The Alpha & the Ice Princess

THE COACH

Georgia

The train stops running an hour outside Rosethorn. After that, there's only one way in.

The depot is barely a depot — a covered platform, a bench, and a white coach idling at the curb with ROSETHORNE HIGH stenciled on the side in gold. No driver's name posted. No schedule. Just a woman with a clipboard checking names off a list that already has mine on it, though I never sent one in.

"Georgia Steele," she says, not a question, and waves me on.

The bus is maybe a third full. Younger kids up front with their parents' worried faces still pressed to the windows outside. A cluster of older girls in the middle, already deep in a conversation I'm clearly not invited to. And in the back, six or seven guys, big enough that the bus tilts slightly toward that side, duffel bags with hockey sticks strapped to the outside stacked in the aisle like they own it.

I take a seat two rows up from them, by the window, and try to disappear into it.

I don't manage it.

"New meat," someone says, low, delighted. A whistle, sharp and deliberate. Then, unmistakably, someone in the back throws his head back and howls, a long, rising note that breaks into laughter halfway through, like it's an old joke I'm not in on.

My face goes hot. I stare hard at the window, at my own reflection ghosted over the trees going by.

"Steele, right?" one of them calls, and my stomach drops, because I never told anyone that. Somebody must have caught it off the driver's list on the way in, and now it's a toy. "Little Steele. What'd you skate, sequins?"

Before I can answer, my bag is gone off the seat beside me — snatched by a hand reaching over the headrest — and it sails backward down the aisle, hand to hand, my skate guards rattling against the zipper with every pass. Somebody unzips it halfway just to see what a figure skater packs. My whole chest goes tight. Those blades are custom-fitted. I've had them eighteen months.

"Give it back." I'm on my feet before I decide to be, and I hate how thin my voice sounds saying it.

"Relax, it's not going anywhere—" one of them starts, tossing it up over his own head, and it clips the luggage rack hard enough that something inside cracks against the frame.

"Cole." One word. Quiet. It doesn't sound like a request.

The laughing stops.

I look up before I mean to, and he's already looking at me. Third row from the back, one boot up on the seat in front of him, gear bag between his knees. Tall, dark-haired, that same stillness I'll only understand later isn't just a personality trait. He doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't have to. Cole reaches back, takes the bag out of the air without looking at it, and passes it forward hand over hand until it lands back in my lap, zipper still open, my blade guards half spilled out.

He doesn't smile, exactly. It's more like the corner of his mouth concedes something.

For a second neither of us looks away. It's a small thing, this look, nothing like what's coming for us both in a few hours. But it isn't nothing either. Something in my chest goes tight and warm at the same time, an odd combination I don't have a name for yet, and for a second I could swear something in his face changes too, like he felt it land the same way I did.

"Sorry about them," he says, not raising his voice, not really talking to his friends anymore either. "They don't get out much."

"Big talkers," I say, aiming for dry instead of rattled, mostly succeeding, zipping my bag shut with hands that aren't quite steady.

"Something like that."

That's it. That's the whole exchange. He doesn't ask my name. I don't offer it. Somehow that feels more unsettling than if he had, like he already has it, or doesn't need it yet, or is waiting for a version of me that hasn't arrived at Rosethorne yet to give it to him properly.

Behind him, one of the guys mutters something I don't catch, and a couple of the others laugh, but quieter now, glancing at him first like they're checking whether it's allowed. He doesn't look back at them. He just holds my gaze a second longer, long enough that it stops being casual and starts being something else, and then, deliberately, he turns back around and picks the conversation back up like nothing happened at all.

Like I've been dismissed.

It should annoy me. It mostly does. I face front, pulse going harder than a thirty-second bus interaction should account for, and check my skates over in my lap — one guard scuffed, nothing worse — before I finally let myself relax back into the seat.

I catch his reflection in the window twice more before we arrive. Both times, he's not talking to his friends. He's watching the back of my head like he's waiting for me to turn around.

I don't give him the satisfaction.

The bus slows as the trees finally break and the gates come into view, stone pillars taller than the coach itself, the wolf-and-pine crest carved into the arch above them.

Behind me, the howling starts up again, this time from more than one throat, low and rough and almost musical, like it's a ritual they all know the words to.

He doesn't tell them to stop this time.

He's not looking at his friends anymore either. He's looking straight ahead, out the front windshield at the gates rising up to meet us, like whatever's waiting past them just took his attention away from me entirely. And something about the way his jaw sets tells me that's not a relief. It's a warning.