Chapter 1 The Scent I Never Forgot

Sloane.

My phone rang while I was eating cereal straight from the box, and Reyna's name lit up the screen like a warning.

"Please tell me you are sitting down," she said the second I picked up.

"I am standing in my kitchen eating dry cereal like a raccoon. What is it?"

"The Rangers documentary. Full access. Locker room, team buses, practice, everything. They want you for the whole championship run, and they want an answer by tomorrow."

I put the box down slowly. "Which Rangers, Reyna?"

"Frostbridge." Her voice softened. "I know what that city means to you."

I did not answer right away. Eight years had passed since I left Frostbridge with nothing but a suitcase and a broken heart, and in all that time I had made sure my work never took me anywhere near it.

"I cannot go back there," I said.

"You can. You have to." Reyna's tone shifted into the one she used when she was trying to save me from myself. 

"Sloane, this contract will clear your studio debt for two years. It puts your name on every major sports desk in the country. You have spent your whole career waiting for a project like this."

She was right, and I hated that she was right. I stood in my small kitchen with my heart pounding and thought about my empty bank account, the rent I had been stretching thin for months, and the career I had built brick by brick with nobody's help.

"I need the money," I admitted.

"I know."

"That does not mean I am okay with the plan."

"I know that too."

I told her yes before I could talk myself out of it, because if I gave myself time to think, I would remember his face and the words he used to end everything between us, and I would lose my nerve completely.

Three days later I stood in front of the Frostbridge Rangers practice facility with two camera bodies hanging from my neck and my stomach twisted into knots.

His scent hit me before I even reached the door.

Cedar and cold air, the spiciness of it that belonged only to him. My knees went weak, and I had to stop walking and press a hand flat against the cold brick wall just to stay upright.

I had told myself the bond would fade with time. That was supposed to be the mercy given to a rejected mate: that the pull would dull eventually, and I could heal from being told I wasn’t wanted.

Mine had not faded at all. It came roaring back the second his scent touched me, as if no time had passed since the night he looked me in the eyes and said the words that ended us.

“I reject you as my mate.”

Six words. That was all it had taken to shatter ten months of falling in love and a lifetime of what should have been.

I forced my legs to move and walked through the doors before the memory could pull me all the way under.

He was not on the ice yet. I told myself that was a relief. I did not believe it for a second.

I spent the next two hours photographing empty rink boards, jerseys hanging in a locker room that still smelled faintly of him from three stalls away, a whiteboard covered in plays written in handwriting I used to know as well as my own. 

By the time practice ended and the players filed past me toward the showers, laughing and shoving each other, I still had not seen his face.

I told myself I was relieved. I was lying to myself, and I knew it.

That night, back in the extended-stay apartment the network had put me up in, I could not sit still. The walls felt too close. 

My skin felt too tight. One afternoon in that building had cracked open eight years of discipline, and I did not know how to put the pieces back.

I needed noise. I needed to not be Sloane Hargrove, the woman he threw away, for even one night.

The bar three blocks from my apartment was loud enough to drown out thought, and I ordered something dark and strong before I even sat down properly.

I had not finished half of it when a man slid onto the stool beside me like he had been waiting all evening for permission.

He was the kind of handsome that made the rest of the room look dimmer. Dark hair pushed back like he had run a hand through it and forgotten to fix it. A mouth built for trouble. His eyes were the deep gold brown of good whiskey held up to light.

"You look like you are having a worse week than me," he said, "and I got benched by my own team doctor this morning."

A laugh slipped out of me before I could stop it. "Try eight years of unfinished business."

"That sounds like a story."

"It is not one I am telling tonight."

"Fair enough." He signaled the bartender without looking away from me. "Then let me buy you a drink, and we can talk about literally anything else."

I should have said no. But tonight, I did not want to say no.

We talked about nothing that mattered: my work, his terrible taste in music, the way the bartender kept side-eyeing us like she had seen this exact scene play out a hundred times before. Every time he laughed, something in my chest loosened just a little.

By the time he asked if I wanted to leave, I was already standing.

His apartment was two blocks away, dark furniture and low lighting, and he kissed me against the closed door before I had even set my bag down. 

It was slow at first, testing, and then it was not slow at all. His hands found my waist like he had been wanting to touch me since the second he sat down beside me, and I let myself stop thinking about Frostbridge and cedar and a rejection that still lived under my skin.

We moved toward the bedroom in pieces, jackets falling somewhere on the floor, his mouth trailing warm and unhurried along my jaw, my fingers curling into his shirt to pull him closer.

Then, low against his throat, I breathed in.

Under the cologne, the whiskey and the warmth of his skin, there was something else. Something that had no business being there. A scent I knew in my bones because I had grown up surrounded by it my whole life.

He was not just any wolf. He was an  Alpha.

My whole body went still.

He froze at the same moment, his hands stopping against my skin, his breath catching hard in his throat.

He knew what I was too.