Kael’s expression had completed its transformation. The mask gone. The composure dismantled. The man behind it visible for the first time since I’d arrived at Olympia Academy—not the captain, not the strategist, not the Alpha whose frosted-pine exterior kept the world at the distance he’d decided was survivable. Theman. Raw. Exposed. His pale gray eyes carrying a fury so concentrated it hadbypassed heat and arrived at something colder—the specific, lethal, absolute-zero rage of a person who had just discovered that the destruction they’d been trying to understand for five years had been engineered by someone they’d trusted.
But his next words weren’t about the letters.
Weren’t about himself. Weren’t about the four months of handwritten apologies that had been intercepted and destroyed by the man who had already taken everything else from me.
His hands tightened on my waist. His gray eyes—wide, devastated, carrying the specific, horrified clarity of a man who had just connected the final dot in a pattern he should have seen years ago—held mine with an intensity that made the moonlight feel warm.
“He dropped you.”
CHAPTER 24
Thin Ice
~KAEL~
“Some men bleed on the ice for glory.He was bleeding because his body had finally had enough of his lies.”
I’m going to kill that motherfucker.
The thought didn’t arrive as a figure of speech. Didn’t land with the hyperbolic, immediately-discounted energy of a man venting frustration through dramatic language he had no intention of executing.
It materialized in my skull with the cold, calculated, fully operational clarity of a captain reading a play he had already decided to finish—the kind of certainty that preceded the most dangerous moments on the ice, when the decision had been made before the body moved and the body was simply waiting for the neural signal to execute.
Garrison Hale.
The name sat in my mouth like bile. The man I’d trusted—notliked, never liked, the rapport between us had been professional rather than personal, maintained through the thin, transactional courtesy of two Alphas who occupiedadjacent sectors of the competitive skating ecosystem and whose paths intersected at federation events and Olympic pipeline functions. But I’dtrustedhim. Trusted him enough to place sixty handwritten letters in his hands and believe they’d reach the woman they were addressed to.
Sixty letters.
Four months of sitting at my kitchen table with a pen and a stack of stationery I’d bought from a shop in Burlington because I’d wanted the paper to feel deliberate—heavy, cream-colored, the kind that saidthis required effortbefore a single word was read. I’d written them in longhand because Octavia didn’t have a phone and the rehabilitation facility’s front desk had confirmed they accepted mail for patients. One every two days. Thirty words minimum, sometimes three pages. Every letter an apology wrapped in a confession wrapped in the specific, agonizing, self-excavating honesty of a man who had spent his life avoiding vulnerability and was learning to practice it on paper because he couldn’t do it in person.
And I gave every single one to the man who had already decided to destroy her.
Who pocketed them. Burned them. Threw them in a dumpster. Whatever Garrison did with sixty handwritten letters from an Alpha begging forgiveness from the Omega he’d left behind—the method of disposal was irrelevant. The result was the same: she lay in that hospital bed for six months believing the silence was absolute. That I hadn’t tried. That the man who’d held her on this rink and bought her skates and stolen his mother’s cookies for her at two in the morning had simply…moved on.
But the letters weren’t the real agony.
The letters were the icing on a cake made of something far worse, far more structural, far more deserving of theviolence currently organizing itself in my bloodstream with the methodical, patient efficiency of a man who had spent fifteen years learning how to channel aggression into precision and was now confronting a target that warranted both.
He hurt what was mine.
The fall. The throw that went wrong. The insufficient launch height during the quad Salchow at the National Pairs Championship that had sent Octavia into a rotation her body couldn’t complete, that had resulted in the catastrophic landing that snapped her knee and her career and left her blood freezing into the ice while twelve thousand people gasped and a man with a satisfied smile stood at center ice.
He dropped her.
I’d known it was suspicious. Had felt the wrongness at a gut level when I’d watched the live broadcast—the launch height visibly insufficient, the rotation running out of sky a quarter-turn too soon, the angles that my hockey-trained eye had calculated in real time and flagged asoff. But I hadn’t finished watching. Had abandoned the broadcast mid-replay because the sight of Octavia’s body hitting the ice at the wrong angle had produced a physical response in my chest so violent that I’d closed the laptop and sprinted to the airport to get on the first flight to Toronto.
Where I’d been turned away at the hospital door.
No outside visitors. Family and pack members only.
The policy had been delivered by a nurse whose expression said she’d enforced this rule a hundred times and whose indifference to my desperation had been the specific, institutional variety that treated emotional crises as logistical problems rather than human emergencies. Pack members. I wasn’t her pack. Wasn’t her family. Was, in the administrative taxonomy of the hospital’s visitor protocol, a man withno verifiable connection to the patient and no right to enter the ward where she was being treated.
And Garrison said she was angry.
The memory reformed with the sharp, re-examined clarity of evidence being reviewed under new light. Garrison in the hospital corridor. The manufactured sympathy on his face. The specific, careful, precisely worded explanation that Octavia was furious—at the world, at herself, ateveryonewho’d been involved in the competitive machinery that had produced the failure.She doesn’t want to see anyone, Sørensen. Especially not the Alphas who weren’t in her corner when it mattered.The implication clear, the accusation implicit:you weren’t there. She blames you. Your letters are being received and your presence is not welcome.
And I believed him.
