The Alpha Captain's Secret Baby novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Jumbotron
The arena camera finds Willa and her son in the upper deck, and the Northmen's captain stops at the faceoff circle. She walks out with Emil, and Rhys is waiting at the service door.
The jumbotron found my son in the second period.
The whole arena roared, and his face filled the screen above center ice.
He had both fists in the air and his mouth wide open.
His blue jersey was two sizes too big, with a 9 on the back that I had ironed on myself.
I was beside him in a ball cap, and the camera had me too.
Down on the ice, the home team was lining up for a faceoff.
Their captain stood at the circle with his stick down.
He looked up at the screen and didn't move.
The referee dropped the puck, and nobody on the home team went for it.
"Mama, I'm on TV!" my son shouted. "Mama, look, I'm huge!"
"I see you, baby," I said.
My voice came out thin.
Emil had won a radio drawing with a crayon letter to the team.
He was five years old, and he had written that he wanted to watch number 9 score.
He didn't know why that number made me go quiet.
I had told myself it would be one game, the upper deck, a ball cap, and a splash of Hattie's cedar wash to hide my scent.
I had not told myself the camera could find us.
Six years ago, Rhys Satterthwaite bit my best friend at the Moon Rite instead of me.
He did it in front of the whole Satterthwaite pack, while I stood in the gallery with Emil two months along inside me.
Pia was the only person I had told about the baby.
She had said to wait in the gallery and surprise him after the rite.
It had sounded like good advice, so I took it.
Then the screen cut away from us, and there she was in the owner's box.
Pia Aaberg, in white cashmere and pearls, clapping for the replay.
She had shared her lunch with me every day for a year when we were six.
She saw our faces on the screen behind her, and her hands stopped.
Someone beside her touched her arm, and she smiled for the camera again.
The smile took a moment to arrive.
On the ice, the captain was skating toward the boards with his helmet tipped back.
His eyes went across the upper deck, section by section.
His bench had gone silent.
The announcer was saying something about a delay, and nobody was listening.
His head turned, and his nostrils flared as he caught a scent.
Cedar and smoke wouldn't hold for long against a wolf like him.
So I took my son's hand and left.
"But the game!" Emil said, as I pulled him up the steps.
"We'll listen to the rest in the car."
"Is the captain mad at us?"
"No, baby. He doesn't know us."
That was the lie I'd told for five years, and it had never been so hard to say.
I knew the back halls of that arena from the girls' skating league I'd grown up in.
I took the stairs past the pretzel stand and through the staff door nobody watched.
Then I took the long gray corridor to the loading dock, where my car was parked in the lot beyond.
Emil ran ahead of me, his jersey flapping around his knees.
"Emil, wait."
The dock doors were open, and cold air came in from the lot.
I could see my car forty feet away under a light.
Then a shape stepped out of the shadow beside the doors, and I stopped.
Rhys stood there in his skates and his jersey, soaked through from the ice.
He had left a game in the second period and run the length of the building to get here.
He was larger than I remembered, and he was breathing hard.
His gray eyes went to me first, and then they dropped to the boy.
Emil stopped in front of him with his chin up.
"You're number 9," Emil said.
Rhys didn't answer him.
He kept looking at me, and his voice came out rough.
"Willa," he said. "Pia told me you took my father's check and left."
I couldn't speak.
"She said you took it the night of the rite and never looked back."
His hands were shaking at his sides.
"Tell me it was a lie."
"I never took anything from you," I said.
Emil looked up at the man in the number 9 jersey.
His gray eyes went gold.
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