Kept skating. The body operating on the autopilot that twenty years of training had installed—edges, crossovers, the spatial awareness that prevented collision with the boards even with my vision surrendered to the dark behind my lids. My arms moved through the music. My blades carved phrases into the moonlit surface that my mouth couldn’t speak and my tears were beginning to write.
A spin. Camel entry, transition to sit, rising into a scratch spin that accelerated with each revolution, my arms pulling in, the centripetal force building until the world was a blur of silver moonlight and cold air and the specific, devastating sensation of a body expressing fury through rotational velocity because the words weren’t fast enough.
A triple toe loop. Launched from the toe pick with an aggression that was less technique and more detonation, my body rocketing upward into three rotations that were sharp, tight, angry—the kind of jump that a coach would have flagged for its excessive attack energy and that a judge would have scored high because the height and the speed and thelanding were all products of a rage that had been converted into athletic output with the efficient, devastating alchemy that only elite competitors understood.
When I came to a stop—center ice, the final note of the piano fading into the Vermont night, my blades perpendicular to the surface in a T-stop that sprayed a fine mist of ice crystals into the moonlit air—I was breathless.
And I was crying.
Not the quiet, controlled, post-heat tears I’d been producing intermittently for the past forty-eight hours. The real kind. The hot, unregulated, streaming-down-both-cheeks kind that I felt in my jaw and my throat and the aching, clenched muscles of my sternum. The tears of a woman who had spent two years performing strength and who had just discovered, on a moonlit rink at three in the morning, that the anger she’d been carrying wasn’t a weapon. It was a wound.
I’m still so angry at them.
At Garrison. At his pack. At the federation that closed the case. At the world that moved on. At every single person who watched me bleed and decided the bleeding wasn’t their problem.
And the anger hasn’t healed a thing. Hasn’t repaired the knee or the trust or the dream. It just sits there. Occupying space. Burning fuel. Producing nothing but heat in a chest that’s already running a fever from too many fires lit by too many people who walked away before the flames went out.
“Why are you crying?”
I blinked.
The voice registered before the presence did—low, measured, carrying the specific, clipped cadence that I’d been hearing in my memory and through ventilation ducts and in the distant, muffled corridors of a house that smelledentirely like the man it belonged to. Not aggressive. Not demanding. Quiet. Stripped of the combative energy that characterized every other interaction I’d witnessed from him and carrying instead a register I recognized from years ago, from the brief, bright window when Kael Sørensen had occasionally let me see the version of himself that existed beneath the composure.
I realized, slowly, through the blur of tears and the disorientation of being jolted from internal monologue to external reality, that someone was standing in front of me.
On the ice. Close. Ten feet, maybe less. The moonlight catching the details in sequence: the skates first—hockey blades, broad and flat, the Bauer Supremes he’d been wearing since his first competitive season, the black boot scuffed and worn in the specific pattern that I’d memorized years ago the way you memorized the handwriting of someone whose presence had been constant enough to leave a visual imprint. Then the sweats—gray, fleece-lined, the same brand and cut as the ones I was wearing. Then upward: the bare arms crossed over a chest that the cold November air should have been punishing but that the man seemed to be ignoring with the stubborn, thermoregulatory defiance of an Alpha whose Scandinavian heritage had equipped him for conditions significantly harsher than a Vermont backyard.
And then his face.
Kael’s expression was neutral. The default. The carefully maintained, emotionally noncommittal mask that he wore the way other people wore skin—permanently, reflexively, with the practiced ease of someone who had been constructing it since childhood and had refined it into a surface so smooth that the world slid off it without gaining purchase. Mouth flat. Jaw set. Posture still.
But his eyes.
The pale gray irises—arctic, normally carrying the controlled, temperature-less quality of overcast skies—were telling a different story. The pupils were dilated. Wide. Expanded beyond what the dim moonlight warranted, consuming the gray and leaving behind a darkness that was less calm thancracked. The composure was there on the surface, but the pupils said the surface was a sheet of ice over a depth that was moving, shifting, producing currents the face wasn’t permitting the mouth to acknowledge.
I blinked again. The tears were still falling—hot, persistent, uninterested in the audience they’d acquired. I lifted my hand to wipe them. The gesture was automatic—the defensive, self-managing instinct of a woman who had learned to handle her own breakdowns because no one else had applied for the position.
His hands got there first.
Both of them. Cupping my cheeks with the broad, calloused palms that I’d felt against my skin in a previous life and that my nerve endings recognized before my brain finished processing the contact. His thumbs moved across my cheekbones—rough, warm, the friction of calloused skin against tear-wet softness creating a sensation that was simultaneously abrasive and unbearably tender. He wiped the tears with the careful, deliberate strokes of a man who had identified a problem and was addressing it manually because he didn’t trust words to do the job.
His hands.
The calluses. The specific, hockey-built roughness of palms that had spent fifteen years gripping sticks and absorbing impacts and performing the punishing, repetitive work that competitive hockey demanded from its players’hands. I’d always complained about them. Vocally, frequently, with the dramatic, exaggerated indignation of a woman whose own hands were maintained with the specific, competition-grade care that figure skating required.Your hands feel like sandpaper, Sørensen. Do you moisturize with gravel?The complaint had been a ritual. A touchpoint. One of the thousand small, recurring exchanges that had constituted the daily texture of whatever we’d been.
The memory made me huff.
“Still not lotioning those damn hands.”
The words were wet, rough, half-dissolved by the tears they’d been filtered through. But they wereours—pulled from the shared vocabulary of a dynamic that had apparently survived five years of silence and a ventilation-mediated heat cycle and was now resurfacing on a moonlit rink at three in the morning as if the interval had been a commercial break rather than a half-decade.
Kael’s expression shifted. The neutral mask developing a crack—not large, not structural, but visible. A pout. The specific, barely perceptible protrusion of his lower lip that I’d cataloged years ago as hisannoyed-but-not-actually-angrytell and that appeared exclusively in response to criticisms he considered simultaneously unfair and accurate.
“Just got out of the shower,” he muttered. The words were defensive, clipped, carrying the grumpy, morning-voice energy of a man who had been caught without his armor and was attempting to reassemble it in real time. “Forgot. Bite me.”
I smirked. The expression arrived through the tears like sunlight through rain—unexpected, contradictory, and absolutely beyond my control.
“You couldn’t handle me biting you.” My voice wassteadier now. Gaining traction on the familiar terrain of our banter, the combative back-and-forth that had been the native language of our dynamic since the first time we’d met and that I could navigate in any emotional state because the rhythm was embedded deeper than mood. “So don’t ask me to do things you won’t let me fulfill.”
