Worshiping Her Curves, Claimed by the Black Ice Alpha.

Nadia's POV After two years of dating Ethan Cole, secretly, he'll finally announce me to the public today. Excitement washes over me. The cardboard sign is heavier than it should be. I've had it tucked under my arm for two hours, through the whole third period, and my fingers have gone stiff around the edges where I gripped it too hard every time Red Fang scored. CONGRATULATIONS ETHAN- MY CAPTAIN, MY MATE is written in silver puff paint. I hug it to my chest now like it can hold me up. Red Fang just beat Black Ice 4–2, and the crowd is on its feet. Ethan Cole pulls off his red jersey, for a moment , I thought he'll throw it at me. At least to recognise my presence. But he doesn't do that. He flings to Doris Morgan. She's always running after him in the campus and he said she meant nothing to him. My eyes follow the crimson jersey like it's my right. Technically, it's my right. I'm his mate for goodness sake. She grabs it and puts it on immediately. My hands feels weak. A wave of jealousy hit me so hard my eyes becomes glassy with tear. But I continue to hold the banner. Get a grip Nadia. You’re his mate. He's skating a slow victory lap with his stick raised with gold excited eyes. I used to think they were the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. From up here they just look like two chips of amber catching the light, cold and pretty. And very far away. Across the ice, the Black Ice bench is a wall of black and glacier blue, and their captain is already skating off toward the tunnel without looking back at the scoreboard, like the loss doesn't touch him. Kai Thorne. I don't know him. Everyone knows him. You'd have to be blind not to notice him. He's six feet tall, shoulders built for taking a hit and giving one back twice as hard. Even from three hundred feet up I can see the way the other Black Ice players give him room on the bench, the careful two feet of space you leave around something that might go off. I don't look at him for long. Ethan finishes his lap and skates to the center ice. He moves toward the microphone stand they've wheeled out for the post-game interview. My heart does the thing it always does...that stupid, hopeful lurch, like a dog hearing a leash come off the hook. This is it. He told me two weeks ago, low and warm against my ear, that after the championship he'd stop hiding it. Stop making me wait in his room until his teammates left. Stop introducing me to people as "a friend from the athletic department." He's going to say it. He's going to look up into section twelve, find me and tell forty thousand people, including the entire wolf packs that I'm his. I hold the sign a little higher. Ethan takes the mic from the sideline reporter with a grin that used to make my knees go soft. He thanks the team. Thanks the coaches. And then his gold eyes lift, and scan the crowd, and I swear for one half of one second they settle on me and a decision moves behind them. "I want to say something," he says, and the crowd quiets, and I stop breathing, "about the kind of mate a real alpha needs." Yes. My chest tickles with hope. "Because there's been talk about me and a girl from the athletic department. And I want to clear it up. Right here. Right now." He finds me again. This time there's no mistaking it-he's looking dead at me, at the sign, at the cardboard, and a fake smile slides across his face. "She's not my mate. I mean, she was. The bond picked her. But come on." He laughs, and it isn't a nervous laugh. It's a real one, warm and delighted, the laugh of a man telling a good joke to friends. "Look at her. I'm the captain of Red Fang. I need a mate who can run with the pack, not someone too soft. Too slow. Too.." he gestures, a lazy up-and-down flick of his hand that takes in all of me, every inch he used to say he loved with his mouth in the dark, "...too much." The stadium laughs. It isn't scattered laughter. It's a wave, thousands of throats at once, rolling down out of the stands and across the ice, and somewhere in it I hear a Red Fang player whoop, and somewhere in it I hear Doris Morgan say, "Oh my god! This is interesting." The sign slides out of my hands. I don't remember deciding to drop it. And then the bond snaps. It doesn't feel like heartbreak. Heartbreak is a story people tell about a feeling-this isn't a story, this is a wire pulled taut through the center of my chest, violently, cut. I feel it physically, a white detonation behind my sternum that drops me straight down onto the concrete steps, knees first, sign forgotten, hands scrabbling at my own chest like I could hold the ends of the wire together if I just pressed hard enough. Pain doesn't cover it. It's not pain, exactly. It's absence, sudden and total, the specific horror of a thing being alive inside you one second and simply gone the next. Somewhere underneath that absence, something else wakes up. It isn't sound. I feel it before I hear it, a low, rolling growl that starts in the base of my spine and climbs, vertebra by vertebra, until it's vibrating behind my teeth. It doesn't belong to the pain. It belongs to me, some deeper, older me I have spent twenty-one years pretending wasn't there, and it isn't grieving. It's furious. He's going to regret that, and so is every single person laughing right now. I don't know that voice. I've never heard it before in my life. I don't get the chance to be afraid of it -because that's when I feel the second thing. A pressure rolling down from the ice itself, immense and absolute, silencing forty thousand people mid-laugh like a hand closing around every throat in the stadium at once. Every hair on my body knows, before I've even lifted my head to look at who it is.