The Hockey Alpha Bullied Me, Then His Wolf Claimed Me

The Wolves won the division final 4–1, and Blair decided the whole program deserved a party.

"All staff," her text to the work-study group chat said. "Attendance mandatory. Dress nice!"

The ballroom at the Ridge Pack lodge had been strung with silver lights and black balloons. The division trophy sat on a velvet-draped stand by the podium, gold and polished enough to throw the light back at everyone.

I found my seat near the kitchen doors. The place card was tented on an empty plate, my name printed in a curly font.

Madison Cole. Cleaning Crew.

The other cards at the table read Athletic Trainer, Equipment Staff, Medical Team. Mine was the only one with a joke built into it.

I didn't sit. I had my last work order folded in my clutch, signed by Professor Okafor, and the brass locker key Dale had issued me in September. Hand them over, get the final signature, walk out. Fifteen minutes, tops.

Through the open doors, camera flashes were going off on the red carpet. Jackson stood in a charcoal suit with Blair tucked under his arm, her gold dress catching every flash.

A reporter from the campus paper held out a phone. "Captain, the pack's been asking. Have you found your future Luna?"

Blair laughed and tipped her head onto his shoulder.

Jackson didn't say yes. He didn't say no either. He smiled for the camera and let the silence answer for him.

I turned toward Dale's table, and Jackson's head came around like he'd felt me move. When the photographers shifted to the goalie, he stepped off the carpet and caught up with me by the coat rack.

"You just got here," he said. "You're leaving?"

"I'm dropping off my key."

"The trophy presentation hasn't even started."

I looked past him at Blair, who was already searching the crowd for him.

"I'm not staying to watch you choose her twice."

---

He caught up with me again in the back stairwell, where the heating didn't reach and the concrete held the January cold.

"Madison. Wait."

I stopped on the landing with my hand on the rail. The metal was freezing, and my fingertips went numb against it, still blue-white at the tips from the auxiliary room.

Jackson held out a pair of gloves. Dark gray leather, cashmere lining, the store tag still looped through one cuff.

"Your hands," he said. "Reyes said resonance backlash can take weeks to clear. You're not supposed to let them get cold."

"You bought these?"

"Does it matter?"

It did. He'd walked into a store and picked them out. He'd thought about my hands when nobody was watching.

He took my wrist to turn my palm over, and his thumb pressed right over my pulse. His breathing went slow and heavy, and I watched his pupils spread. This close, his cedar cologne didn't cover the real scent underneath it, the frost-and-cedar of him that my wolf had stirred for on the ice.

"Are you actually going out with Mason on Friday?" he asked. His voice had dropped. "Pancakes on Route 9?"

"Why do you care?"

"Answer the question."

"You don't get to ask me that, Jackson."

His grip tightened. Not painfully. Just enough that I understood he wasn't planning to let go until he heard what he wanted.

Then a door banged open two floors down. Footsteps and laughter echoed up the stairs, along with someone calling for the captain.

Jackson dropped my wrist so fast my hand hit the rail.

He stepped back, put a full arm's length between us, and slid his own hands into his pockets like they'd never been anywhere else.

The footsteps passed on the floor below and faded.

I looked at the gloves, then at him. Then I took his hand out of his pocket, set the gloves in his palm, and closed his fingers over them.

"If you can't hold my hand in daylight, don't reach for it in the dark."

He opened his mouth. Nothing came out.

I went up the stairs without him.

---

The staff lockers were in a narrow corridor behind the kitchen. Mine was the last one in the row, where I'd stuffed my backpack before the party.

The latch had new scratches on it. Bright silver gouges in the gray paint, the kind a flathead screwdriver leaves when someone pries without a key. The door sat a quarter inch open.

Sticking out of the outside mesh pocket of my backpack was a small glass vial with a cork stopper. Pink liquid caught the hallway light. A handwritten label was taped around the middle.

MATE POTION.

I didn't touch it. I didn't touch the bag or the locker door either.

I pulled out my phone, opened the camera, and started recording. The timestamp burned into the corner of the screen: 8:47 p.m.

"This is Madison Cole," I said, keeping my voice steady. "Staff locker fourteen. The latch has been forced. There's a vial in my bag that I didn't put there, and I haven't handled it."

I panned slowly over the scratches, the gap in the door, the label.

Then I stuck my head out into the kitchen hallway. Hannah Ortiz, the RA from my dorm, was running the coat check for extra cash.

"Hannah. I need a witness. Two minutes."

She followed me back, saw the vial, and her eyes went wide. "What the hell is that?"

"Something someone wants me holding. Can you say your name and the time on camera?"

She did. Then I sent the video to her phone, to Professor Okafor, and to my cloud backup, and I had Hannah screenshot the delivery confirmation.

"You think this is a prank?" Hannah whispered.

Before I could answer, a camera shutter clicked behind us.

Blair stood at the end of the corridor with the party's hired photographer, a lanky guy with a lens the size of a coffee can. She looked at the open locker, at the vial, then at me, and her face arranged itself into something like shock.

"Oh my God," she said. "So it's true."

"What's true?"

"Get a shot of the bag," she told the photographer. He raised the camera.

I stepped in front of the locker. "You came straight here. Out of a whole building. To the last locker in the staff hall."

"I was looking for the bathroom."

"With a photographer."

Her smile didn't move. "Lucky timing."

"Funny how the evidence shows up before the accusation."

For half a second, something sharp flashed across her face. Then she turned and walked back toward the ballroom, her photographer trailing behind.

That was when it hit me. This wasn't about humiliating me in a locker room. Blair didn't need a laundry girl crying in a hallway. She needed an audience.

---

I grabbed my backpack by the straps, careful to keep my fingers clear of the mesh pocket, and headed for the service exit.

The door was ten feet away when the ballroom lights cut out.

The crowd went quiet. Then a spotlight snapped on and swung across the room, over the tables and the trophy, and stopped on me in the kitchen doorway.

Two hundred faces turned toward me at once.

At the podium, Blair stood in the second spotlight. She lifted her hand. Between her manicured fingers was a glass vial with a cork stopper and pink liquid inside. It was identical to the one in my bag.

Jackson stood beside her at the edge of the stage, the gold trophy behind him, his tie loosened. He'd gone completely still.

Blair leaned into the microphone.

"Before we celebrate our captain, let's expose the girl who tried to steal him."

A murmur rolled through the room. Somebody laughed. Phones came up everywhere.

"Tonight," Blair said, "everyone at Northridge is going to see exactly how a certain scholarship student uses magic to steal someone else's man."

Jackson's eyes moved from the vial in her hand, across the room, to the staff name badge pinned on my dress.

Madison Cole.

I watched him read it, and I couldn't tell whether he was going to step forward or step away.

Blair raised a small black remote and pressed the button.

The projection screen behind her flickered to life, huge and bright above the trophy.

It was a photo of a door. A battered beige door with a scuffed brass number plate screwed into the wood.

Room 214, Halvorsen Hall.

My dorm room.