The Alpha Who Owns The Ice

The rink smelled like bleach and cold metal, and Sienna Cole had exactly four minutes to convince herself she belonged in it.

She stood outside the door marked TRAINING STAFF ONLY, badge clipped to her scrub top, résumé folder sweating in her hand even though the building was so cold she could see her breath. Behind the door, something crashed. A stick, maybe, or a body against the boards. Then a voice, low and clipped, giving instructions she couldn't make out.

She'd rehearsed this. Physiotherapist, three years of clinical experience, most recently at Halden Sports Medicine. She hadn't rehearsed the part where her stomach dropped like she was about to walk into a job interview or a car accident, she couldn't tell which.

Milo needed this job. That was the whole of it. Her brother's surgery date was locked in for eight weeks out, and eight weeks wasn't enough time to save what the insurance wouldn't cover, not on what she made freelancing. The Iron Wolves paid triple. She pushed the door open before she could talk herself out of it again.

The practice facility opened up bigger than she expected, glass on one side looking down into the rink, weight room on the other, and in the middle of it, a man arguing with a trainer twice his age like the man was a rookie and not, according to the paperwork in her folder, the actual owner.

Killian Frost. She'd looked up his photo exactly once, out of professional diligence, she told herself, and the photo had not done anything to prepare her for six-foot-three of him standing with his arms crossed and his jaw set like he was deciding whether to fire someone.

"-not asking you to clear him for full contact, I'm asking why the last three reports contradict each other," he was saying, and then he turned, and his eyes found her before she'd said a word.

Something happened.

She'd describe it later, badly, to no one, because there was no good way to describe a stranger's gaze landing on you like a hand closing around your throat, not violent, just total, like he'd already catalogued her and filed her somewhere important. His nostrils flared, actually flared, like a man scenting weather.

"You're the new PT," he said. Not a question.

"Sienna Cole." She held out her hand because that was what you did, and because her hand was shaking slightly and she needed something to do with it.

He looked at her hand like it might be a trick. Then he took it.

The world didn't stop. She wanted to be clear with herself about that later, replaying it, because it would have been easier to explain if the world had actually stopped, if there'd been some visible sign. Instead it was just heat, sudden and total, racing up her arm and into her chest like she'd swallowed something lit on fire, and his hand tightened around hers, not painfully, but like he couldn't have let go if the building caught on fire.

"Sorry," he said, and dropped her hand like it had burned him too. His voice had changed, gone rough at the edges. "Sienna Cole," he repeated, testing it.

"That's me." She flexed her fingers, checking they still worked. "I have a two o'clock with your training staff. I think that's you?"

"That's me." He didn't move.

The older trainer cleared his throat. "Boss. The report."

Killian didn't look away from her. "Give us the room, Dale."

"Boss, we've got forty minutes before-"

"Give us the room."

Dale left, throwing Sienna a look on the way out that she couldn't read, somewhere between pity and warning. She filed it away. She was good at filing things away. It was mostly what had gotten her through the last five years: her mother's death, becoming Milo's guardian at twenty, three moves in two years chasing rent she could afford. You filed things away and you kept walking.

"I don't usually do the interviews myself," Killian said, once the door shut. He'd recovered some of his composure, though his eyes still tracked her like she might bolt. "Dale handles the shortlist. I wanted to see this one."

"Should I be flattered or worried?"

Something flickered across his face, close to a smile, gone before it landed. "Depends how the next ten minutes go."

He asked her about the Halden position, about her approach to return-to-play timelines, about a specific hamstring case she'd handled that apparently he'd already read about in her file, and the questions were sharp, better than she expected from an owner who was supposed to be more spreadsheet than sports medicine. She answered them the way she'd answer anyone, professional, a little dry when the questions got repetitive, and every time she made eye contact she caught him doing something strange: breathing her in, slow, like he was trying not to be obvious about it and failing.

"Your file says you did your clinical rotations in Millbrook," he said, out of nowhere, twenty minutes in. "Small town. You grow up there?"

"No." The word came out clipped before she could soften it. "I grew up in foster care, mostly around the county. Millbrook was just where the rotation placed me."

"Where were you born?"

"Why does that matter for a PT position?"

He held her gaze a beat too long. "Curiosity."

"I don't know," she said, and it was true, in the way that a lot of true things about her life were also just gaps where information should be. "I don't have a birth certificate. There was a fire, when I was ten. Records office. I've got a guardian's affidavit and that's it."

Something in his face went very still, very focused, and for a second she thought she'd said something wrong, given him a reason to end the interview. Instead he leaned forward, forearms on his knees, and asked, quiet: "Do you ever get headaches around the full moon?"

She stared at him. "That's a strange question."

"Humor me."

"I-" She almost laughed it off, except she didn't, because the truth was strange enough that she'd never told anyone. "Sometimes. And I don't sleep well those nights. Why would you-"

The door slammed open. A younger woman, dark-haired, sharp-eyed, filled the frame with the kind of urgency that made Sienna's pulse spike before the woman even spoke.

"Killian." The woman's eyes flicked to Sienna, narrowed, then back to him. "We need you upstairs. Now. It's Talia's father. He's here."

Killian's whole body changed, shoulders squaring, jaw tightening, the openness of thirty seconds ago folding closed like a door.

"I have to go," he said, standing, and then, to Sienna, in a voice pitched low enough that the woman in the doorway couldn't hear it: "You're hired. Don't leave the building until I find you again."

"That's not really how job offers work-"

"Sienna." He said her name like he'd been saying it his whole life. "Please."

He was gone before she could answer, the dark-haired woman shooting her one more unreadable look before following him out, and Sienna sat alone in the empty office with her pulse hammering and no idea, none at all, why a billionaire hockey team owner had just asked her about the full moon like the answer might change his life.

She didn't know yet that it already had.