MY HOCKEY ALPHAS' SHARED OBSESSION

Chapter 3

WREN'S POV

I looked for Cassius all morning and could not find him anywhere.

"Have you seen the goalie?" I asked Ingrid, trying to sound casual and failing.

"He runs early laps before the rest of the team shows up. Why?"

"No reason." I gripped my clipboard tighter. "Just wanted to check his knee."

Ingrid gave me a look that said she did not believe me for a second, but she let it go, which I was grateful for since I had no idea how to explain what I thought I had seen in that window reflection without sounding like I needed a psychiatric evaluation of my own.

I checked the equipment room, the weight room, even the empty film study room, and found nothing but the faint, cold feeling that I was looking in all the wrong places on purpose. Somebody clearly did not want to be found.

Practice started rough and stayed rough. The players moved faster than yesterday, drills sharper, tempers shorter. I stood at the boards, trying to focus on my job instead of golden eyes and growls with no source.

Then Finn went down hard.

He hit the ice at a bad angle during a scrimmage, ankle twisting underneath him, and the sound that came out of him was sharp enough that I was already moving before the whistle blew.

"Don't move," I said, sliding to my knees beside him on the ice. "Let me look."

"It's fine," Finn said through gritted teeth. "Just give me a second."

"It is not fine. You went down like your ankle folded in half." I pulled off his skate carefully, checking the joint with both hands. Already swelling, already darkening at the edges, the kind of injury that usually meant weeks on the bench, not days.

"Ice and elevation, now," I said. "We need imaging on this."

"I'll be fine by tomorrow," Finn said, and something in the way he said it made me pause.

"That's not how ankles work, Finn."

"Mine does." He gave me a weak grin that did not match the pain still tight around his eyes.

"You are not skating on this for at least a week. I don't care how tough you think you are."

"You'd be surprised what I can skate through."

"That's not something to brag about," I said, wrapping the joint firmly. "It's something to worry about."

He laughed, short and strained. "Worrying about me is a full time job around here, trust me."

I got him to the bench, wrapped the joint, packed it in ice, and told him firmly to stay off it. Then I turned to grab extra supplies from the medical kit, my back to him for maybe ninety seconds.

When I turned around again, the swelling had visibly gone down.

I stared at his ankle, certain I was imagining it, and knelt to check again. The darkening bruise that had covered half his foot minutes ago had faded to a faint yellow shadow, the kind you would expect a full week into healing, not two minutes.

"That's not possible," I said quietly.

Finn's easy grin dropped away completely. "Wren."

"I watched this swell in real time. I watched it darken. It does not just fix itself in ninety seconds, Finn, that is not how bodies work."

"You should probably forget you saw that."

"I'm not going to forget that." My voice came out sharper than I meant it to, fear and confusion tangled together. "What is happening on this team?"

A shadow fell over us both, and I looked up to find Roman standing there, gold eyes fixed on me with an intensity that made every other sound in the arena fall away.

"Finn," Roman said, not looking away from me. "Go get checked by Standish."

"Roman, I was going to explain everything," Finn said quickly.

"Go."

Finn went, favoring the ankle far less than he should have been able to, and then it was just Roman and me and the empty bench between us.

"Sit down, Wren," Roman said quietly.

"I don't think I want to sit down. I think I want an explanation."

"You'll have both, if you let me get there." A muscle in his jaw ticked, the only sign that he was working to keep his voice even. "I know how this looks from where you're standing. I need you to give me a minute before you decide I'm a monster."

"Sit down first," he said again, softer this time. He did not raise his voice, but there was something underneath it that made my legs move before my brain agreed to it.

I sat. He crouched in front of me, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off him despite the cold air of the rink, and his eyes held mine with a focus that made my pulse stumble.

"What you saw," he said slowly, "you were not supposed to see yet."

"Yet."

"There's a right way to do this. A careful way." His jaw tightened. "You just watched Finn heal an ankle injury in under two minutes. I need you to understand how much that changes things."

"Changes what things? Roman, what are you?"

He was quiet for a long moment, gold eyes studying my face like he was deciding exactly how much truth I could hold without breaking.

"We are not like other men," he said finally. "We never have been. Not the team you think you signed up for, and not the men you think you have been treating."

My heart pounded so hard I was sure he could hear it. Maybe he could. Maybe that was exactly the kind of thing he could hear.

"The growl in the parking lot," I whispered. "The note. Cassius's eyes."

"All real." His hand came up, brushing a strand of hair from my face with a gentleness that did not match the danger radiating off every other part of him. "You are the only person outside this team who has ever gotten this close to the truth, Wren. That makes you either very important to us, or very dangerous to us. I am still deciding which."

"That's not comforting."

"It wasn't meant to be. It was meant to be true." He studied me for a long moment, something unguarded flickering behind the gold. "I have watched grown men run from far less than what you just saw. You haven't run yet."

"Should I be running?"

"I hope not." The honesty in his voice startled me more than anything else he had said. "But that has to be your choice. Nobody on this team gets to make it for you, whatever it looks like from the outside." His hand lingered at my jaw, and heat pooled low in my stomach despite every warning bell going off in my head. "But I will tell you this much for free. Now that you know what you know, you are not walking away from this team quietly. Not tonight. Not ever."

Before I could find a single word to answer that, the rink lights flickered once, hard, plunging the whole arena into darkness for three full seconds.

When they snapped back on, Roman was gone, and in his place, low against the ice at the mouth of the tunnel, stood something on four legs with fur the color of midnight and eyes burning the exact same gold.