I laughed. Softer this time. The sound carrying warmth rather than mockery.
“You know I do.”
He synced with me.
The transition was seamless—one stride, then two, his heavier hockey blades finding the tempo of the Perlo ballad still drifting from my pocket, his body positioning itself in the formation we’d practiced without ever calling it practice. Side by side. His right, my left. The spacing exact—three feet of lateral distance that allowed our arms to extend without contact but close enough that the scent exchange between us was intimate, concentrated, the frosted pine and cold steel wrapping around me from the right while the cold air pushed it toward my Omega receptors from the left, and the combined effect was a sensory memory so vivid it felt less like recall and more like time travel.
We moved.
The slow, opening phrase of the music gave us the structure—long, sustained edges that traveled the length of the rink in parallel lines, our bodies rising and falling in unison through the knee bends that drove the glide. His posture was different from Luka’s on the ice: wider, lower, the athletic stance of a hockey player whose center of gravity was designed for sudden directional changes rather than sustained elegance. But the adaptation was there—the way he’d learned, years ago on this same rink, to lift his chest, lengthen his stride, convert the staccato of hockey movement into a passable approximation of the flowing, continuous vocabulary that skating with a figure skater demanded.
I shivered when his hand found mine.
Not from the cold. From the contact. His palm against mine—rough, calloused, the sandpaper grip I’d complained about a hundred times and missed for five years—sending a current through my arm that was part thermal, part electrical, part the designation-level recognition of an Alpha’s touch that my body had stored in its permanent archive and was now cross-referencing against the live input with the enthusiastic,see-I-told-you-he-was-compatibleenergy of a system that had been trying to tell me this for days and was thrilled to finally be holding the evidence.
We executed the crossovers. The synchronized turns. The mirror work—him skating forward while I skated backward, our hands linked, our eyes locked, the music guiding us through the choreography that our bodies remembered even when our minds had been trying to forget. The piano swelled. The melody climbed. His grip on my hand tightened—incrementally, involuntarily, the unconscious response of a man whose body was approaching a moment it recognized and was bracing for.
The final element. The lift.
His hands found my waist. The same placement. The same grip. Thumbs braced against the base of my ribs, fingers splayed across my hips—identical to the position Luka had used for the throw at the audition, because the technique was universal, but the hands were different. These hands were wider. Rougher. Carrying the specific, calloused geography of a hockey player rather than a goaltender, and the difference was tactile, intimate, a map I’d read with my body years ago and was reading again now.
He coiled. Prepared to launch me upward. The power gathering in his legs—the explosive, hockey-trained, fast-twitch force that could send an Omega skyward with enoughheight to complete three rotations and land clean on the strong leg that Luka had prescribed.
And I froze.
My body locked.
Every muscle. Simultaneously. The full-system, emergency-override rigidity that my nervous system produced when a motion sequence triggered the specific, PTSD-adjacent alarm that lived in the deep tissue of my reconstructed knee and in the older, darker tissue of a memory that no amount of rehabilitation had been able to reach. The throw. The launch. The moment of weightlessness before the rotation began—the exact sequence that Garrison had sabotaged, that had sent me spiraling with insufficient height, that had ended with my knee on the ice and my blood on the surface and twelve thousand people holding their breath.
Kael felt it.
Immediately. The coil dying in his legs, the upward force aborting before it achieved lift, his body reading the rigidity in mine with the instantaneous, full-contact sensitivity of a man whose hands were pressed against the place where the fear lived and who understood, without being told, that proceeding would cause more damage than stopping.
He skated to a halt. Still holding me. His hands on my waist, my body elevated a few inches above the ice in the aborted lift position—suspended, caught, held in the space between the launch that didn’t happen and the landing that wasn’t required.
I blinked. Looked down at him. My eyes wide, my breathing shallow, the residual adrenaline of the freeze pumping through my system with the sharp, metallic taste of a fear response that had been triggered and was now cyclingthrough the aftermath without the crisis that would have given it a resolution.
He frowned. The expression was concentrated, focused—not angry, not frustrated, butstudying. Reading the data my body was providing with the same analytical intensity he brought to every problem that required understanding before it could be solved.
“Why did you freeze up?”
I bit my lip. The words assembled themselves in my throat with the reluctant, heavy weight of a confession that the confessor had been avoiding and that the night, the ice, and the proximity of this particular Alpha had conspired to extract.
“You’ll…let me fall.”
Three words. Small. Fractured at their edges. Carrying approximately seventeen layers of meaning that extended far beyond the physical act of a throw landing and into the foundational, structural territory of trust—the kind that a body required in order to let itself be launched into the air by another person, and the kind that a heart required in order to let itself be held by one.
Kael’s response was immediate.
“I’d never let you fall.”
No hesitation. No qualification. No strategic, chess-player’s calibration of the words before they were released. They arrived with the raw, unmediated force of a truth that had been stored under pressure and had been waiting—for years, perhaps—for the exact question that would give it permission to surface.
“Nor would I launch you up if I’m not confident that you’ll land.”
I swallowed. The lump in my throat was made of fiveyears and a hospital room and sixty-seven unanswered questions and the specific, devastating weight of a woman who wanted to believe the words being spoken to her and was terrified of what believing them would cost.
We shared a look.
