Breaking the Ice

The First Fight

Scarlett's POV

I knew they were going to react. I prepared for it.

What I didn't prepare for was how loud twenty-two hockey players in a small room could actually get.

It starts the moment Coach finishes speaking. Not one voice — all of them, overlapping, some directed at Coach and some just directed at the ceiling, the way men complain when they forget they're being watched.

A girl? On the team?

This is a joke, right?

Coach, come on, you can't be serious —

I keep my chin up. My face neutral. My hands loose at my sides, which is harder than it sounds because what I actually want to do is cross my arms and plant my feet and tell every single one of them exactly what I think. But that's not the right move. Not yet. Not in someone else's locker room, on the first day, when I still have everything to prove.

So I breathe. I wait. I let them get it out.

The loudest voice in the room isn't the one I expect. I thought it would be one of the bigger guys, one of the ones who'd already been staring at me like I was an error on a page. But it's Carter — the captain, number seven, arms crossed now, jaw set — who steps forward and speaks in a way that cuts through all the others.

"Coach." His voice is controlled. That's what makes it land harder than the shouting. "This is a men's team. Whatever the charter says, there are practical realities here. Locker room access, training dynamics, team chemistry —"

"Already handled," Coach says. He hasn't moved. He hasn't changed his expression. He's answered this question before — I know because he told me he would, back in his office three weeks ago when I was making my case and sweating through my jacket and trying not to show it. They'll push back, Sinclair. I'll handle it. You just have to survive the first week.

"Handled how?" a guy near the back asks. Red hair, freckles — I'll learn names later.

"Separate locker facility. Shared ice time, same training requirements." Coach glances at his clipboard, then back up. "She meets every eligibility standard. This isn't up for a vote."

"You can't just —" someone starts.

"I just did." Coach closes the clipboard. "You have nine minutes."

The room goes quiet in the specific, reluctant way of people who have lost an argument and know it. I watch Carter's jaw work. I watch him look at me — really look, for the first time, properly — and I hold his gaze without blinking because that's the only language I know how to speak right now.

He looks away first.

It doesn't feel like a victory. It feels like a postponement.

Coach gives me a small nod — the kind that means you're dismissed, go — and I slip out before the grumbling can start back up again.

The private locker room they've set up for me is at the end of a side corridor, tucked away like an afterthought. It used to be a storage office, I think. There's a single bench, a short row of lockers, a rectangle of mirror on the wall. Clean, quiet, impersonal.

But one of the lockers has a label on it.

SINCLAIR. #11.

I don't move for a moment. Just look at it.

The sounds of the arena seep through the walls — crowd building, music starting up, the distant thud of the announcement system running a check. This place is massive and I am very small inside it and I have exactly one year to make it count before my father decides for me.

But for right now, in this room that smells like paint and cold air, I have a locker with my name on it.

I sit down on the bench and start unlacing my skates, slowly, and I let the feeling be what it is — the careful, almost frightened happiness of something you've wanted so long you stopped believing in it. I don't let myself cry. That's a different kind of rule I have, one I learned younger than I should have. But I breathe it in, all of it, the smallness of this room and the bigness of what it means.

I'm still sitting like that, skate half-off, when the door opens.

No knock.

I look up.

Liam Carter fills the doorway, still in full gear, helmet gone. He steps inside and the room immediately feels smaller, the walls tighter, the air doing something strange. He walks toward me — not rushed, not slow — and I stand up without thinking about it, because sitting while someone closes the distance on you like that is not something I'm built to do.

He stops close. Closer than is necessary. Closer than is comfortable.

I can hear his breathing.

I can see the fine tension in his jaw, the controlled-but-barely quality of his eyes. This isn't the loud anger of the locker room. This is the quieter kind, the kind that's been sitting with itself and getting heavier.

My pulse does something I decide not to think about.

"You can't walk in here without knocking," I say. Calm. Even.

He doesn't answer right away. His eyes stay on mine like he's trying to find something there, some c***k in the surface, some proof of whatever story he's already written about me.

He won't find it.

I don't know what he's about to say. I don't know if it'll be another version of what happened in the locker room or something worse or something different entirely. I don't know why his silence feels louder than anyone else's noise has all day.

What I know is this: I have my name on a locker at the end of this hallway.

And I'm not going anywhere.