When vengeance strikes in the form of a bullet out for the princess's blood, Princess Aleia VonAuclair must flee the heart of her country in order to protect the people she loves and take back the pieces of her soul she'd lost to the girl she once l...
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"I'm surprised your brother managed to make it on the team so fast," Cara said as we walked down the concrete steps of the stadium to the second row, right beside the tunnel where Bryan told me to sit.
The chilly night air held a slight bite to it, and I attempted to pull my knit sweater even tighter around me while balancing a tray of steaming, warm cups in my hands.
The stadium adorned an open roof feature, so every last bit of warmth I could get, I savoured. We'd stopped by at the campus cafe to pick up some drinks for ourselves and, since tonight wasn't an actual game, we picked up some coffee for the guys, too.
Cara carried the second tray of hot chocolates for the three of us, while Lily swung around multiple bags of snacks, they'd bought from the grocery store since apparently, the university charged a ridiculous amount of money at the stands only for their students to be eating trash.
I shrugged. "All he had to do was say the words two-time champion and the coach let him try out."
"Is he any good?" Lily asked.
"I guess," I said, following Cara into the row before plopping in between the two. "I only went to some of his games and even then, I barely knew what was happening. I can't even tell you if we won some of them. The only way I knew they were doing something right was when people started screaming."
They laughed and I scanned my eyes over the expanse of the stadium, trying to play Where'sWaldo with all of the guards.
"So, you're basically just his emotionally supportive cheerleader?"
I wrinkled my nose. "Ew, don't say that. That sounds...gross."
Lily snorted, her blue eyes sparkling under the bright stadium lights. We'd arrived at the stadium a whole hour early instead of the thirty minutes Bryan had initially suggested.
When I'd told the girls over text, they'd said that majority of the students would already be there by then so the crowd wouldn't be helpful if I wanted to get to my brother in the tunnels without getting walked all over.
They didn't know I didn't actually need to pass anything to Nate, but I took their words to heart and told Bryan I'd be there an hour early. Nate played the perfect act of forgetting his knee pads at home even though I knew he carried three extra sets in his gym bag like the obnoxious over-preparer that he was.
"Come on, you didn't even catch on to the scoring system while watching these things?" Cara asked as she slipped on her jacket.
I shook my head. "Where I'm from, ice hockey isn't as big a deal as it is here, but my brother enjoys it enough to take it seriously that I try to be supportive. I really can't tell you anything about the game because I sort of blank out through the whole thing. I just go home and say you did great out there and he'd start going on a tangent about all the ways he could've done something better."
