(Max’s POV)
"Stay away from Alphas you don’t know." His voice finally broke the silence, low, still facing the door, still not looking at me. "Not the ones who smile at you. Not the ones who look harmless. All of them. Every single one, until I tell you otherwise."
"Okay."
"I mean it, Max." He turned then, and whatever softness might have lived in that stillness a moment ago was gone, replaced by something harder, more urgent. "You don’t understand what you’re walking into every time you play hero. An Alpha doesn’t need a reason. Half of them would break your arm just to prove they could, and there’s nothing you could do to stop it. Nothing. Do you understand?"
"I understand."
He studied me another second, like he didn’t quite believe that, and then he let go of whatever he’d been holding onto and jerked his chin toward the door. "Come with me."
I didn’t ask where. I just followed, my hand still faintly warm from where I’d held his wrist a minute ago, out of the first aid room and down the corridor toward the sports complex.
The locker room was loud before we even reached the door — voices, laughter, the metallic clang of lockers being slammed — and it went quiet the second Lucian pushed through with me half a step behind him.
Every head in the room turned.
A dozen guys in various states of pulling on pads and jerseys all stopped what they were doing at once, eyes moving from Lucian to me and back again, some curious, some openly assessing, the way you’d look at something that didn’t belong in a room and hadn’t been announced.
"That the brother?" someone muttered, not quietly.
One of them peeled away from his locker and crossed toward me before I could get my bearings, tall, broad-shouldered, grinning in a way that didn’t reach anywhere near friendly.
He got in close, too close, looming enough that I took an instinctive step back and hit the row of lockers behind me.
"Careful," he said, low, right up in my space. "Wrong locker room to wander into, human."
My heart was already hammering, some old, tired part of me bracing for whatever came next, when Lucian’s voice cut across the room.
"Stop it."
The guy blinked, straightened, and then — a beat too slow, like he’d genuinely been enjoying himself — broke into a wide, easy laugh, throwing an arm loosely around my shoulders like we were old friends caught mid-joke. "Relax, relax, I’m just messing with him." He squeezed my shoulder once, friendly now, all the menace gone as fast as it had appeared. "Damn, Cross, you didn’t tell us your brother was this easy to spook."
"He’s not—" I started, and stopped, because I genuinely didn’t know how to finish that sentence in a room full of people watching.
"Marcus." The guy stuck a hand out toward me, grinning, entirely unbothered by his own whiplash change of temperature. "I room with your brother during away games. He’s told us basically nothing about you, by the way, which, frankly, is very on brand."
"Max," I said, shaking his hand, still recalibrating.
"Max." Marcus said it like he was trying the name on. "Okay, Max. You skate?"
"Not really."
"Tragic." He grinned wider. "We’ll fix that eventually. Anyway—" he clapped me once on the shoulder and finally let go, already turning back toward his own locker "—stick around, it’s more interesting with an audience. Your brother’s captain, in case nobody’s mentioned it. Makes practice twice as brutal as it needs to be."
I glanced toward Lucian, half-expecting him to already be walking away, already done with the whole exchange. He wasn’t.
He was watching Marcus with something unreadable in his expression, something that might have been irritation, might have been something else entirely, and when his eyes cut to me for half a second, he didn’t look away as fast as he usually did.
"Suit up," he said finally, to the room in general, and the locker room dissolved back into its usual noise, everyone lacing skates and pulling on jerseys, the moment folding itself back into ordinary chaos.
Lucian changed with his back half-turned, quick and efficient, and I found a spot near the door to wait, feeling more like a stranger and less like one, both at once, in a way I didn’t fully understand yet.
The walk out to the rink was easier than the one into the locker room had been. A few of the guys nodded at me on the way past, one of them asking if I wanted water from the cooler like it was nothing at all, like I’d been there every day instead of for the first time.
I found a spot in the stands, halfway up, close enough to see clearly but far enough that I wasn’t in anyone’s way, the cold already creeping up through the concrete under my shoes.
Lucian skated out onto the ice with the rest of them, and for a while I just watched — the drills, the shouted plays, the particular way his whole body seemed to know exactly what it was doing before his mind caught up to it.
Marcus skated past the boards at one point, breathless, grinning up at me through the glass. "He’s not usually like this, you know."
"Like what?"
"Bringing people around." Marcus jerked his head toward the ice, toward Lucian, who was currently running a drill with a focus that looked almost like it hurt. "Cross doesn’t do that. Ever. You’re literally the first person he’s brought to a practice that wasn’t already on the team." He shrugged, pushing off toward center ice to catch up with the others. "Just saying. Means something, probably."
He turned and skated off before I could ask him what.
I sat there a long moment after that, watching Lucian move across the ice, replaying it — first person he’s brought to a practice that wasn’t already on the team — when Lucian’s head turned mid-stride, mid-drill, and found me in the stands.
He didn’t look away.
The play kept moving around him — a pass called, a stick tapping the ice, someone shouting his name to get his attention back on the puck — and still he didn’t look away, skates slowing under him like the rest of the drill had simply stopped mattering.
"Cross!" The coach’s whistle cracked across the rink, sharp. "Eyes on the ice!"
Lucian didn’t move. Not yet. He held my gaze one more second — long enough that my pulse picked up for reasons that had nothing to do with the cold — before something shifted behind his eyes, something I didn’t have a name for and wasn’t sure I wanted one for.
Then the puck came flying straight toward where he was standing, and he still hadn’t turned back around.