His hands were still on my face.
The thumbs had stopped wiping. Were now resting against my cheekbones—still, warm, occupying the position they’d claimed without retreating. His frosted-pine scent surrounded me at this proximity—dense, layered, carrying the whiskey warmth beneath the cold exterior with a potency that the open air diluted but couldn’t eliminate. His gray eyes held mine with the focused, unblinking intensity that I’d seen him bring to face-offs and contract negotiations and every high-stakes situation that required absolute commitment to the position taken.
He frowned.
The expression was deeper than the pout. More structural. The crease between his brows engaging with the seriousness of a man whose composure had been breached and who had decided, in the three-second window before the default defenses reassembled, to say the thing that was sitting behind his teeth.
“You wouldn’t let me join in on your heat.” His voice was low. Controlled, but barely. The consonants clipped shorter than usual, the vowels compressed—the vocal pattern of a man managing a surge of emotion through dental engineering. “So clearly you’re the one still mad.”
I rolled my eyes.
The gesture was comprehensive, orbital, and accompanied by the specific, full-body exasperation of a woman whohad just been told by a man who’d hidden in his bedroom for four days thatshewas the one with the emotional obstruction.
I moved his hands from my cheeks. Gently but firmly—the way you disengaged from a hold that felt too good to be safe. My palms against the backs of his hands, pressing them downward, creating the distance that the conversation required and that his proximity was threatening.
“You didn’t deserve all ofthis,” I said, and the wordthiswas accompanied by a gesture that encompassed my entire body—a sweeping, demonstrative, Octavia-grade hand motion that traveled from my collarbones to my hips and communicated, with theatrical precision, that thethisin question was not merely her participation in the heat but the full, comprehensive, twenty-five-year, three-perfect-tens, Olympic-qualifying, throws-triple-Salchows-on-reconstructed-kneespackagethat was Octavia Moreau, and that access to said package was a privilege he had not earned.
He huffed. “But Luka gets all of that?” The question was loaded. Pressurized. Carrying the territorial, comparative, who-got-what accounting that Alpha rivalries produced when the currency was an Omega’s attention. “Last time I checked, he ditched too.”
I skated backward. A smooth, instinctive, distance-creating glide that put three feet of moonlit ice between us without breaking eye contact—the figure skater’s equivalent of a verbal retreat: poised, controlled, and performed while facing the person you were moving away from.
“Well, at least he knows how to acknowledge his wrongs and apologize.”
Kael’s jaw tightened. “I can apologize.”
I laughed.
Not politely. Not diplomatically. The full, bright, carrying-across-a-frozen-backyard-at-three-in-the-morning laugh of a woman who had just heard the most preposterous claim of the evening from a man whose relationship with the wordsorrywas best described as a restraining order.
“Apologizing for coochie,” I said, skating faster now, the edges biting deeper as the speed increased and my body translated the conversation’s escalating energy into kinetic output, “is not genuine, Captain.”
He groaned. Started following—his hockey strides heavier, louder, the broad blades chasing my figure edges across the moonlit surface with the aggressive, gap-closing energy of a forward pursuing a puck carrier. His scent intensified with the movement—the pine sharpening in the cold air, the steel brightening, the whiskey warming as his body temperature rose with the exertion.
“Ididapologize.”
I laughed harder. The sound scattering across the rink and bouncing off the wooden boards and dissolving into the Vermont night like music notes thrown to the wind.
“I must have hit my head and ascended briefly to heaven,” I said, “because Kael Sørensen does not apologize to anyone.” I carved a wide arc, my back edges carrying me in a sweeping semicircle that kept him in my peripheral vision while maintaining the gap. “Aside from your mother. When you stole her cookies to give to me because I was having a whole sugar-drop episode and she caught you red-handed in the kitchen at two in the morning.”
He stopped.
The hockey skates spraying ice crystals into the moonlight as he braked—a full, abrupt, body-weight deceleration that sent a fine mist arcing through the silver air. His expressionhad changed. The grumpy defensiveness receding, replaced by a look I recognized from years ago and hadn’t seen since: surprise. Genuine, unmanaged, arrived-before-the-mask-could-intercept surprise.
“You remember that?”
I shrugged. The gesture was casual, my edges maintaining their arc, my posture carrying the relaxed, unhurried confidence of a woman who was better at skating backward than most people were at walking forward.
“I remember a lot of things.”
He stared at me.
Five seconds. The pale gray eyes conducting a search I could feel but couldn’t fully read—scanning, assessing, the strategic mind behind them running calculations whose variables I wasn’t privy to and whose conclusion arrived in the form of a question that was less casual than its delivery suggested.
“Do you remember the warm-up routine we always used to do on here?”
The question landed in my chest with the specific, bittersweet impact of a memory being recalled from long-term storage—a file I’d archived but hadn’t deleted, preserved in the deep, seldom-accessed sector of my brain where the things I couldn’t bear to revisit and couldn’t bring myself to erase occupied adjacent shelves.
The warm-up routine.Ourroutine. The informal, never-choreographed, evolved-through-repetition sequence of edges and crossovers and partnered elements that Kael and I had developed over dozens of moonlit sessions on this exact ice. Not a program. Not a structured, scored, competition-formatted routine. Aconversation. The physical, blade-to-ice language that two people who understood movement at themolecular level had created by simply skating together until the individual vocabularies merged into a shared grammar.
