The stadium shakes.
Ten thousand voices compressed into concrete and steel, gold and silver splitting the crowd into warring halves. The championship banner snaps in the wind above the scoreboard—BLACKMOOR REGIONAL FINALS—and the floodlights turn the field into a stage where everything that matters is about to happen in front of everyone who matters.
I stand behind the team bench with no clipboard, no manager badge, no official reason to be here. Theo got me in through the staff entrance, his hand steady on my shoulder, his only words: "Front row. Whatever happens, you should be close."
The teams take the field. Grayson leads the formation—golden jersey, captain's armband, shoulders thrown back like the world was built to hold him up. Rhys lines up across from him in silver and crimson, jaw set, eyes steel-gray and controlled.
He found me this morning. Pressed his forehead against mine in the cottage doorway, his hands on my face, his breath warm and unsteady.
"Don't come today," he'd said.
"Not a chance."
"Sloane—"
"I'll be there. Front row. And if your brother opens his mouth, I'll be on that field before he finishes his sentence."
He'd kissed me. Hard, brief, the kiss of someone leaving for somewhere they might not come back from. Then he walked toward the stadium without looking back.
First quarter. Clean play. Rhys moves through the formations with mechanical precision, every hit controlled, every sprint measured. Grayson matches him—harder, louder, performing for the crowd that chants his name. The scoreboard ticks even. Fourteen all.
Second quarter. Rhys breaks through the defensive line for a forty-yard run, and the vampire section erupts. Grayson's face goes rigid on the sideline. He pulls two players aside, speaks low, gestures sharp. They nod.
Halftime. Twenty-one to seventeen, vampires leading. My fingers dig into my knees. Rhys glances toward the bench as the teams head for the tunnel. Our eyes meet for one second—gray, steady, terrified underneath—before the crowd swallows him.
Third quarter starts wrong.
Grayson takes the field with a different energy. Looser. Calmer. The posture of someone who's stopped caring about the score because the game is about to change. He plays the first three downs casually, almost lazily, and my stomach begins to churn.
Seven minutes left in the third. Grayson signals timeout.
The referee's whistle cuts through the noise. Players drift toward their benches. But Grayson doesn't go to his bench. He walks to the sideline, picks up the announcer's microphone from the commentary desk, and strides to the center of the field.
"What's he doing?" Theo leans forward beside me. "That's not—he can't just—"
"No." The word rips out of me. I'm on my feet, my hands gripping the railing, my voice tearing across the field. "Grayson, don't! Don't do this!"
He doesn't look at me. Doesn't pause. Doesn't flinch.
"Ladies and gentlemen." Grayson's voice booms through the stadium speakers, amplified and enormous. "I apologize for the interruption. But there's something this crowd needs to know before this game continues."
The stadium quiets. Ten thousand people leaning forward, phones rising, the instinct for spectacle overriding everything else.
"Rhys Vance." Grayson turns toward the vampire bench. "Would you like to tell them? Or should I?"
Rhys stands at the edge of the field. His teammates flank him, confused, shifting on their feet. His face is marble—white, still, carved into something that might be calm if you didn't know what his heartbeat sounded like when he was afraid.
"No?" Grayson shrugs. "Then I will."
He lifts his phone. The stadium's jumbotron flickers, and the photograph fills the screen—thirty feet tall, impossible to deny. Rhys's face in profile, eyes blazing full amber. Wolf gold burning through vampire gray.
"Rhys Vance is not a pureblooded vampire." Grayson's voice carries across the silence like a blade. "He is a vampire-werewolf hybrid. An abomination. The most reviled combination in supernatural history. A monster that should have been killed at birth."
The sound that moves through the stadium isn't a gasp. It's a tremor—ten thousand bodies reacting at once, the vibration traveling through concrete into the soles of my feet. Whispers become shouts. Shouts become chaos. Someone in the wolf section stands. Then another. Then a dozen.
Rhys hasn't moved. He stands on the sideline with ten thousand pairs of eyes on him, and I watch his mask disintegrate in real time. His jaw loosens. His shoulders drop. The gray in his eyes bleeds to amber and stays—not a flash, not a flicker, but a surrender. The wolf he's spent twenty-one years burying rising to the surface because there's no reason to hold it back anymore.
His teammates step away from him. One foot. Two. The gap opens around him like a wound, and he stands alone on the edge of the field with his secret projected thirty feet above his head.
"This creature has been hiding among us." Grayson's voice rings with righteous fury. "Pretending to be one of us. Contaminating our teams, our school, our—"
I'm already moving.
My legs carry me over the railing before my brain approves the decision. Theo grabs for my arm and misses. The field is green and enormous and the distance between the bench and the sideline stretches like a hallway in a nightmare, but my feet keep hitting grass.
Rhys sees me coming. His amber eyes widen, and his mouth forms my name without sound.
I reach him. My hand finds his—cold, rigid, his fingers curled into a fist that I pry open and thread mine through. His grip closes around my hand so hard the bones grind together.
I turn to face the crowd.
"If he's a monster," my voice cracks through the stadium and I don't know how because my entire body is shaking, "then so am I. Half-human. Half-wolf. And I'm not ashamed."
The jumbotron finds us. Two figures holding hands on the sideline—the vampire-werewolf hybrid and the halfblood girl, standing together while ten thousand people decide what to do about it.
"Touching." Grayson's voice drips from the speakers. "The abomination and the mutt. A perfect pair." He turns to the crowd. "You've seen the proof. You know the law. The hybrid must be dealt with."
Movement in the stands. Wolves rising from the gold section, filtering toward the exits, heading for the field. Vampires shifting in the silver section—some standing, some staying seated, the purist families clustered near the front with faces carved from stone.
In the luxury box above the fifty-yard line, Lord Vance sits motionless. His gray eyes fix on his son from behind the glass, and his expression gives away nothing. No fury. No shame. Just the patient calculation of a man deciding which pieces to sacrifice.
The wolves reach the field first. A line of gold jerseys spreading across the grass, moving toward us with the slow inevitability of a tide. Behind them, vampire purists descend the stands—Ashfords, old-blood families, their movements synchronized and predatory.
Rhys's hand trembles in mine. His amber eyes sweep the closing circle, counting bodies, calculating odds, running the math on a fight he can't win.
"We could still run." His voice is barely audible beneath the crowd. "There's still time."
"I'm done running." I squeeze his hand. "I've been running my whole life."
The circle tightens. Fifty feet. Forty. Grayson stands at the center of the field, arms spread, conducting the chaos he created. My father is on his feet in the coaching box, shouting something I can't hear, his face twisted with the horror of a man watching both his children destroy each other.
Thirty feet. The wolves' eyes glow amber in the floodlights. The vampires' fangs catch the light.
"Whatever happens," I whisper. "I choose you."
Rhys's hand tightens around mine. The amber in his eyes blazes—full, bright, unapologetic. The wolf and the vampire, merged and visible and refusing to be buried.
"Always," he answers.
The crowd surges forward.