Pack for Snow

“March ninth,” Priya said for the third time, as though repeating it might change the ink. “The auditors showed up at the Tides office on the fourteenth, and the Tides office was my office, Tess. I remember because I was labeling skate bags and a man in a blue suit took the box cutter out of my hand.”

“It could be a clerical mistake.” I turned the gray slip over in my fingers and tried to sound like a person who believed that. “Maybe they approved a different contract that week and recycled the paper.”

“For a rogue who was not a rogue yet?”

“Maybe they planned to poach me from the Tides the normal way.”

“Frostmere has never poached anyone from the Coast, and you know it.” She snatched the slip back, held it up to the light as if it might confess, and then gave a short, humorless laugh. “Do you want to hear the worst part? I had a feeling when he said the word alpha. My wolf went quiet like she does when a storm is coming, and I ignored her because I wanted you to be happy.”

“I am still happy,” I said, and my voice betrayed me by wobbling. “I am happy and I am also going to be sick in that planter.”

“Do not be sick in the planter, it is the only plant we have.” She dragged me to the bench beside the skate rental window and sat me down. “Call him. Call Voss, tell him you changed your mind and make it a polite refusal.”

I tried. Voss had left no card, so I called the Frostmere front office, and a living person finally informed me that all contract questions went through the pack chair’s private secretary, who was traveling and would reply at her earliest convenience.

“Earliest convenience,” I repeated, hanging up. “That is a threat dressed in a cardigan.”

“Check your bank.” Priya jabbed a finger at my phone. “He said the offer was generous, and men like that usually pay in advance so you cannot argue.”

I opened the app with two fingers, the way you touch a hot pan, and there it sat in the deposit column, a signing bonus so large that I had to count the zeros twice. Under it, in tiny gray letters, was the note from the contract I had skimmed in the lobby. Return of this payment requires thirty days written notice and a penalty of triple the amount.

“Triple,” Priya said faintly.

“I cannot afford triple. I cannot afford a single stick.” I put my head between my knees. “I just bought myself a very beautiful cage.”

“Then we get you out of it properly, with a lawyer.”

“With what money? The money that is in the cage?”

She opened her mouth and then closed it, and the silence that followed was the loudest thing in the building, apart from the bucket at center ice going plink, plink, plink.

“You look like someone just canceled the Coast,” said a smooth, amused voice from the glass doors.

I did not need to lift my head to know who it was. Only one man in the league could make a rainstorm sound like a compliment. Dante Vega stood in the doorway with his designer jacket soaked to the shoulders and a paper bag of pastries in one hand, grinning the grin that had sold forty thousand jerseys for the Sunhaven Tempest. He was twenty eight and the most annoying forward on the Coast.

“Vega.” I sat up and wiped my eyes with my sleeve. “Did you drive two hours to gloat? Because I am having a day.”

“I drove two hours because my cousin works the toll booth on the Divide road, and she texted me that a black car with Reach plates went through at ten this morning, empty on the way out and headed straight for Harbor Street.” He dropped onto the bench between us and held out the bag. “Almond croissant. It is a peace offering.”

“You hate me.”

“I adore you. You hit me into the boards four times last season and I have never been more alive.” He studied my face, and the teasing faded a little. “Tess. Did you sign something?”

Priya made a noise like a kettle. I sighed, and I handed him the slip.

He read it, and I watched his easy smile fold up like a map. “March ninth.” He said it quietly, the way people talk in a hospital. “My chair got a courtesy call from Frostmere in the first week of March. They asked whether the Saltmarsh roster would be ‘available’ for a favorable conversation, and he laughed it off, because nobody asks that about a healthy pack.” He met my eyes. “And then the pack stopped being healthy, and nobody laughed again.”

“Why did you not tell me this six months ago?”

“Because I did not put it together until three minutes ago, and because I am a flirt and not a detective.” He folded the paper along its crease and gave it back to me. “My mother grew up in Frostmere, and she used to say they do not hire people, they acquire them. Here is my advice, and you will hate it. Go north, because you have no choice, and play like a goddess. Keep your phone charged, keep your door locked and keep Priya on speed dial. Do not be alone with the pack chair, and whatever you do, do not fall into bed with the captain.”

I laughed out loud, a short and surprised sound. “Excuse me?”

“Jarrett Locke.” Dante pronounced the name like a man naming a rival mountain. “Twenty nine, never lost a faceoff in his career, has never been seen smiling and has the personality of a fridge. He is also the chair’s nephew, which means every inch of his life is supervised. If you let him close, you will be handing the family a key.”

“Dante, I would sooner marry my skates.”

“I am only saying.” He stood and pressed the pastry bag into my hands. “Eat the croissant. Win the Cup. And when this all explodes, call me before you call a lawyer, because I will be much more fun.”

He left the way he had come, with a wink and a spray of rain, and Priya stared at the closing door.

“I hate that he is useful,” she said.

“I hate it more.”

The week disappeared in a blur of boxes. I packed my life into two duffel bags, which was humiliating, and Priya packed three casseroles into a cooler, which was heroic. On Thursday night she handed me a heavy wool coat she must have bought with money she did not have. “It is not pretty, but it is warm. Pack for snow, remember.”

I hugged her until neither of us could breathe.

The black car came at dawn on Friday, exactly as promised, and it was the kind of car that does not make noise when it breathes. A driver in a gray cap took my bags without speaking and held the door, and I climbed into a back seat that smelled of cedar and cold money. Priya stood on the curb in her slippers with the rain coming down, and she waved until the street swallowed her.

We crossed the Divide road under a sky the color of pewter. I watched the palm trees thin out, and then the pines took over, and somewhere past the toll booth the first white flecks hit the windshield and my wolf lifted her head inside my chest, restless and curious and just a little bit afraid.

I took out the gray routing slip, because I had read it so many times that my fingers needed something to do. I smoothed it flat on my knee, and the light from the window caught the back of the paper, and I saw something I had missed in the lobby.

There was handwriting on the reverse, small and slanted and pressed so hard into the page that it had bruised the fibers. It was written in pencil, in a hurry, by someone who did not want to be caught.

Do not let them name you a rogue risk. Read page thirty one.

I scrambled for my bag and dragged the contract out of the folder, and my hands shook so badly that the pages tore at the corners. I flipped to page thirty one and ran my finger down the dense gray lines until I found the paragraph that I had been too dizzy and too desperate to read.

And in the second sentence, I found my own name, written beside a word that made the heater in the car suddenly feel like a block of ice.

The driver glanced in the rearview mirror, and his eyes were not those of a stranger.

“Miss Rourke,” he said gently. “I would not read that out loud.”