not seen clearly last night but knew anyway, the way you knew something that had happened to your body even when your eyes had not been paying attention, and the mark on my neck heated up so suddenly and so sharply that I gasped out loud and my legs stopped working underneath me.