All Chapters of Her Ice, His Rules: Chapter 1 - Chapter 6

[ 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