My Hockey Captain Found Out I'm an Omega

Chapter 3 - The Truth They'll All See

I can't stop hearing that word: public.

Three days later, it's still the first thing I think about when I wake up. I've read the notice so many times I have it memorized: results posted to the league database, visible to scouts, sponsors, every rival program in the country. Not a quiet failure. A headline. Omega Infiltrates Elite Program — except now it comes with my photo attached.

I don't sleep. I skate instead, alone, at five in the morning when the rink belongs to no one, running drills until my legs shake and my mind finally goes quiet.

That's where Ace finds me.

"You're here every morning," he says, leaning on the boards like he's been standing there a while. "Coach doesn't even open the rink till six."

"I have a key." I don't mention I bribed the equipment manager with three months of stick-taping duty to get it.

He watches me finish a lap, arms crossed, unreadable. Then he steps onto the ice in his sneakers, which is either insane or the most Ace thing he's ever done, and skids to a stop in front of me.

"Run a drill with me," he says. "Two-on-none. You and me against nobody."

I should say no. I should go home and panic quietly like a person with a normal amount of self-preservation.

I say yes.

What happens next is the best six minutes of hockey I've played in my life. He reads me like we've been running plays together for years, not months — a give-and-go so clean it feels choreographed, a saucer pass I don't even have to look for because I already know his stick will be there. When I finally snap a shot past an imaginary goalie, he laughs, loud and real, and hauls me into a hug that lifts me clean off my skates.

For one heartbeat, our faces are close enough that I forget every reason this is dangerous.

He doesn't smell like a threat. He smells like woodsmoke and clean ice, and something under that — something warm that makes my knees genuinely unsteady, in a way that has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with him.

"Twin Aces," he murmurs, still holding on. "That's what the guys are calling us. Did you hear?"

I hadn't. By Monday, everyone has.

It's on the athletics department i********:. It's in the student paper. Twin Aces, the unstoppable duo carrying Brentwood into the championship. My name is suddenly everywhere it's never been before — box scores, highlight reels, a headshot next to Ace's on a banner outside the rink.

•

Two nights later, Ace corners me in the library with a legal pad and a stack of chemistry notes I don't remember agreeing to share.

"I heard you're failing Orgo," he says, dropping into the seat across from me like it's already decided.

"I'm not failing. I'm surviving."

"Same thing, with you." He grins at his own callback, and it does something unfair to my chest. "I'm not failing Orgo either. Figured we could survive it together."

We study for two hours. He's better at it than I expected — sharp, patient, the kind of person who explains things twice without making you feel stupid the first time you didn't get it. Somewhere around hour two, our hands brush reaching for the same highlighter, and neither of us moves away fast enough to pretend it didn't happen.

"Can I ask you something?" he says, not looking up from his notes.

"Depends what it is."

"Why hockey? You could've picked literally anything. Chess club. Debate. Something where nobody puts you through the boards twice a week." His voice is careful, like he's circling something without wanting to spook it. "What made you pick the one sport that hates you?"

The honest answer sits right behind my teeth — because my brother loved it and it broke him, and someone has to make it pay for that — and I swallow it whole.

"Guess I like proving people wrong," I say instead.

"Yeah." He finally looks up, and whatever he sees on my face makes something in his expression soften, careful and warm in a way that has nothing to do with hockey at all. "I'm starting to notice that about you."

We don't talk about it again that night. But when he walks me back to my dorm afterward — unnecessary, the library's a five-minute walk, we both know it — neither of us mentions that either. He just stays half a step closer than he needs to the whole way, like he's daring the distance between us to close on its own.

It doesn't. Not yet.

But for the first time in two years, some small, reckless part of me wants it to.

•

Coach brings it up at the team meeting Thursday, tapping a printout of a college hockey blog post on the whiteboard. "This is the kind of chemistry programs kill for," he says, looking straight at me and Ace like we're a matched set now instead of two people with two very different reasons for being on this ice. "Keep doing whatever you're doing."

If only he knew what that actually was.

•

A girl from the student paper corners me outside the weight room Wednesday, recorder already out. "Jude, right? People want to know the real story behind Twin Aces. What's it like training this close with Cole? Any truth to the rumors you two are—"

"We're teammates," I cut in. "That's the story."

"Come on. Nobody skates like that with someone they're not obsessed with." She smiles like she already has her headline written. "What are you so afraid of people finding out?"

The question lands like a fist to the sternum. I mutter something about being late for lifts and get out of there before my face gives away how close she just came to a truth she doesn't even know she's fishing for.

Visibility was supposed to be the enemy. Instead it's the thing that might save me — because now, when I ask around about moving my certification date, someone finally listens.

Her name is Dr. Ferris, the team physician, and she owes her position partly to Ace's father, who sits on the athletic board and writes checks large enough to have buildings named after him. I only know that because I go looking — because after the reporter, after the hug on the ice, I finally dig into exactly who funds this program, who wrote the "biologically unfit" memo my brother believed enough to disappear over.

The name on the original policy proposal, filed six years ago, is Richard Cole.

Ace's father.

I remember exactly what that policy cost. Eli's spot, revoked within a week of his designation leaking. His name still shows up if you search it — not for anything he did on the ice, just for what he was. Strangers still find ways to message him, three years later, calling him a mistake the league corrected.

I sit with that for a long time, laptop glowing in the dark of my dorm room, my brother's voice in my head — they will let you believe you belong right up until the moment they need you not to — and something in my chest goes cold and very, very clear.

This isn't just about proving Omegas belong. It's about the man whose name is stamped on the rule that broke my brother, and whose son I've somehow, impossibly, fallen for.

I could stop. I could walk into Coach Halloway's office tomorrow and withdraw before the test even happens. Quiet. Safe. No headline with my face on it.

Instead, I email Dr. Ferris using an old research credential from a bioethics seminar last spring, and I request — as a "confidential inquiry into screening protocol fairness" — a private addendum to my results. Not falsified. Just delayed. Sealed pending review.

It's a lie built on a technicality, and if anyone traces it back to me, it will look exactly like what it is: an Omega manipulating the system to keep playing.

I hit send before I can talk myself out of it.

Two minutes later, my phone lights up. Not Dr. Ferris.

Ace.

Can I ask you something and you actually answer me this time?

My hands are still shaking from the email. I almost don't open the next one.

My dad mentioned your name tonight. Said Coach flagged your certification for a manual review. Said it's unusual enough that he's coming to watch the results get posted himself.

I read it four times before the meaning lands all the way.

Richard Cole is coming. In person. To watch my results go public.

And underneath the fear, something worse is waking up — the realization that the man I've been planning to destroy is about to be standing three feet from his son when I fall apart in front of both of them.