My Hockey Alpha

Nina

“That’s weird,” I said under my breath, peeling away the bandages the rest of the way while Jessica and Lori watched with confused expressions on their faces.

Where my knee had been completely torn up the night before, it was now perfectly fine… As though I had never been injured at all. I furrowed my brow and poked the area where I had been injured, but felt nothing out of the ordinary. Had the blood just made it appear worse than it really was? No… I remembered clearly that the skin was broken. I even had a gaping hole in the knee of my jeans to prove it.

Suddenly, my phone started buzzing and made all of us jump. I picked it up to see James’ number on my screen, momentarily making me forget about the strange occurrence with my knee.

“Hello?” I said, holding the phone up to my ear.

“Hey,” James said, sounding a bit excitable. “I have something to show you. Meet me on the quad in fifteen?”

“Uh, sure,” I replied.

I was still holding the bloody gauze in my hand when I hung up, and Lori and Jessica were still staring at me. This was definitely something I would have to talk to Enzo about later… Maybe he had simply healed my knee when I fell asleep. That was the only reasonable explanation, but it certainly wasn’t an explanation that I could give my roommates.

“I guess it just wasn’t as bad as it looked,” I said, tossing the bandage in the trash and walking back to my room as nonchalantly as I could while Jessica and Lori stared after me confusedly .

I met James at the quad fifteen minutes

out a manila folder He handed it to me with a serious look on his face. “Check this out,” he said quietly,

contained Ronan’s physical records — all showing incredibly superior strength and speed —

in competition with Enzo’s father’s company,” James said, pointing at the newspaper clippings. ” Not

impressive physical skills. Was Ronan truly human, or was he hiding something? Enzo hadn’t mentioned anything seeming out of the ordinary about

and nodded. “But why is the question,” he whispered. “Is the Blizzard Tournament really so important that two

anything else, James and

girls staring at us and giggling. One of them was coming toward me… and it was Lisa.

of hiding? And why

get up in my face. It was oddly similar to how she had

thrown directly into my face. I stood there with my mouth hanging open in surprise as the coffee seeped through my

the coffee cup on the ground. “I know you saw Enzo walking me home that night and just

and respond, Lisa turned on her heel

are you oka–“James started to say, but I just wanted to run away and hide Without another word, I dropped Ronan’s file and ran back to my dorm

in the lobby and sprinted up the stairs two at a time. When I finally made it back to my apartment, I burst inside and ran into my room, locking the door behind me while a confused Lori and Jessica

door. I heard concerned muttering on the other side of the door, but I didn’t care, all I wanted was to curl up into my shell and

more photos had been taken of me that morning and were posted

me talking to James, as well as the moment when Lisa threw her coffee in my face. Had Lisa hired someone to photograph that very