The Rogue Alpha's Northern Mate

The roof of the Harbor Street Rink has a leak directly over center ice, and that morning it decided to aim at my head. A fat, cold drop landed between my eyes while I was kneeling to tie the skates of a very serious eight year old named Bo, and I took it the way I took most things lately, with a long breath and a muttered curse that I pretended was a cough.

“Coach Tessa said a bad word,” Bo announced to the whole rink.

“Coach Tessa said ouch,” I told him. “Ouch is a very old word with a lot of meanings.”

“It did not sound like ouch.”

“Then your ears are still growing. Go show me a crossover, and if you fall, fall like a professional.”

He shuffled off toward the bucket at the blue line, and I stood up and let my knees crack. Six months ago I had stood on ice under a glass dome while forty thousand people screamed my name. Now I had a whistle on a shoelace, a thermos of terrible coffee and eleven children who thought I was fascinating because I could skate backward without looking.

“Rourke.” The voice came from the rail, dry as a cracker. “You have company.”

Priya Nair leaned on the boards with her jacket zipped to her chin, wearing the expression she saved for either gossip or disaster. She had been the equipment manager of the Saltmarsh Tides for four seasons, and when the pack fell apart she had kept me alive with casseroles, which I still considered the finest act of friendship on the Coast.

“Company in what sense?” I skated over and braked in a spray of shaved ice. “If it is the landlord, tell him the roof is a lawsuit with a shingle on it.”

“It is not the landlord.” She pointed her chin toward the lobby. “It is a man in a gray wool coat, and he came in a black car that has never once been rained on. He asked for you by your full name, and he used the word alpha.”

My stomach did something unpleasant. Nobody had called me that since the night the Tides dissolved. “Did he say who he was?”

“He said he was from Frostmere.”

I stared at her for five seconds while another drop landed on my shoulder unnoticed. “Frostmere as in the Timberwolves, the Northern Reach, the polished glacier people who think the Coast is a rumor?”

“The very same.” Priya lowered her voice. “Which means he is either lost, or somebody up there has lost their mind, and I do not know which I like less.”

I handed my whistle to a startled mother and crossed the lobby on my skate guards with my heart pounding like I had just come off a double shift. The man waited beside the vending machine. He was tall and thin and perfectly still, with silver in his hair and a leather folder under one arm, and he gave me a small, precise bow that nobody had given me in half a year.

“Miss Rourke. My name is Gregor Voss, and I represent the Frostmere Timberwolves.” His accent was soft and clipped, pure Northern Reach. “The pack chair preferred that this offer not travel by wire.”

“The pack chair. That would be Alaric Locke.” I folded my arms so he would not see my hands shaking. “Then he knows I am a rogue, Mr. Voss. He knows my pack is gone and my uncle is in prison, and he knows your people made a law that keeps rogues out of the Reach.”

“All of that is true.” He did not blink. “The chair has decided to make an exception.”

“Why?”

“Because your numbers were the best on the Coast, and because Frostmere lost its top line center to injury three weeks ago.” He slid a heavy cream colored document toward me. “The chair believes talent should not be punished for the sins of its relatives. It is a one season contract, and I think you will find the terms generous.”

I read the number at the bottom of the first page, then read it again, and when my brain finally believed it I made a small, undignified sound. “That is a typo.”

“It is not.”

“That is more than the entire Tides payroll.”

“A little more, yes.” The corner of his mouth moved. “Frostmere pays for what it wants.”

Priya arrived at my shoulder like a small, suspicious weather system and read over my arm for four seconds before she went rigid. “Tess. Step aside with me. Right now.”

She dragged me around the corner and shoved me against a poster of last year’s playoff schedule. “Do not sign this.”

“Priya, it is a way out of the bait shop and the leaking roof and the casseroles.”

“My casseroles are excellent.”

“They are the reason I am alive, and I love them, but I am twenty five years old and the best center the Coast has produced in ten years, and I am eating cereal for dinner.” My voice cracked on the last word. “I cannot do this anymore.”

“You think I do not know that?” Her eyes were bright and furious. “But the north does not do favors. They have spent a hundred years looking down their noses at us, and now they want you badly enough to pay a fortune and break their own law. When something is that good, you read every line of it first.”

“Then I will read it right here, standing up, and if it smells like a trap I will walk away and you can say I told you so for ten years.”

“Twenty,” she said, but she let me go.

I read the contract in the lobby of a cold rink while Mr. Voss waited with infinite patience. It ran forty pages in the kind of language that makes your eyes slide off the paper, and I did my honest best. I read the salary and the housing and the travel, and I was a little dizzy by the time I reached the signature page and saw a pen already lying beside it, as if the whole thing had been inevitable.

“One question,” I said. “Why me, and why today?”

“I answer to the chair and do not question his reasons.” He tapped the page gently. “Whatever you hear when you arrive in the Reach, I hope you remember that the offer was sincere.”

That should have worried me more than it did. Instead I looked through the glass at the eleven children falling over each other on the ice, and I thought about the last night in the Tides arena, when the lights went out on a pack I would have died for. I thought about how tired I was of being pitied.

I picked up the pen and signed my name.

“A car will collect you on Friday at dawn,” Mr. Voss said, closing the folder with a satisfied click. “Pack for snow, Miss Rourke, and bring a very good coat.”

He walked out into the rain, and the black car slid away without a sound. I stood in the lobby with a grin spreading across my face, and Priya came up beside me with her arms crossed and her mouth in a flat, grim line.

“You are going to be a professional hockey player again,” she said.

“I am going to be a professional hockey player again!” I grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “Say something nice, I beg you.”

“I am thrilled and terrified, and I would like to be allowed to feel both.” She peeled my hands away. Then she frowned and bent to the floor, where a loose gray sheet had slipped from the back of the folder. It carried no letterhead, only a stamp in the corner. “Tess. This was not part of the contract.”

“What is it?”

“A routing slip, the kind they use for internal approvals.” She held it under the light, and I watched the color drain from her face. “It has the date the pack chair approved your offer. Look at it.”

I took the paper and read the stamp. The ink was crisp and black and unmistakable, and for a moment I forgot how to breathe.

Frostmere had approved my contract on the ninth of March, five days before the Saltmarsh scandal broke and a full week before my uncle was arrested and my whole pack was torn out of the league like a page from a book.

Somebody in the north had wanted me before I ever became a rogue, and I had just signed my name to the one thing they could not have known I would need.