MY FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ALPHA MATE
1251 Words
~Katherine~
Here's what nobody tells you about going viral for the wrong reasons. It doesn't go away. Seven days passed and the video was still finding new audiences on day seven.
It was still getting new comments and still getting shared into group chats by people who thought the original audience might have missed something.
I'd developed a whole system by day three; hood up, eyes down, earphones in even when nothing was playing, walk fast enough that anyone pointing a phone at you can't hold a clean shot. It worked maybe sixty percent of the time.
Monday morning's ambush found me at the corner near the science block.
"Oh my god, that's her!" A freshman spun around so fast she nearly dropped her ring light. "That's the girl from the video, I'm not joking, that's actually her!"
I kept walking. No reaction. Don't stop. Don't look at the lens.
"Katherine! Is he really your mate? Does Eleanor know yet? Are you scared of what she'll do to you?"
I turned into the nearest bathroom, locked the door, and stood with my back against it until my breathing came back to something normal.
The tightness in my chest had arrived a week ago and moved in permanently. Just below my sternum, constant, like a hand pressing inward.
I knew what it was. I'd known since the morning after the rejection, when I'd woken up and reached for Nyx out of habit and found her quieter than usual. Then quieter again the next day. Then quieter again.
A rejected mate bond did that to she-wolves. It didn't kill you quickly. It just turned down the volume on everything you were, one degree at a time.
I looked at myself in the mirror above the sink. I saw my blonde hair and purple shadows under my eyes that the concealer had long since given up fighting.
This was the face of a girl the Thornhill pack had called destined, currently hiding in a second-floor bathroom from a stranger with a ring light attachment. What a joke.
"Katherine Thorne," I said to my reflection. "You did not fight for three years to disappear into this bathroom. Get out of it."
My phone buzzed. Audrey had texted.
“Our group study starts in seven minutes. Where are you?”
“Coming. Start without me if you need to,” I texted back.
Three question marks came back. I took that as encouragement and fixed my face and went to the library.
****
I almost didn't put my name down for the scavenger hunt.
Then I thought about Eleanor watching me opt out, making myself small and absent and easy to overlook. And I walked to the sign-up table and wrote my name in large, clear letters.
Professor Crackstone had been running the full moon game for eleven years and she treated it like a military campaign.
One map. One hundred competitors. Eighteen objects placed specifically to require wolf senses to find them.
My wolf had been a ghost for a week.
But when the whistle blew and I started running, I felt her move.
The cool air, the full moon hanging fat and bright above the trees, casting its glow on me made Nyx flicker. She wasn't fully back, not even close to what she'd been. But a pulse of her was enough.
I found sixteen objects while most competitors were still hunting their twelfth.
The eighteenth was buried in the hollow of an old split oak at the northern edge of the grounds. I pushed my arm into the shoulder and my fingers found carved wood.
Then I ran like something was behind me.
The crowd split when they saw me coming. Professor Crackstone raised her hand before I'd fully stopped.
"Katherine Thorne! First!"
The applause was real and warm and for roughly forty-five seconds, nothing else existed.
Not the video. Not the rejection. Not the bond quietly going dark inside me. Just my ribs burning, the crown being lifted and the fierce joy of winning something nobody expected me to win.
Eleanor was the only person in the crowd standing completely still.
She was holding last year's crown in both hands and wearing an intense frown on her face.
Good.
She placed the crown on my head with perfectly controlled hands. Her fingers pressed in fractionally harder than necessary, a message in pressure, private enough that only I could read it.
"Congratulations," she said, loudly enough for the nearest rows.
"Thank you, Eleanor," I said, for the same audience.
What her eyes said was a different sentence entirely. What her eyes said was: enjoy the next few minutes.
I knew they wouldn't last long.
****
She found me three minutes into the walk back to my hostel.
"Well, well, well."
Eleanor's voice drifted from the trees to my left. I stopped and turned.
There were three of them in the clearing. Eleanor, Diana, my second roommate, and a girl I didn't recognise. Moonlight caused Eleanor's eyes to glint.
"You didn't take the warning seriously."
"You sent Diana to deliver it," I said. "I don't take threats seriously from people who can't challenge me themselves."
A tiny muscle moved in her jaw.
"You kissed my boyfriend."
"He kissed me on a dare,” I argued. “Those were his words, not mine, spoken into a microphone in front of the whole school."
"You told people you were his mate."
"I told no one anything. It happened. Neither of us chose it."
Eleanor was quiet. Then she stepped forward and closed the distance between us to almost nothing.
"Here is a fact, Kitty. My mother runs this school. Every rule that protects you, every process that gives you recourse, every door that stays open for you here, it exists because she allows it. One phone call from me and you are expelled. No review, no appeal, no second chance. And once Moonstone removes a student, no reputable school will take them afterward." She tilted her head. "Your prophecy ends in this clearing if I decide it does tonight."
She wasn't wrong. Every word of it was completely true and she knew that I knew it.
The sensible move was to nod, say nothing, walk away and come back to this with a better plan.
But I have never in my life made a sensible move.
"Eleanor." I looked her in the eye. "I have been shrinking since I got here. Tiptoeing around your feelings, swallowing my own thoughts and making myself invisible so you'd feel comfortable." I let that sit for a second. "There is no version of me you'll accept. So I'm done performing smallness for you. Call your mother. Take the crown. Do whatever makes tonight feel like a win. I'm not leaving this school, I'm not hiding from you, and I am not making myself less to make you feel like more. I'm not feeding your delusions of grandeur anymore.”
Silence.
Then Eleanor's face changed. The elegance just fell away, like a stage set being taken down. What was underneath it was older and colder than anything I'd ever seen before.
She nodded to her girls.
They moved fast. I got two solid strikes in before the third caught my arms. The crown tumbled into the grass.
I was still fighting when Eleanor crouched and picked up a stone from the ground.
"You should have stayed home," she said.
The stone connected with my skull and the moonlit clearing disappeared instantly.
- Writer
