I’d kept them here so I’d always have a pair waiting. So whenever I came over and needed a break from the world, from the pressure, from the noise of a career that demanded perfection and punished anything less, I could lace up and escape.
I blinked away the tears. Hard. Twice. The disciplined, competition-trained blinks of a woman who had spent her life performing through emotional states that would have incapacitated civilians and who was not going to break that streak in a mudroom over a pair of boots she’d abandoned half a decade ago.
I wish there wasn’t tension between us.
I wish I could walk upstairs and find him and sit across from him and have the conversation that five years of silence have been accumulating toward—the one where he explains why he sent a proxy instead of coming himself, and I explain why the hospital room was empty, and we both acknowledge that the stubbornness we share is the thing that connected us AND the thing that destroyed us.
But I can’t be forgiving with Kael. Not yet. Not easily. Because the Alpha is as stubborn as I am, andstubborn people enjoy groveling rather than submitting to their own losses. He needs to come to me. Needs to earn the conversation the way Luka earned it—on his knees, in public, with his pride in his pocket and his vulnerability on display. Until then, the tension stays. The wall stays. The distance that he chose and that I reinforced stays in place, because the alternative—forgiving him prematurely, before he’s demonstrated that the forgiveness won’t be wasted—is a risk I’ve taken with too many people who didn’t deserve the investment.
I sat on the mudroom bench. Pulled on the skates.
The fit was… perfect. Still.
After five years, the boots remembered my feet with the same fidelity that the house remembered my presence—the leather conforming to my arches, the ankle support bracing at the exact height my skating style required, the heel settling into the pocket that hundreds of hours of training had carved into the interior. I laced them.
Tight at the base, looser at the top—the specific, personalized tension pattern that every skater developed through years of trial and error and that became as individual as a fingerprint.
I stood.
The blade guards clicked against the mudroom floor as I crossed to the door and pushed it open. The November air rushed in—cold, clean, carrying the scent of frost and pine and the mineral sharpness of ice at outdoor temperature.
The moonlight spilled across the rink in a silver wash that turned the surface into a mirror, reflecting the bare branches overhead and the stars scattered across the clear, black Vermont sky.
I stepped onto the ice.
The first edge sang.
The sound—the clean, ringing, unmistakableshhhof asharpened figure blade meeting a frozen surface—traveled through the blade, through the boot, through the bones of my foot and up my shin and into my knee—the rebuilt one, the reconstructed one, the one that had been snapped and repaired and rehabilitated and tested andtrusted—and the vibration settled into my chest like a hum. Like a frequency I’d been missing. Like coming home to a house that had been dark for years and finding that someone had left the porch light on.
I took a breath. Let it out slowly.
Watched the exhale fog the moonlit air and dissolve into the night.
Just a bit of playful skating. Then I’ll go back to bed.
CHAPTER 22
The Captain’s Penalty
~KAEL~
“The ice didn’t care about his pride.Neither did she.”
Icursed as I came.
The word ripped from my throat in a guttural, bitten-off snarl that the shower’s spray swallowed before it could reach the walls—the pressurized water absorbing the sound the way it absorbed the evidence, sluicing away the release that had required twenty-three minutes of sustained effort, two failed attempts, and a level of self-directed anger that would have concerned a therapist if I’d possessed the humility to see one.
The climax was thin. Insufficient. A fraction of the volume and intensity that an Alpha’s body was designed to produce—the biological equivalent of an engine sputtering through its last teaspoon of fuel rather than the full-throttle, system-flushing release that a healthy, unmedicated male in his mid-twenties should have generated with the ease of exhaling. My knot attempted to form at the base—a weak, partial, pharmaceutical-sabotaged swelling that achievedapproximately thirty percent of its intended circumference before the blockers intercepted the hormonal signal and shut the process down, leaving me with a half-formed knot that throbbed with the dull, persistent ache of a thing that had been started and forcibly prevented from finishing.
I hissed through the pain of it.
Pressed my forehead against the shower tiles. Cold. Smooth. The ceramic offering the indifferent, inanimate comfort of a surface that didn’t judge, didn’t pity, didn’t deliver the specific, devastating expression of concern that my packmates would have produced if they’d known the full scope of what was happening to their captain behind a locked bathroom door at three in the morning.
This is what my life has come down to.
Jerking off in the shower. Alone. Silencing the desperation so the men sleeping in the rooms below couldn’t hear the humiliating reality of Kael Sørensen—captain of the Ironcrest line, projected first-round Olympic selection, the Alpha whose composure was so legendary that opposing teams used his name as a benchmark for emotional regulation—struggling to ejaculate as if the act weren’t a basic, entry-level function of male physiology that most men accomplished with the effort of a sneeze.
Twenty-five years old. Two hundred and twenty pounds. Testosterone levels that required pharmaceutical intervention to prevent them from turning me into a liability. And I can’t get a proper release without a twenty-minute war of attrition against my own biology.
