Chapter 2: Two Names I Did Not Want to Know

Sloane.

I woke up before he did, sunlight cutting through a gap in the curtains and landing right across his face.

For a moment I just watched him breathe, the rise and fall of his chest, the way his jaw looked softer in sleep than it had all night. Then my brain caught up with the rest of me, and I remembered what I had smelled against his throat, and I sat straight up in bed.

He is an Alpha. That scent did not belong to a stranger from a bar. It belonged to someone who had a pack behind him, a rank, a reason to hide what he was.

He stirred at the movement beside him and opened his eyes slowly, and for a second neither of us said anything. The silence sat heavy between us, thick with everything we had figured out about each other in the same breath, right before things had gone too far to stop.

"You already knew," I said. It was not a question.

"I knew the second you got close enough to smell me." His voice was rough with sleep, but his eyes were sharp, watching me the way a wolf watches something it has not decided whether to trust. "You are one of us too."

"Was," I said. "My pack does not exist anymore."

Something shifted in his face, sympathy maybe, or curiosity, I could not tell which. 

He sat up against the headboard and ran a hand through his hair, and I noticed for the first time how careful his movements were, like a man used to being watched and photographed and judged for every small thing he did.

"I never got your last name," he said.

"Hargrove. Sloane Hargrove."

"Emrys Kade."

The name landed like a slap.

I had heard it a hundred times in the last three days alone, muttered by Rangers staff with a mix of respect and resentment, printed on scouting reports left open on desks I was not supposed to look at. Emrys Kade, captain of the Northgate Marauders, the one team standing between Frostbridge and a championship. Torin's rival. The Alpha the entire league treated like a storm that had not decided which direction to blow yet.

I must have gone pale, because his expression sharpened.

"You know who I am," he said.

"I am doing the documentary on the Rangers," I said, my voice flatter than I meant it to be. "Full season access. I am on Torin Vale's team."

For a second, something flickered behind his eyes, gone before I could name it. Then he laughed, low and short, as the universe had just told a joke only he could hear.

"Of course you are," he said.

I got dressed fast after that, pulling my clothes on in a bathroom that smelled like his cologne and trying not to think too hard about what I had just done. When I came back out, he was standing by the door already, hands in his pockets, looking at me like he was deciding what to say.

"I should go," I said.

"Sloane." My name in his mouth felt strange, too intimate for someone I had known less than twelve hours. "Whatever you find out working with his team, whatever you hear about mine, I would like to see you again."

"That is not a good idea."

"Probably not," he agreed, and there was something almost gentle in the way he said it. "Doesn't mean I do not want it."

I left without answering, because I did not trust myself to say the right thing, and because some small stubborn part of me was already wondering if he meant it.

By the time I reached the Rangers practice facility that afternoon, I had convinced myself the entire night could be filed away as a mistake I would never repeat. I had my cameras ready, my press badge clipped to my jacket, my professional mask fixed firmly in place.

Then I turned the corner into the hallway outside the locker room and walked straight into Torin Vale.

He stopped hard, like he had hit a wall. I stopped too, my camera bag slipping an inch on my shoulder before I caught it.

Eight years had changed him. He was broader now, harder in the jaw, carrying himself like a man who had spent a decade being obeyed. But his eyes were the same, and they locked onto mine with the same intensity I remembered from the night he destroyed us both.

"Sloane." My name came out of him rough, almost disbelieving.

"Torin." I kept my voice even, professional, the same voice I used with athletes who thought a camera in their face permitted them to be difficult. "I am covering the season for the network. I assume someone told you."

"Someone told me a photographer was coming." His jaw tightened. "Nobody said it was you."

"Well. Here I am."

We stood there for a moment too long, the hallway around us full of players moving in and out of the locker room, equipment bags dragging across the floor, nobody paying attention to the two of us except us. 

I watched something crack behind his composure, just for a second, before he shut it down and folded his arms across his chest.

"This is going to be a problem," he said.