The realization had arrived approximately thirty seconds into my first lap—the moment the movement-generated warmth activated the pheromone molecules embedded in the fabric and released them into the cold air around my body like a slow-burn incense. Not Maddox’s cedar and embers. Kael’s frosted pine. The scent I’d been breathing through ventilation ducts for four days, the one that hadtracked me in my sleep, the one my conscious mind was at war with and my Omega biology had been quietly, persistently lobbying for since the moment his six-foot-four frame had materialized in that doorway and his bloodshot eyes had found mine across a room full of evidence that I’d been thoroughly attended to by everyone except him.
Typical.
Typical that his clothes were in the mudroom. Typical that I grabbed them without checking. Typical that the universe decided the woman trying to establish emotional distance from Kael Sørensen should do so while literally wrapped in his scent.
Hmph.
I’d be lying if I said I was fuming.
That was the truth I’d been circling since the third lap—skating in wide, meditative arcs beneath the moonlight, the music drifting from my pocket in tinny, phone-speaker waves that the cold air thinned and the open sky absorbed, leaving just enough melody to guide my edges without filling the silence completely. I wasn’t fuming. Wasn’t raging. The volcanic, two-years-of-suppressed-fury eruption that had detonated in Luka’s face on the floor of Rink Three had spent its fuel. What remained wasn’t fire but something quieter, more structural, harder to name.
I’m mad at myself.
The admission surfaced with the reluctant, heavy buoyancy of a thing that had been held underwater for too long and was rising despite the hands pressing it down. I was mad at myself for being in the situation. For being the woman who’d been abandoned by the world and who had to stand in front of a judge at eight in the morning with no partner, no pack, and no indication that the universe intended to provide either. Mad that the abandonment was a pattern I’dbeen unable to break—not because I attracted unreliable people, but because I kepttrustingthem. Kept extending the benefit of the doubt to Alphas who treated it like a line of credit they had no intention of repaying.
And deep down—in the honest, unfurnished, no-visitors-allowed basement of my emotional architecture—what I wanted wasn’t revenge or distance or the satisfaction of watching them suffer.
I wanted acknowledgment.
An apology. A grovel. The fight. The messy, uncomfortable, ego-stripping confrontation where someone looked me in the eye and said: I did this. It was wrong. I’m here now and I’m not leaving.
And maybe I was yearning for that more with Kael than I was with Luka.
The distinction had been nagging at me since the shower with Renzo, since the quiet, post-heat clarity that had replaced the hormonal fog and given my analytical mind its processing power back. Luka’s forgiveness had been…easier. Noteasy—the man had gone to his knees on a frat house floor and volunteered as a pack member and performed a pairs routine in hockey gear, so the effort had been significant. But my willingness to accept it had been faster. More instinctive. Driven less by evidence and more by the desperate, aching hunger for the sizzling, electric chemistry that had characterized us from the first night in Halifax and that my body had been starving for with the single-minded, nutritional urgency of a system deprived of an essential element.
I was desperate for that connection again. For the voltage. For the way his scent rewired my nervous system and his hands mapped my body like he’d built it himself. And maybe that desperationmade me generous with the forgiveness—too generous, too fast, willing to accept the gesture without requiring the full excavation of why he’d left in the first place.
It could bite me in the ass. And I’d be willing to accept that if that was the end result.
But Kael.
With Kael, the stubbornness wasn’t a defense mechanism. It was arequirement. Because forgiving Kael Sørensen required something that forgiving Luka hadn’t: confronting the part of me that had been genuinely, deeply, structurallyin lovewith the man and that had been wounded at a depth that the figure skater’s surface and the Omega’s biology couldn’t reach. The wound was personal. Specific. Carved into the tissue of a trust that had been offered without conditions and retracted without explanation, and the scar it left demanded a correspondingly specific repair.
Maybe I want to be stubborn about all of it. Maybe stubbornness is the only currency I have left in a transaction where I’ve already paid too much.
The music shifted. The piano descending into a minor key, the melody darkening, and my edges followed—the choreography unconscious, the body translating emotional input into physical output with the automatic, lifelong efficiency of a system that had been trained to express through movement what the mouth couldn’t manage in words.
I dared to think about him.
Garrison.
The name arrived in my consciousness like a contamination—spreading through the quiet, moonlit space I’d been cultivating with the toxic, corrosive efficiency of a substance that damaged everything it contacted. Garrison Hale and his pack. The men who had stood in the coaching zone while Iwas loaded onto a stretcher. Who had dismantled my support structure with the methodical precision of demolition experts and then walked away from the rubble with their reputations intact and their careers unbothered and their public expressions of concern pitched at the exact frequency that garnered sympathy without inviting scrutiny.
They set me up.
The words were not new. I’d thought them a thousand times, had screamed them into Luka’s face on the floor of Rink Three, had whispered them to hospital ceilings and rehabilitation facility walls and the dark, silent interior of sleepless nights where the pulse oximeter’s beep was the only voice that answered. But here, on the ice, in the moonlight, with the piano descending and my blades carving patterns that my rage was dictating—the words hit differently. Landed harder. Detonated at a depth I hadn’t let them reach before because reaching it would mean acknowledging the thing beneath the anger that was worse than the anger itself.
They didn’t suffer.
Not one consequence. Not a single, measurable, professionally or personally significant repercussion for engineering the destruction of another human being’s career and body and Olympic dream. Garrison walked. His pack walked. The federation investigated and found insufficient evidence and closed the case with the bureaucratic indifference of an institution that valued stability over justice. The sponsors moved on. The media moved on. The skating world moved on.
Everyone moved on.
As if I didn’t exist. As if the blood on the ice was a spill that maintenance cleaned and the audience forgot and the sport absorbed into its history the way soil absorbs rain—briefly visible, quickly gone, leaving no trace on the surface.
And that’s what hurts. Not the fall. Not the knee. Not the months in a hospital room or the rehabilitation that taught me to walk before I could remember how to fly. The thing that hurts—the thing that lives in the basement of my chest and refuses to pay rent or vacate—is how the world simply MOVED ON. How the absence of consequences for the people who hurt me became, in itself, a consequence for the person they hurt. Because the message was clear: you were not important enough to pursue justice for. Your pain was not significant enough to disrupt the system that produced it. You can heal on your own time, in your own silence, and the machinery will continue operating exactly as it did before your blood was cleaned from its surface.
I closed my eyes.
