The Check

I have been hit by some of the biggest players on the Coast, and I have learned that the trick is to see the hit coming and make sure it lands on something you can afford to lose. Jarrett Locke moved faster than anyone that size had a right to, and I saw him coming from forty feet away, so I did what I always did. I dropped my shoulder, leaned into the boards and made him miss.

He did not miss.

The impact rattled my teeth. My back slammed against the glass with a crack that echoed through the whole arena, and the puck skittered off toward the far blue line while the entire first line whooped. I got an arm up on instinct to shove him off, and that was the moment his bare right hand closed around my wrist.

The world went quiet.

Heat poured through my arm like someone had opened a furnace under my skin, and it did not stop at the elbow. It rushed up my shoulder and flooded my chest, and my wolf, who had been polite and sulky and silent for six long months, rose up inside me with a howl so loud that I felt it in my molars. I could not breathe. I could not think. I could only stare at the gray eyes inches from mine, which had turned a burning, startled gold.

“Oh, no,” I whispered.

“Do not move,” Jarrett said hoarsely.

“I am not moving, you are the one holding me!”

“I know.” He looked at his own hand as though it belonged to a stranger. Then his lips parted, and his voice dropped into something low and rough and not entirely his, and the word that came out of him rolled across the ice like thunder. “Mine.”

Every skate on the rink stopped at once.

I heard Mika gasp somewhere behind us, a high, awed little sound. A veteran defenseman dropped his stick, and it clattered on the ice like a gunshot. The silence stretched until I could hear the hum of the lights, and I understood with perfect, dreadful clarity that the whole team had just watched their captain’s wolf claim a Coast rogue in front of God and the cameras.

“Let go,” I said through my teeth.

“I am trying.”

“You are trying very badly.”

“My hand does not seem to take orders.” His jaw clenched, and a muscle ticked in his cheek. “Believe me, Rourke, if I could undo this, I would have done it already.”

“That is a lovely thing to say to a woman, Captain. Do you write your own material?”

“This is not a joke.”

“I am panicking, and humor is my only coping mechanism, so you will have to be patient.” I tried to yank my arm back, and the heat flared so fiercely that we both hissed. “Fine. Fine. What do we do?”

“Nothing.” He drew a slow breath, and the gold in his eyes flickered, struggled and slowly faded to gray. His fingers loosened one at a time, as if each of them was an argument he had to win, and when he finally let go I stumbled and nearly sat down on the ice. “We do nothing, and we say nothing, and we finish this scrimmage.”

“You just said mine in front of twenty people.”

“Then twenty people can keep their mouths shut.”

“That is not how people work!”

“It is how my team works.”

A whistle shrilled so loudly that I jumped, and Coach Frey came striding out of the tunnel in her gray tracksuit with a face like a closing door. She stopped at the edge of the ice and looked from Jarrett to me and back again, and for one long moment I was certain she was going to say something that would end my career in under a minute.

“Locke,” she said flatly. “Rourke. In my office, ten minutes. Everyone else, three laps and then showers, and if any of you open your mouths before you have left this building, I will personally bench you until spring.”

Nobody argued. They filed off the ice in a hushed, shuffling line, and Mika threw me a look so wide eyed and delighted that I almost laughed. When the rink was empty, I turned on Jarrett with my arms crossed and my wrist still burning.

“I need you to be honest with me,” I said. “Is this a thing you can do to anyone, or did I just get extremely unlucky?”

“It is not a thing I do.” His voice was cold again, and polished, and completely devoid of expression, although a faint flush had crept up his neck. “A bond like this is rare. My grandmother had one, and she said it hit her like a train.”

“Mine feels more like a refrigerator falling on my head.”

“I will take that as a compliment.”

“Do not.” I rubbed my wrist. “I came here to play hockey, Captain. I did not come here to be anyone’s destiny, and I am not looking for a mate. I have enough problems.”

“I did not ask for one either.” A bitter ghost of a smile crossed his face. “You are a rogue and a Coast alpha, and I am the heir to the proudest pack in the Reach. Do you imagine I wanted this?”

“I imagine you want me to disappear.”

“I would be lying if I said otherwise.” He looked at me, really looked, for the first time since we had met, and something flickered behind the wintry calm that I could not name. “And I would be lying if I said it was possible.”

My heart did something undignified. I was still searching for an answer when I felt it, the faint prickle at the back of my neck that every wolf knows, the sensation of being watched by someone who does not blink.

I looked up.

High above the ice, behind a pane of dark glass in the owner’s box, a silver haired man in a gray coat stood perfectly still with his hands clasped behind his back. He had been there the entire time. He had seen the check and the hand and the word, and as I met his eyes through the glass he raised both palms and began, slowly and deliberately, to applaud.

“Jarrett,” I said quietly. “Who is that?”

His face went blank as stone, and his voice came out as a thread. “That,” said Jarrett Locke, “is my uncle.”