All Chapters of BREAK ME KNOT: An Omegaverse Quarterback Romance: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

56 Chapters

NEW YEAR'S EVE

Maeve's POVMy mother had been planning this party since October. I knew this because she had mentioned it during the Sunday calls with the particular casualness she used when something was anything but casual. A small gathering, she had said. Friends of the family, some colleagues of your father's, a few young people your age. It would be nice to ring in the New Year together. A small gathering was sixty people. Friends of the family meant donors and political allies. And a few young people my age meant exactly what it had always meant, which was men my mother had researched, approved of and placed in my vicinity with the confidence of a woman who believed in creating the right conditions for the right outcomes. I had known all of this and come home anyway because there was no other option, and I had spent three weeks being a good daughter and making the right conversation and smiling until my face was tired, and tonight was the last performance before I could go back to campus.

SIXTEEN CALLS

Declan's POVThe bond told me before the phone rang. I was sitting on the floor of my hotel room in Providence, where I had driven after a week alone in the empty rink just to be somewhere that wasn't Blackwood without being somewhere that required explaining myself, when the bond went from its dull three-week ache to something live and alarmed. Not pain exactly. Distress, sharp and coming from her, and underneath it was an air of her omega in a situation it found threatening. I was already reaching for my phone when the call came in. Unknown number. Connecticut area code. It rang once and then twice and then it stopped. I sat there looking at the screen and felt the bond settle back from alarm to something that was embarrassed, almost. Like whatever had happened had been resolved or removed and she was now sitting somewhere with her hand over her mouth wondering what she had just done. She had called me. I called back. It went to voicemail. I called again. Voicemail. I calle

EARLY

Maeve's POVI told my mother I had a study group commitment on January fifth. She looked at me across the breakfast table with that particular look of hers, the one that meant she was deciding whether to believe me, and I held her gaze and kept my face exactly where it needed to be. "Study group," she said. "Professor Adeyemi set it up before break," I said. "Constitutional law prep for the spring moot. Mandatory attendance, he was very clear about it." She looked at me for another moment. Then she put her coffee down. "I'll have the car ready at noon," she said, and that was that. I went upstairs and packed in twenty minutes and sat on my bed looking at the room I had grown up in and thought about the fact that I could not wait to leave it. The truth was I hadn't slept properly in three weeks. The truth was that the panic attacks had gotten worse after the party, something about the scent-marking attempt waking my omega up in a way that made the distance bond unbearable, like b

THE BARRIER

Declan's POVHer scent hit me a second before I turned. Honeysuckle and vanilla and the warmth underneath that was just her, and I went still on the ice the way I went still when something happened that my body understood before my brain caught up. I turned and she was at the entrance with her bag on the floor at her feet and her silver hair down, and the bond, after three weeks of distance static and aching absence, opened up like a window thrown wide in a room that had been closed too long. I didn't decide to cross the ice. I just did it, the way you did things when the thinking part stepped aside and something older and more certain took over. My alpha didn't ask permission, didn't calculate, didn't do any of the careful management I had spent four months building. It just moved, and I moved with it, and I crossed the rink and she watched me come and didn't step back from the barrier. She stayed exactly where she was and let me come to her. I stopped on my side of it. We wer

YES AND NO

Maeve's POVI don't know how long we stayed like that at the barrier. Long enough that my hands cramped from holding his jersey. Long enough that the cold of the rink stopped registering as cold and became just the air we were breathing. Long enough that the bond settled into a quiet I hadn't felt since September, the deep unhurried warmth of something that had been running hard for a long time and had finally been allowed to stop. When he asked if I was okay and I said yes, he looked at me the way he looked at things he didn't believe but had decided not to argue with yet. "Maeve," he said. "I'm fine Declan," I said. "I'm here aren't I?" He looked at me for a moment. "Yeah," he said quietly. "You're here." We stood there for another beat and then I made myself take the step back and let his jersey go, and he let his hands drop slowly from my face, and the inch of space between us felt enormous in the way that space between bonded people felt enormous, noticed and wrong in a way

THE SPACE BETWEEN

Declan's POVI let her go and then I stood at the barrier for a while after the door closed. My alpha did not receive it quietly. It had opinions, loud and specific, about the fact that she had just walked back out into the cold and I had stayed on my side of the barrier and let her do it. I stood there and managed the opinions until her scent faded back to the background register of someone on the same campus rather than in the same room, and the bond settled into its close warm version, and I breathed. She was back. She was on campus and close and the bond knew it like a fact that had always been true and had just been temporarily obscured. I went back to my drills. I ran them until the team started filing in for the afternoon session. Marcus came early the way he sometimes did and found me at the far end of the ice and skated over with that look already on his face, the one that meant he had done most of the thinking and was just waiting for the conversation to catch up. "Your

SPRING SEMESTER

Maeve's POVSpring semester started on a Monday and I signed up for everything. Moot court, which I had been planning since October and which had a tryout process apparently brutal enough that half the freshmen who attempted it dropped out before the first round. The law review junior committee, which took two freshmen per year, both spots available, and Adeyemi had looked at me at the end of last semester with that expression of his that wasn't quite a recommendation but functioned as one. A Wednesday evidence law group run by a third year named Priscilla who had a reputation for reducing people to their component parts and then making them put themselves back together, which sounded like exactly what I needed. If I was occupied enough I wouldn't have to sit with the thing I was not yet ready to sit with. That was the theory anyway. "You've signed up for seventeen things," Alana said on Tuesday morning, looking at my desk with genuine concern. "Sixteen," I said. "The environment

THE WATCHING

Declan's POVDan called on a Tuesday with the kind of news that was supposed to change everything. "Boston wants to move forward," he said. "Formal offer on the table by end of February if the February meeting goes the way I think it's going to go. We're talking numbers that are going to make you want to sit down Declan." "Good," I said. A pause on his end. He had learned my particular brand of underreaction by now and had mostly stopped taking it personally. "I'm going to need you present for the February meeting. Not performing. Present. You remember what we talked about." "I remember," I said. "Good. How's the season going?" "Well," I said, which was true. The season was going exceptionally well by any objective measure. We were on a winning streak that had the kind of momentum that coaches talked about in terms of building something, and my numbers were the best of my career, and Coach Jerry had stopped looking at me with that particular expression of concern and started loo

SAFE

Maeve''s POV"Are you being stalked?" Alana asked me on a Wednesday morning. I looked up from my coffee. "What?" She was looking at me with genuine curiosity, no alarm in it, just the focused attention she brought to things she found interesting. "You keep looking over your shoulder," she said. "When we walk to class, when we're on the path, when we're in the dining hall. You do this thing where you check a specific direction like you're expecting to see someone." "I do not," I said. "You do," she said. "You did it three times yesterday walking to the law building and twice in the dining hall at lunch. I've been watching you do it for two weeks and I finally googled the behaviour pattern and stalking came up first so I thought I should ask." I looked at my coffee. "Maeve." "I'm not being stalked," I said. "Then what is it?" I thought about how to explain something I had not fully explained to myself yet. The bond had always given me his geography, that much was familiar, the

THE DRAFT

Declan's POVThe confirmation came on a Thursday afternoon by email, which was not how I had imagined it. I had imagined a phone call. Dan's voice, that contained excitement of his that he kept professional right up until it wasn't. A moment with weight to it. Instead it was an email with a subject line that read Formal Scouting Confirmation - D. Hayes and three paragraphs of language I had to read twice before it resolved into what it was actually saying, which was that I was being formally considered for the upcoming NHL draft and would be included in the official scouting pool. I sat at my desk and read it three times. This was it. This was the thing I had been building toward since I was twelve years old watching my dad flip through old game footage and telling me stories about what the game could give you if you gave it everything first. This was the thing my father had sat across from me and made me promise not to jeopardize. This was the point, the whole point, the reason

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