Chapter 5 - My Captain Claimed Me
1236 Words
I don't remember the walk from the bus to my hotel room. I remember heat — real heat, finally, arriving like a wave I can't out-skate — climbing up through my spine until my skin feels too small for my body.
I lock the door. I press my back against it and slide down until I'm sitting on the floor, breathing through it, except nothing about this is textbook. It's fire under my ribs and a pulse pounding somewhere low and insistent, and underneath all of it, one single unbearable thought.
Ace knows.
He has to. I saw his face on the bus. I felt the exact second his body understood what mine was screaming.
My phone is still in my hand, and it lights up before I can even process the number of missed calls. Dominic. Three times. Then a text that makes my stomach turn inside out.
Dominic: Enjoy the room, Twin Ace. I'm right down the hall, and I've got a very good camera.
I shove the phone away like it burned me.
Someone knocks. Once. Quiet.
"Jude." His voice, rough at the edges. "Open the door."
"Go away." It comes out broken, nothing like an order.
"I'm not going anywhere." A pause. Then, softer: "I've known for three weeks."
The words hit harder than the heat does.
"You're lying," I whisper, even though he can't possibly hear me through the door.
"I'm not." Another pause, longer. "I knew the day I checked you into the boards and you smelled like something I couldn't stop thinking about for a week. I didn't say anything because I wanted to know why you were doing this before I decided what it meant."
My hand is on the door handle before I've decided to move it.
"And now?" I ask.
"Now I know exactly why. Dr. Ferris told my father about a flagged request from a bioethics account this afternoon. He put it together in about ten minutes. I've spent the last two hours making sure he doesn't do anything with that information before I talk to you first."
The door feels like the only thing holding me together, and I open it anyway.
Ace stands in the hallway, and the second our eyes meet, something in his expression breaks open completely — the captain, the mask, all of it gone. He steps inside before I can decide whether to let him, and the door clicks shut behind him, and it's just the two of us and the heat crawling under my skin and three weeks of a truth he's been carrying alone.
"You should hate me," I say, voice barely holding together. "My whole reason for being here — it was never just hockey. Your father wrote the policy that ended my brother's career. I came here to ruin the name on that memo. I came here to ruin you, if it meant taking him down."
"I know that too." He says it like it costs him nothing, and everything, all at once. "Found the connection to your brother two weeks ago. Didn't change how I felt about you. Made it worse, actually."
"Why?"
He crosses the room in two steps, and every instinct I have — Omega instinct, animal and old and completely beyond my control — leans toward him instead of away.
"Because you walked into a league that told you exactly what you were worth," he says, "and you decided to be the best player on the ice anyway. Because I've spent two months trying to figure out why the toughest player I've ever skated beside plays like every shift is personal. Because I don't care whose kid I am, Jude. I care whose captain you almost took the title from."
"Almost?"
The ghost of a smile. Gone fast, replaced by something darker, hungrier, entirely un-captain-like.
"Ask me again tomorrow," he says. "Right now I can't think about hockey."
"Ace, Dominic knows too. He's got a camera. He's down the hall right now waiting for—"
"Let him wait." His voice drops, rough and certain. "Nothing that happens in this room is his to film. And nothing that happens in this room changes what I just told you."
"Is this what you want?" he asks, quieter now, giving me the out even with his own control visibly fraying at the edges. "Say the word and I stop. All of it. I mean that, Jude."
"I know you do." My voice shakes, but nothing underneath it does. "I don't want you to stop."
He reaches for me slowly anyway — like he needs the reaching to be his choice as much as mine — and I don't pull away. His hand closes around the back of my neck, and the heat that's been clawing through me for the last hour finally has somewhere to go, and every rational thought I've built my entire disguise around dissolves into the way he pulls me against his chest like he's been waiting three weeks to do it.
"Whatever happens after tonight," he murmurs against my ear, voice wrecked, "however this ends — the certification, my father, the finals — I need you to hear this part first."
His arms tighten. My pulse is a drum I can feel in my throat.
"You're mine," he says. "You've been mine since the day you hit the ice like you had something to prove. I should have said it before your body forced the truth out of both of us."
"Ace—" My voice breaks around his name. "If your father finds out you knew and said nothing, he'll destroy you too. Your captaincy. Your scholarship. Everything you—"
"Let him try."
For one suspended second, I let myself believe it. Let myself believe there's a version of this where his father's fury and my two years of lies and my brother's ruined shoulder all just stop mattering, because Ace Cole is looking at me like I'm the only thing in this room worth protecting.
I open my mouth again — to argue, to warn him, to tell him this changes nothing about what I still have to do to his father — and that's when the door behind him bursts open without a single knock.
Dominic stands in the frame, phone already raised, already filming, a slow and vicious smile spreading across his face.
"Well," he says. "Guess I don't need to tell anyone anything. Looks like the whole team's about to see this for themselves."
Ace turns, slow and lethal, putting himself between me and the door. "Turn that off, Reyes. Now."
"Or what?" Dominic doesn't lower the phone. "You'll do what your daddy's been doing to people like him for years? Ruin me quietly so nobody asks questions?" He tilts the camera, catching both of us in frame, catching the patch-less skin at my collarbone, catching everything two years of my life were built to hide. "This is going to be the most-watched video on this campus by morning, Vance. Hope whatever just happened in here was worth it."
He's already backing out the door, already typing, already gone before either of us can stop him — and all I can do is stand there in the wreckage of everything I've protected, Ace's arm still locked around me, and watch my entire life end in a text message I can't take back.
- Writer
