Chapter 161: She Knows I Hate Her Interference

Reid’s mother—Fidora’s eyes narrowed into tiny, calculating slits. For a long, agonizing second, the silence in the grand hall was thick enough to suffocate.

​Then, beside her, Reid’s father let out a soft, relieved sigh, his gentle hand reaching over to pat his wife’s arm. "Well, if the Captain doesn’t mind, then it’s settled. They used to share rooms during away games and when Reid was injured anyway, dear. It’s perfectly fine."

​The matriarch stayed silent for a moment longer, before finally offering a sharp, dismissive wave of her hand to the butler. "Fine. Show them to the east wing. And ensure my son’s room is cleared of any crude sports equipment before they enter."

The butler bowed low, his expression entirely seamless as he gestured toward the grand hallway. "Right this way, gentlemen."

​I stood up first, my movements precise and deliberate. I didn’t look at Reid. I didn’t give his mother a second glance. I simply kept my posture rigid, stepping out into the corridor with the cold, unshakeable aura of a captain who was merely doing his job to manage a problematic player.

​Behind me, I could hear the heavy, aggressive thud of Reid’s boots tracking my footsteps. The air in the hallway was thick with the suffocating remnants of his flared pine scent—sour with old, rebellious rage and a fierce, possessive undercurrent that he was desperately trying to keep under wraps.

​We walked through the east wing in absolute silence. The walls were lined with dark, oil-painted portraits of generations of McCoys, their cold, painted eyes watching us pass. The butler led us up a curved marble staircase and stopped before a pair of heavy, intricately carved double doors.

​"Master Reid’s quarters," the butler murmured, opening the doors and stepping aside. "If you require anything further for the evening, Captain Evans, please use the internal line."

​"Thank you. That will be all," I said, stepping across the threshold.

​The moment the heavy wooden doors clicked shut behind us, sealing us away from the butler and the watchful eyes of the estate, the suffocating professional distance between us snapped like a frayed wire.

​I turned around, my eyes flashing with a sudden, furious heat as I grabbed Reid by the lapels of his suit jacket.

"Are you completely out of your mind?!" I hissed, my voice a harsh, low whisper as I yanked him down toward my face. "What the hell was that, Reid?! We had a plan! We rehearsed it for hours!"

​Reid didn’t fight my grip. He let me pull him down, his large hands coming up to wrap firmly around my wrists, his grey eyes wide and dark with a terrifyingly raw intensity.

The heavy scent of frozen pine flooded the room, no longer suppressed, wrapping around me like a physical weight.

​"We never rehearsed staying over. And I couldn’t leave you alone in the guest wing, Kain," he rasped, his jaw clenching so hard a muscle twitched in his cheek. "You don’t know her. You don’t know what she’s capable of. The moment you walked out of that dining room, she would have had people monitoring your door. She would have intercepted your phone. She would have found a way to corner you without me there to block her."

​"I am the captain of this team, Reid! I can handle a corporate interrogation!" I shot back, my fingers digging deeper into the expensive fabric of his jacket. "You practically screamed at them that you can’t bear to have me out of your sight! Do you have any idea how that looked?!"

​"It looked like I’m a paranoid, rebellious bastard who doesn’t trust his mother," Reid countered, his grip on my wrists tightening as he stepped closer, crowding his massive frame into my personal space until my back hit the solid wood of the door. "Which is exactly what she expects me to be. If I act too perfect, if I act too compliant, that is when she starts getting suspicious. She knows I hate her interference. Using that old grudge was the only card I could play to keep you in this room."

​I stared up at him, my breathing shallow and ragged as the anger in my chest slowly began to melt into a heavy, exhausted realization. He was right. To an Alpha matriarch like his mother, a son acting out of bitter, deeply rooted spite was entirely believable. It masked the true nature of his obsession under the guise of an old family war.

​I let out a long, shuddering breath, my fingers slowly uncurling from his lapels. My head dropped forward, my forehead resting against his solid chest as the residual adrenaline from the dining room finally drained away, leaving me completely spent.

​"We’re on an incredibly thin wire, Reid," I whispered, my voice sounding small in the vast, quiet room. "If she detects even a micro-gram of an Omega’s pheromones in this wing... if she sees one slip-up between us tomorrow morning... she will tear my entire life apart just to sanitize your pedigree."

​Reid’s hands left my wrists, his long, heavy arms wrapping completely around my waist as he pulled me flush against him, burying his face into the crook of my neck. His heat was immense, a solid, grounding presence that instantly chased away the cold dread of the McCoy estate.

​"She won’t find anything," Reid growled softly against my skin, his voice thick with a fiercely protective promise. "I’ll keep my scent wrapped around you the entire night. We’ll play our parts, we’ll walk out of those gates tomorrow, and we’ll get back to our ice. I’m not letting them touch you, Kain. Not her, not the league, not anyone."

I felt the steady rise and fall of Reid’s chest against my shoulder, the only grounding thing in this massive, oppressive room.

The heavy, protective sweep of his frozen pine scent was already working to mask any trace of the stress rolling off my body, but my mind was still stuck on the venomous edge in his voice back in the dining hall.

​I slowly pushed back against his chest, just enough to look up into his grey eyes. The lingering, raw anger from facing his mother was still burning behind his lashes.

​"What did you mean?" I asked quietly, my voice a low murmur that barely carried in the vast space of his childhood bedroom. "When you told her she did it before... ’back then.’ What exactly did she do to you, Reid?"

​Reid’s jaw tightened, his gaze flicking away from me to stare blankly at the far wall. For a long moment, the silence stretched out so far I thought he was going to dismiss it entirely, to shove it down the way he did with most things that cut too close to the bone.

​He took a slow, heavy breath, his hands sliding down to rest loosely on my hips, anchoring me to him.

​"High school," he finally rasped, his voice dropping into a bitter, gritty register. "I had finally made it onto the junior hockey team. I wasn’t using the family name, I wasn’t relying on their money—I was just playing. Hard. I thought I finally had something that belonged entirely to me, away from the boardroom, away from her plans. You could almost say I was following in your footsteps since you had just debuted in the pro leagues then."

I thought back. If he was in highschool, then I probably was. This guy... he really has been on my trail for the past ten years.

​He let out a sharp, humorless chuckle that sounded more like a growl.

​"And she just... she just blew it up," he said, his fingers tightening against my fabric. "One day, out of nowhere, I was called into the office. Kicked off the roster. No explanation, no technical reason, nothing. The coach wouldn’t look me in the eye. It took me three weeks of digging to find out she had paid him off. A massive corporate ’donation’ to the school’s athletic department, explicitly conditioned on pulling me from the ice."

​I felt a cold drop in my stomach. As a captain, the thought of management or family sabotaging a dedicated player from the inside out made a wave of professional fury rise in my chest. "Why?"

​"Because I had ’bigger things ahead of me,’" Reid spat, mimicking his mother’s cold, clinical tone perfectly. "According to her, running around an ice rink with a stick was a waste of a McCoy’s pedigree. She thought if she stripped it away from me, I’d give up and crawl back to the corporate track she laid out. But she miscalculated."

​He looked back down at me, his grey eyes flashing with a sudden, violent spark of the stubborn, reckless Alpha I knew so well.

​"Our relationship started getting worse from there. The fighting, the screaming, the total silence—it all started because of that," Reid whispered, a dark, triumphant grin tugging at the edge of his mouth despite the heavy memory. "She didn’t want me to live this dream? Fine. Then I’ll live it even more. I fought my way through the minor leagues, signed contracts she couldn’t buy out, and finally found my way onto the Serpents. Every single second I spend on the ice is a giant middle finger to her empire and her ego."