So. The PHL is going live June 15. You know that. You’ve marked your calendar. You’re ready.

But before the puck drops on the whole glorious league, I want to introduce you to the family at the heart of it all — because everything, and I mean everything in the McKenzie Legacy series starts with five Australian kids who looked at their futures and decided to chase them across the world, no matter what it cost.

Let me paint you a picture.

Five siblings. One family. Ambitions too big for one country to hold.

Three boys — identical triplets, because their parents clearly believed in doing things at scale — who grew up dreaming of ice. Of rinks. Of the NHL, or something like it. Of making it in the sport that had absolutely no business being the obsession of kids growing up in Australia, and yet. There they were. Obsessed. Determined. Entirely unstoppable.

And two girls — identical twins — who were born to skate, but not the way their brothers wanted to. Figure skating. Blades and music and the kind of precision that makes your throat tight when you watch it done perfectly. These two wanted it so badly, so completely, that they did something that still gets me right in the chest when I think about it: they gave up their Australian citizenship to compete for the country that could give them their dream.

Let that land for a moment.

Five kids. Five enormous futures. One family watching them all fly away, one by one, toward the lives they were built for.

The McKenzie Legacy is five books. Five love stories. Five characters who carry the weight of everything they left behind, and everything they’re still becoming.

And the first book?

The First Line.

🏒

Lachlan McKenzie. Captain. The kind of man who leads from the front and holds everything together and has absolutely no idea what to do when a woman walks into his orbit and refuses to be managed, organised, or tidily categorised.

Dr Sienna MacLeod. The woman in question. She has not read the memo about being tidily categorised, and she would like it known that she is very busy and does not have time for whatever this is.

I will be honest with you. When I imagine these two — when I see them in my head, which I have been doing for longer than I should probably admit — I see Thor and Merida.

You’re welcome.

He is, in every sense, built like a Viking who also somehow learned to skate. She is all fire and independence and she will absolutely shoot an apple off your head if you give her sufficient motivation. They are, on paper, a disaster. In practice — well. That’s what the book is for.

The First Line is the beginning. The McKenzie Legacy is the whole story — and once you’ve met this family, the triplets and the twins and all the love and loss and history they carry with them, I’ll be taking you somewhere very special.

To the team that sits at the shining heart of the entire PHLu.

The Portland Pioneers.

But first — Lachlan. And Sienna. And the moment everything starts.

June 15.

Cover reveal: May 31. Be there.

🏒 — Bella