James

She made it back to her room before her legs gave out.

Not literally. She caught herself on the doorframe, straightened, checked the corridor both ways out of habit, then closed the door and let herself be alone for the first time all day. She dropped her bag. Sat on the edge of the bed. Stared at the floor.

Then she lay back and looked at the ceiling and let the day unpack itself.

It started with him.

She hadn't meant to think about Justin. She had actively decided, somewhere between the locker room and the dining hall, that she wouldn't. But the mind doesn't negotiate. It retrieves what it wants and presents it without permission, and what it kept presenting was the first time she'd seen him.

The gate. Her first morning. The bus had barely stopped when she'd felt it. That particular atmospheric shift that happens when something significant enters a space. She'd looked up and there he was. Taller than the boys around him, which wasn't unusual. But it wasn't the height. It was the stillness. Everyone else was moving, adjusting bags, checking phones, performing arrival, and he was simply standing, hands in his pockets, looking at nothing in particular with the absolute confidence of someone who had never once in his life questioned whether he belonged somewhere.

She had thought: trouble.

She had thought it the way you think rain when the sky changes. Not fear. Just recognition.

Then he'd moved through the crowd and the crowd had parted. Not dramatically, not obviously, just the way water moves around a stone. And she'd understood something about the architecture of this place that no orientation booklet would have told her.

She'd filed it. Moved on.

Something keeps pulling me toward you.

She pressed the back of her hand to her bandaged jaw and stared at the ceiling. It wasn't the words that unsettled her. It was that he'd said them the way people say true things. Not performed. Not calculated. Just released. Like he hadn't meant to and couldn't take it back and had decided, in the space of a breath, not to try.

She thought about his hand over her mouth.

The heat of it. The closeness.

She shut it down before the thought could finish forming.

You have six years, she reminded herself. Six years, one secret, and zero room for this.

The room was small and entirely hers and she was grateful for it with a specificity that still surprised her.

She turned her head and looked at the desk. The stack of textbooks. The timetable she'd copied out in James's handwriting, not because anyone would check, but because the practice helped her hold him close. His particular slant on the letter g. The way he never dotted his i until the end of a word.

He was smarter than me, she thought. He always was.

She'd known it growing up and hadn't minded. Had been proud of it, even, the way you're proud of something that belongs to you. James and his grades, James and his scholarship offers, James and the way teachers looked at him like he was a door they couldn't wait to see open. She'd had hockey. He'd had everything else.

Now she had to have both.

She sat up and pulled the mathematics textbook toward her. Opened it to the chapter she'd half-understood in class that morning. Read the first theorem. Read it again.

James would have had this memorized by now.

She picked up her pen.

Then I'll memorize it twice as hard.

The invitation took her longer to write than she expected.

Not because she didn't know what to say. She knew exactly what to say. It was the handwriting. James's handwriting. She'd been practicing for weeks and she still had to slow down at the g and the y and the particular way he curved his capital K that she'd always teased him about.

She wrote it out three times before she was satisfied.

Mama. Papa. There is a competition. Season One. I want you there.

She didn't write about the Alpha King.

Or the cost of losing.

Some things didn't belong on paper.

She folded the letter. Sealed it. Set it beside her pillow to post in the morning.

Then she stared at it for a long moment and thought about her father at the window. Her mother's voice going careful around James's name.

We cannot lose.

She'd heard about the Alpha's son, of course.

Everyone had. It moved through the dormitories the way information always moved in places like this. In whispers, in fragments, in the careful casualness of people pretending they weren't as interested as they were. The Alpha's son is enrolled. The Alpha King himself is attending the Season One match. The heir is here, somewhere, among us.

She had listened. Filed it. Moved on.

She had more immediate problems.

By the next afternoon, she was back on the ice.

Training was brutal and she was grateful for every second of it.

She pushed through the edge drills until her thighs burned past the point of complaint and settled into something quieter and more useful. The particular numbness that meant her body had stopped arguing and started working. Blades cutting tight arcs into the ice. Weight transfer. Edge to edge. The sequence her uncle had drilled into her at nine years old, standing on the frozen yard in boots two sizes too large, laughing at her wobbling ankles.

Push through the burn, Ky. The burn means it's working.

By the time they switched to shooting, her arms were shaking. Her aim didn't miss.

The Blue House boys were watching from the other side of the rink. They'd been watching for three days now, not scouting, not seriously. Just spectating with that particular brand of loud contempt that advertised itself as confidence.

"Look at them," one called out. "White House training like it's going to save them."

Laughter. Arranged, performative.

"You lot are going to embarrass yourselves," another one said. "Someone should tell them there's no prize for showing up."

"Scholarship boy's working hard." John's voice, recognizable even from a distance. "All that effort for a loss. Almost feel sorry for them."

She didn't stop moving. She lined up the next shot, shifted her weight, and put it exactly where she wanted it.

She knew what was at stake. Didn't need reminding. Didn't need the scoreboard or the dignitaries or the Alpha King in the stands to tell her. She'd known from the moment she'd done the math in her room at 11pm with her mother's voice still sitting in her chest.

Lose, and her parents paid half a year's fees.

Half a year's fees they did not have.

Could not get.

Would not be able to explain. She lined up another shot.

We are not losing.

The puck hit the back of the net.

She didn't celebrate.

She reset and went again.