All Chapters of Beneath The Ice : Claimed By My Stepbrother : Chapter 71 - Chapter 75

Theo~ The first thing I noticed about the Super Team training camp was that nobody cared who I was. Honestly, it was kind of refreshing. Back home, everybody knew me. Captain. Starter, Theodore Matthews. People had opinions before I even opened my mouth. Here, nobody looked at me twice. I was just another player dragging a heavy hockey bag through a dorm hallway at eight in the morning. For the first time in months, my chest felt lighter. Not completely. But enough. Enough that I could breathe without feeling like someone was standing on my ribs. Maybe this was exactly what I needed. Distance. Perspective. A few weeks away from everything that had become too damn complicated. A few weeks away from Noah. That thought hit harder than I expected. I shoved it aside immediately. This wasn’t about Noah. I’d been repeating that sentence so often lately that it almost sounded believable. Almost. The dorms at the training facility were nicer than our university housing. Bigger rooms, bett

Melody~By the third week of pretending I was fine, I was ready to admit I was terrible at it.Not out loud, of course. Out loud I was doing great. I went to class. Answered questions, held conversations. I even laughed a few times when people expected me to. From the outside, I probably looked completely normal.The problem was that every quiet moment immediately betrayed me. The second I was alone, my brain went right back to Reina. It was annoying. Embarrassing, honestly. I was twenty-three years old. I had survived exams, family drama, terrible relationships, and one particularly traumatic group project that should probably qualify as psychological warfare.Yet somehow one woman had completely hijacked my ability to think about anything else and the worst part, my best friend wasn't here for me to rant about it!I was sitting in a café near campus when I finally got tired of arguing with myself. My coffee had gone cold almost twenty minutes earlier. I hadn't touched it. Instead, I

TheoBy the end of the first week, I had mostly stopped feeling like the new guy, even though there were still moments when I walked into a room and it hit me all over again that everyone here came from different universities, different teams, and different cities. Most of them already knew each other from tournaments or training camps I had never attended, but it wasn’t nearly as overwhelming as it had been on that very first day. I knew people’s names now at least most of them and I could tell which players talked nonstop during drills and which ones turned into total psychos the second their skates hit the ice. I had figured out which coaches were actually strict and which ones just liked to act like it, and more importantly, I finally knew exactly where everything was in the facility. That small win alone felt pretty damn good.The training schedule was absolutely brutal. Every morning started before I was even fully awake, and every afternoon left my legs feeling like someone ha