Three seats. Four seats.
My lungs burned. My legs screamed. But I had more. I had so much more.
The fifteen-hundred-meter mark. Last five hundred to go.
And then—from somewhere in the Riverside crowd, cutting through all the noise—I heard it.
“MOORE POWER! MOORE POWER! MOORE POWER!”
The chant spread like wildfire through the bleachers. Dozens of voices, maybe hundreds, all screaming it in unison.
Something deep and primal unleashed inside me.
It wasn’t just anger anymore. It was rage. It was every moment he’d made me feel small. Every time he’d chosen his perfect life over us. Every second of the past year I’d spent trying to forget him and failing.
This wasn’t about winning.
This was about breaking him.
I needed to show him that he didn’t matter to me anymore. That Emily mattered. My mom mattered. Noah and Coach Hale and everyone who actually gave a shit about me—they mattered.
Not him. Never him again.
This whole thing—this rivalry, this crush, this stupid fucking pull I felt every time he was near—it was over. Done. I was burying it right here, right now, in the middle of this river.
I attacked the last two hundred and fifty meters like a man possessed.
Every stroke was violence. Every pull ripped something out of me and threw it into the water. My vision tunneled. My body moved on instinct, on fury, on something I didn’t even know I had inside me.
Five seats ahead. Six seats.
The finish line appeared through the spray and the haze.
And that was it.
I crossed it at a full length ahead of him.
A full fucking length.
The Riverside crowd erupted—screaming, air horns, someone probably jumping in the river. I couldn’t even process it. My chest heaved, gasping for air, my whole body shaking from the effort.
But I wasn’t done.
I let my boat glide to a stop and turned around.
When Alex crossed, he stopped paddling immediately, his head dropping forward, shoulders slumped.
He looked destroyed.
I waited until he drifted close enough, until he finally looked up.
His eyes met mine.
Those ice-blue eyes had lost their brightness. They looked hollow. Defeated. Terrified. And I felt something dark and satisfied coil in my chest.
I let the smirk spread across my face—slow, deliberate, cruel.
“Good race.” I paused. “Golden boy.”
