Chapter 1: The Man Who Broke My Stick

Elliot POV

I had learned a long time ago not to want things that could be taken. Hockey was the one exception I had allowed myself. I spent six years making sure no one ever found out why it cost me more than it cost anyone else.

The arena was loud enough to shake the bones in my body. I could hear only my own breathing, harsh inside my helmet, too fast and too uneven. The scoreboard burned at the edge of my vision: one minute left, one goal behind, the championship hanging on a blade's width of hope.

This was the moment I had built my entire life around. It was also the kind of moment men like Sebastian Wolfe were born to steal.

I didn't need to search for him. Even across a rink crowded with flashing lights and chaos, I found him at center ice, all broad shoulders and dark jersey, wearing the arrogant, easy posture of a man who had never once doubted the world would bend for him. Somehow, that made him worse.

I tightened my grip on my stick. Sebastian Wolfe made hatred feel too close to hunger.

"Gray!"

The puck shot toward me, fast and clean. Instinct took over. I moved, received it in one smooth motion, and for one bright, violent second, the net, the lane, and my shot opened up.

I pushed forward. Then Sebastian moved.

He came from my blind side with terrifying speed. His shoulder drove into me, knocking every breath from my lungs as my hands jerked, the sharp, splintering crack of my stick breaking, splitting the moment in two. I hit the ice flat on my back. The world flashed white, then black, then back again.

The final buzzer screamed. We had lost. I had lost.

The arena erupted. The sound reached me from far away, muffled by humiliation and the sickening heat rising in my face. Then, blocking out the lights like a storm cloud that had decided to take human form was Sebastian. He looked down at me with infuriating calm, his hair damp and his mouth curved into something not quite a smile, but enough to make my blood burn.

He bent close, his visor nearly touching mine. "Stay down, pretty boy."

Something pulled tight in my chest. I hated that name. Hated the way opponents used it like beauty made me weak. Most of all, I hated that when Sebastian said it, it didn't sound like mockery alone; it sounded like possession.

I shoved myself up, skates digging into the gouged ice. "Go to hell."

His hazel eyes moved over me, unreadable and too intent. "You first."

He didn't move. For one deliberate beat, his gaze dropped to the broken halves of my stick on the ice before snapping back to my face, not gloating, but something quieter, something he was keeping to himself. Then he skated away, swallowed by his team's celebration, while I stood there feeling like something inside me had cracked with the stick.

I had hated Sebastian Wolfe long before tonight. Everyone knew who he was: captain, star player, and walking scandal, the kind of Alpha who left headlines and broken hearts in every city he touched.

But the truth was uglier than his reputation. Sebastian had been a problem since I was nineteen, angry and desperate to prove myself. Every game between us turned vicious, every hit landed harder, and every exchange grew sharper. The fans called us fire and gasoline, and they had no idea how right they were.

What made him unbearable wasn't that he targeted me. It was that he saw me. Beneath the gear and the temper, he looked at me like he was trying to strip something open, as if he already suspected the answer and was simply waiting for confirmation.

I had spent my entire career making sure he never got it.

I kept my head down through the handshake line. He passed me once, his gloved hand hitting mine with unnecessary force, and then I went straight for the tunnel.

Something felt wrong. There was too much heat under my skin, and my pulse wouldn't settle the way it should after a game. I told myself it was adrenaline, the loss, and the hit. I was good at telling myself things.

The tunnel swallowed the crowd noise by degrees, then all at once. My skates hit the rubber matting, and I kept moving, because stopping meant someone might look at me, and right now my face was doing things I couldn't control. Six years on this ice and I had never lost it this clean, one hit, one broken stick, and one man looking down at me with that specific calm that meant he had gotten exactly what he came for. I hated that I didn't know what that was.

I pushed through the locker room doors, relieved to find it empty. I dropped my bag, ripped off my gloves, and curled my trembling fingers into fists. My helmet came off next, and I slammed it into the shelf hard enough to crack the silence.

I braced both hands on the bench and forced myself to inhale. One. Two. Three.

The locker room door clicked open with a soft brush of wood against the frame, shooting through me like a warning. I whirled around, my breath catching in my throat.

Sebastian stood in the doorway. He hadn't removed his jersey, and the corridor light framed the width of his shoulders, turning him into something dark and entirely too sure of itself. He closed the door behind him, the latch clicking home.

I had seen Sebastian Wolfe walk into rooms before: press conferences, tunnel intersections, and once, a hotel lobby in Calgary where we'd both been stranded by a weather delay and spent forty minutes pretending not to notice each other. He always did the same thing: took up exactly as much space as he wanted and made the rest of the room arrange itself accordingly. He was doing it now to a room that only contained me, leaving me nowhere left to arrange myself around him.

The four walls seemed to press inward.

His gaze dropped to the broken half of my stick against the bench, then lifted back to me, slow and direct, like a man who had come looking for something specific and had just found it.

He tipped his head, a slow line forming along his jaw. "Well. Now you look mad."

I straightened my spine, squaring my bare shoulders against the metal lockers. "Get out."

Sebastian took one step into the room, his heavy skates slicing a groove into the rubber matting, then another, his eyes never leaving mine.

Tonight was not over. It was not even close.