Page 129 of Choosing Their Omega

When Lily calls, my heart picks up instinctively, afraid it’s an emergency. Maybe Ben is sick again. Maybe he had an accident.

But it turns out that she just needs hair clips.

I smile into the phone helplessly. She’s adorable. And of course I have some hair clips on me. We all do. I can have an employee take some and meet her at the entrance to give them to her. I know she’ll be okay without them, technically, but her hair is long and thick and I know it can really get in her way without something to hold it back.

“I’ll get someone—” I start to say, but then I hear a sickening noise of metal colliding. There’s a loud crunching sound and the screech of tires… then the call drops.

I stare down at the phone as icy panic floods me. Fuck. Fuck, that sounded like a car accident.

I call Lily back.

The call doesn’t even ring, it goes right to voicemail, as if her phone is turned off.

Or smashed and broken, unusable.

My hands shake and I nearly drop my own phone as I run on my skates over to the rink where everyone else is getting on to warm up. “Cruz!”

He must hear the panic in my voice. I’m sure everyone can, because he drops the bag of pucks he’s holding and skates over immediately. “Holy shit, you look like you saw a ghost.”

“Lily was in a car accident. I was on the phone and I heard it. I can’t get through to her.”

Cruz’s face goes pale as all the blood drains out of it, and I’m pretty damn sure that look of horror he’s sporting is a match for the expression on my own face.

“Miles! Lawson!” Cruz yells.

They skate over. “What’s wrong?” Lawson’s gaze darts back and forth between us.

“Lily was in a car accident and I think she’s unconscious.”

As I tell them, Cruz waves Vaughn over. “Coach, we have to go. Our Omega was just hit by a car.”

Vaughn’s eyes go wide. “Is she okay?”

“We don’t know,” I bite out. I feel like I’m going to shake apart from how badly I’m panicking. I feel like I can’t breathe. “We have to go.”

My voice comes out as a snarl, and Miles and Lawson scramble off the ice to get a move on, undressing as they head to the locker room.

As much as I want to leave right now, my equipment be damned, I know that we won’t fit in the damn car if we’re in our hockey padding. Especially me as the damn goalie.

I rush back to the locker room. Behind us, I hear Cruz and Vaughn continuing to talk as they walk quickly behind me.

“I know that we’ll be out of the game—”

“I can’t say that the team managers will be happy—”

“Fuck the team managers, I don’t give a damn about our careers. They could fire us over this if they want, but—”

“No, I don’t think it’ll come to that. This is a family emergency. You need to go to her, anyone would understand that.”

They’re talking over each other, their sentences overlapping, but Vaughn’s tone is calm and reassuring. Honestly, even if he was yelling at Cruz and calling us bad team players, irresponsible, and all the rest, I wouldn’t give a damn. Nothing matters except for Lily. She’s more important than anything else, even our careers.

It sounds crazy to think, given how our careers have been everything to us for all of our adult lives. But it’s true, and I don’t regret it.

But it does help to know that Vaughn is sympathetic. Our team backs us up.

“We’ll manage without you,” Vaughn promises us as I step into the locker room.

I don’t think I’ve ever stripped down so fast in my damn life. Miles and Lawson are fumbling and nearly falling on their faces as they race to get undressed. They’re finished before I am so they hurry over to help me with my stuff, getting all of my padding off so that I can change back into my street clothes.

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