First sight

ISLA

The arena was so loud that I could feel it in my chest. Thousands of people were on their feet, screaming, and most of them were screaming the same three names. Killian. Asher. Zane. The Cross brothers. The Northern Wolves' golden triplets, the reason half this city called itself wolf territory even though nobody actually believed in wolves. I sat in the press box with my laptop open and my coffee going cold, and I tried not to roll my eyes every time the chant started up again.

"You'd think they cured cancer," I muttered.

The reporter next to me, an older guy named Frank who'd covered hockey since before I was born, laughed without looking up from his own screen. "You really don't like them, huh."

"I don't like anybody who gets handed the world and then acts like they built it themselves," I said.

That wasn't the whole truth. There was more to it than that, but I wasn't about to explain my entire childhood to Frank in the middle of a game. So I just watched the ice instead, watched Killian Cross skate like the rules of physics were more of a suggestion for him than a law, watched the crowd lose their minds every time he touched the puck.

I hated how good he was. I hated how good all three of them were.

Then it happened.

Asher was on the ice, weaving toward the goal, and one of the opposing players tried to cut him off. Asher didn't just block him. He hit him, hard, an elbow that came up a half second too late to be an accident, and the guy went down and didn't get up right away. The whistle screamed. The crowd groaned and cheered at the same time, the way crowds do when they don't care who gets hurt as long as their team wins.

My stomach dropped straight through the floor.

I wasn't watching Asher anymore. I was watching Ethan. My brother, seventeen years old, lying on the ice in a game that ended his whole future before it even started, and nobody ever gave us a real answer for why. I could still hear him telling me it didn't matter, that hockey wasn't everything, using that flat voice he only used when he was lying to make me feel better. I gripped my pen so hard my knuckles turned white.

"You okay?" Frank asked, snapping me back to reality.

"Fine," I said, too fast.

I wasn't fine. But I wrote my notes anyway, because that was the job, and I had learned a long time ago how to keep typing even when my hands wanted to shake.

The Northern Wolves won, obviously. They always won. That was sort of the whole point of tonight's story, if my editor got his way.

I found out exactly what he meant twenty minutes later, standing outside the locker room hallway with my phone against my ear.

"Cole," Marcus said, "I need you on a new angle. Big one."

"I'm already covering the Wolves, Marcus, that was tonight's piece—"

"No, I mean really covering them. Dig deep. Ten years, and this team has barely lost. Injuries that should end careers, and guys are back on the ice in two weeks. I want to know how. I want to know what's really going on inside that organization."

My heart started beating a little faster, and not in a good way. "Why me?"

"Because you're the best investigative reporter I've got, and because you don't already worship them like everyone else in this city." He paused. "That a problem?"

I thought about Ethan. I thought about twelve years of watching this team turn into gods while my brother quietly fell apart in the shadow of what they became.

"No," I said. "No problem at all."

I hung up before he could hear whatever was in my voice.

I told myself this was just a job. A really good career opportunity, the kind of assignment reporters wait their whole lives for. That was the story I kept telling myself as I walked down that hallway toward the private area where players met with press, my badge swinging against my chest, my heart going way too fast for someone who was supposedly just doing her job.

Then the door opened, and I saw them.

Up close, the triplets were somehow even more insufferable than they looked on television. Killian stood with his arms crossed, jaw tight, looking at the room like he was already bored of it. Asher had a lazy, charming smile on his face, the kind that probably made most women forget their own names, but I wasn't most women. Zane stood a little apart from his brothers, and even from a distance I could feel how much colder he was, like he'd rather be anywhere else on earth.

"Isla Cole," said the team's press officer, a nervous-looking woman named Priya, "meet Killian, Asher, and Zane Cross."

"We know who she is," Zane said, before I could even open my mouth.

I blinked. "Excuse me?"

"Ignore him," Asher said smoothly, stepping forward with his hand out. "He's charming like that with everyone."

I didn't shake it. "I'm not here to make friends. I'm here to ask questions."

Killian's eyes moved over me, slow and careful, like he was reading something written on my skin that I couldn't see myself. "What kind of questions?"

"The kind that get real answers," I said. "Not the ones your PR team writes for you."

Something shifted in the room. I felt it before I understood it, a strange kind of tension that had nothing to do with hockey or interviews or anything normal at all. Asher's smile faltered for just a second. Zane's jaw clenched so tight I could see the muscle jump. And Killian just kept staring at me like I was a puzzle he desperately needed to solve.

"You'll get your interview," Priya said quickly, clearly sensing the weirdness too. "Tomorrow, my office will set it up properly."

"Fine," I said, gathering myself, refusing to let three overgrown hockey stars unsettle me in my own city. "I look forward to it."

I turned to leave, my boots clicking against the tile floor, my whole body humming with an emotion I couldn't name. Anger, maybe. Or something closer to nerves, which made no sense, because I did not get nervous around men like this. I had spent years building walls exactly so men like this could never get past them.

I was almost at the door when I felt it.

A gaze, heavy and sudden, pulling at me like a hand on my shoulder. I turned around without meaning to, and across that crowded, noisy hallway, I found Killian Cross already looking straight at me.

And then he froze.

Not just stopped moving. Froze, completely, like every muscle in his body had locked at once, like the air itself had gone out of the room. His eyes widened slightly, his lips parted like he wanted to say something and couldn't find the words, and for one terrifying second, he looked at me the way you look at something impossible.

Something you thought you'd lost forever.

"Killian?" Asher said, his voice suddenly sharp with concern. "Hey. You good?"

Killian didn't answer him. He just kept staring at me, and I stood there frozen too, caught in something I didn't understand, something that made the hair on my arms stand straight up.

Whatever this was, it wasn't nothing.

And I had the horrible feeling that my simple little investigation had just become something much, much bigger than I ever wanted it to be.