All Chapters of Her Ice, His Rules: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

[ Cade POV ]Her stats were a problem.I'd been staring at them for four hours,broken down by game, by period, by zone entry, by every metric our analytics team ran on every player in the conference,and the numbers weren't lying. Scarlett Voss was fast. Not fast for a left wing, not fast for a woman, not fast with qualifying clauses of any kind. Fast. Shot percentage in the top four percent of the position nationally. Zone exits cleaner than any forward we currently had in uniform. Assists-to-goals ratio that put her in a category of players who understood the ice architecturally,not just where the puck was, but where it was going to be in three seconds, and how to be there first.She was twenty-two years old.The problem was not her stats.I closed the laptop. Pressed both palms flat against the desk and stared at the ceiling, which offered nothing useful. Then I got up, went to the window, came back to the desk. Sat down again. This was not how I handled problems. I identified them,

[ Cade POV ]The list was practical. Necessary. A straightforward operational framework for a living situation that had been created by a housing coordinator who apparently did not understand the concept of gender-separated team housing, and a coach who I was increasingly certain had not only known about it but had arranged it on purpose. I would deal with that later. For now: the list.I'd printed it. Not written, printed, because printed conveyed a different level of seriousness, conveyed that this had been thought through and formalised rather than scrawled as an afterthought. Seven items. Font size eleven. Margins even on both sides. I set it on the kitchen table at 5:45am and had my coffee made and my bag ready before she came downstairs.The rules were reasonable. Separate bathroom schedules, she had mornings at 6:00am, I had 6:45am, no overlap, no ambiguity. No shared meals unless team events required shared attendance. No personal conversations beyond basic household logistics

[ Cade POV ]Media day was a performance I'd been running since I was sixteen years old and I treated it the same way I treated game prep: the night before, I broke it into components. Likely angles. Expected questions. Which ones got real answers and which ones got something that sounded like an answer but contained nothing a journalist could use against me or the team. I was good at it in the way that you got good at something by doing it dozens of times under real pressure. I didn't particularly enjoy it. That was not the point.The point was control. The media room was the one place in my season where the wrong word from the wrong player could do damage that no amount of ice time repaired.She was better at it than I was. I figured that out in the first fifteen minutes.Not flashier. Not more polished in the way of someone who'd been media-trained into a persona. Better in the specific way of someone who was completely, uncomplicatedly themselves under pressure, which was rarer an

[ Cade POV ]The team bus smelled like energy drinks and old tape, same as every away trip since my first year.I was in the back row, always the back row. Good sightline across the whole bus, no one behind me, room to think. I had my earphones in and a scouting report open on my phone. I'd been staring at it for forty-five minutes. I couldn't have told you what a single word said.She was three rows ahead. Window seat. Headphones on, the big over-ear kind, the kind that meant she'd made a decision about the world and the decision was: not right now. Knees pulled up against the seat in front. She'd fallen asleep about an hour in and she was completely, unreasonably still. The bus was loud, Kowalski's card game had escalated to a point where actual currency was probably involved, Finn was providing commentary, two players near the front were in a loud argument about something that had started as tactics and was now apparently about sandwiches. She slept through all of it without moving

[ Cade POV ]I waited until the house was fully quiet. Then I unlocked the drawer.It was a small barrel lock, cheap, the kind that came built into old furniture and wouldn't stop anyone who was actually determined to get in. I'd used the key anyway, every time, for two years. I knew it was more ritual than security. I did it anyway.The article was inside. Folded into quarters, the paper gone soft at the creases from being opened and folded back the same way too many times. I'd read it the morning it was published, then again that night when I couldn't sleep, then approximately twenty more times in the two years since. Always late. Always alone. Always the same ritual of the key and the unfolding and the words that never changed no matter how many times I read them.NORTHGATE WOMEN'S ATHLETIC BOARD CLEARS WOLVES OF MISCONDUCT ALLEGATIONS.The headline told you the result before you got to the story. That was how headlines like that worked, to signal the direction so you arrived at th