Page 117 of Wild Card 13

Minnesota Frosthawks

It was absurd how long I sat there. My cursor blinked after the word Acting like it was waiting for me to do something brave.

I deleted it.

One word.

Six letters.

Gone.

Lucy Thomas

Director of Player Operations

Minnesota Frosthawks

The apartment didn't change. No music swelled. No hidden audience applauded. Only Dottie’s soft snores as she pressed against my hip. And still, something inside me settled.

I saved the change before I could talk myself out of it. Then I opened a blank document. I didn't know why. Habit, maybe. Or instinct. Or the part of me that had been trying to speak for years and kept getting buried beneath practical decisions.

The empty page glowed back at me. White. Unmarked. Patient.

My fingers hovered over the keyboard.

I thought about a girl who had spent her life orbiting a world that kept asking her to choose between who she loved and who she wanted to be. I thought about a boy with too much light in him, and all the ways good intentions could still break someone. I thoughtabout second chances and timing and the terrible, stubborn hope of loving someone despite every reason not to.

I typed one line. Then another. Not much. Just an outline. A beginning. But it was more than I'd let myself have in years.

A quiet thought slipped through before I could stop it.Why couldn't I do both?

I could work for the team. I could write in my spare time. I could build a life that didn't require me to abandon one version of myself to become another.

Dottie shifted in her sleep, burrowing deeper into my side, her warm weight pinning me in place like she knew I had a habit of running from realizations once they became inconvenient.

I looked around the apartment. At the books still stacked on the floor. The art still leaning against the walls. The boxes I had never finished unpacking because some part of me had been waiting for permission to leave.

I rested my hand lightly on Dottie's head, my fingers sinking into the soft fur between her ears. She didn't wake. I smiled down at her, tired and quiet and more certain than I had been when the night began. "I guess it's time to finish unpacking these boxes and really make this place our own."

CHAPTER 15

BUZZ

NOW

The executive conference room sat at the end of the hallway, all glass walls and polished wood and expensive chairs designed by someone who had clearly never been asked to sit in one while being told they were a disappointment to the franchise.

Sarah Yu was already there, tablet in front of her, posture straight, expression unreadable.

Coach Holloway stood by the windows with a travel mug in one hand, staring out at the practice rink below like the ice had personally offended him.

Rawlings sat halfway down the table, unusually quiet, his coffee untouched in front of him. That was new. Keith Rawlings treated coffee like a constitutional right.

Ezra sat at the head of the table, jacket off, sleeves rolled, talking quietly to Alois Müller.

Alois barely fit in a conference room chair like a normal human being. He sat there in black athletic gear, one ankle hooked over the opposite knee, massive shoulders relaxed, face carved into the same expression he wore before killing penalties and ruining opposing forwards’ evenings.

He glanced at me when I came in.