Because the narrative fit. Because Octavia’s anger was legendary and her stubbornness was structural and the idea that she’d refuse contact during recovery was not merely plausible but PROBABLE—the exact response that anyone who knew her would have predicted, and that Garrison, with the surgical cunning of a man who understood his target’s psychology as well as her skating mechanics, had weaponized against both of us.
He used her personality against her. Against me. Constructed a lie so precisely calibrated to our dynamic that neither of us questioned it, because the lie was built from true materials—her stubbornness, my guilt, the patterns of our relationship that he’d studied and exploited with the same analytical precision he’d applied to sabotaging her throw.
Fuck.
FUCK.
“He set you up,” I said.
The words left my mouth with a rawness that surprisedme—stripped of the controlled, measured delivery I applied to every other sentence in my life, carrying instead the unfiltered, present-tense fury of a man who was watching the full scope of a five-year deception crystallize in the moonlit air between himself and the woman it had been designed to isolate.
Octavia’s composure fractured.
Not slowly. Not with the gradual, managed dissolution that I’d seen her deploy at the audition and on the frat house dance floor—the controlled demolition of a woman who released her emotions in metered doses so that they served the moment rather than overwhelmed it. This was instant. Structural. The walls collapsing simultaneously, and what emerged wasn’t the fierce, defiant, I-will-survive-this version of her pain that the world was accustomed to witnessing. It was theunderneathversion. The quiet, devastated, gray-eyed vulnerability of a woman who had just been handed evidence that the narrative she’d built her recovery on—everyone abandoned me because I wasn’t worth staying for—had been a lie. A fabrication engineered by the man who’d broken her body and then, systematically, broken her trust in everyone else.
The betrayal was visible in her face like weather across a landscape—arriving in waves, each one deeper than the last, each one revealing a new layer of the damage. The anger she’d been carrying for years was being reclassified in real time: not a response to abandonment but a response tomanipulation. Not the rage of a woman whose people had failed her but the devastation of a woman whose people had beenpreventedfrom reaching her by a man who had calculated, with sociopathic precision, that her isolation was the final element of his design.
I want to get off this ice. I want to find Garrison Hale. I want to beat the comprehension out of his skull until his face resembles the damage he inflicted on her career and her heart and the five years of her life that he stole from BOTH of us.
“You…didn’t show up.”
Her whisper cut through my murderous internal monologue with the precision of a blade through silk. Quiet. Fragile in a way that Octavia Moreau’s voice was never fragile—the structural integrity that she maintained in every public sentence, in every confrontation, in every sharp, clever, fuck-you-I’m-still-standing declaration she’d made since the fall—temporarily absent. Replaced by the undefended, asking-not-accusing tone of a woman whose certainty had just been removed from beneath her like ice cracking under her feet.
“I wasn’tallowedto!”
The frustration erupted. Five years of it. The compressed, pressurized, never-expressed frustration of a man who had flown to Toronto and been turned away at a hospital door and had spent every day since living with the belief that his letters were being received and his presence was not welcome and that the silence between them was her choice rather than an engineered outcome.
“No outside visitors. Family and pack members only.” The words were bitter. Familiar. I’d rehearsed them in my own head a thousand times—the institutional language that had functioned as a wall between me and the woman I’d been trying to reach. “Garrison said you were angry. Said you didn’t want to see anyone—especially not the Alphas who weren’t in your corner when it mattered.” I heard the sentence from Garrison’s mouth echoing in my memory and recognized, for the first time, the surgical craftsmanship ofthe lie. “Fuck—itmade sense. I’d be angry too if my dreams were fumbled by someone I trusted. So when he said you didn’t want visitors, I believed it. And when they wouldn’t let me in, I wrote the letters…”
I trailed off. The sentence collapsing under its own weight as the implication completed itself in the silence between us.
I wrote the letters and gave them to the man who had already ensured they’d never arrive.
“Oh, I’m going tokillthat motherfucker.”
The declaration was low, measured, carrying less volume than my previous outburst but significantly more lethality—the shift from reactive anger to calculated intent, the captain’s voice replacing the lover’s. I turned away from her. Toward the edge of the rink. Toward the mudroom. Toward the car keys and the GPS and the systematic process of locating a man whose address I could obtain through federation records within twenty minutes and whose face I intended to rearrange within the hour.
“Wait.”
The word stopped me.
Not its volume—it was barely above a whisper. Not its authority—Octavia’s commanding presence had been temporarily dissolved by the revelations of the last five minutes. What stopped me was itsfrequency. The specific, quiet, stripped-to-the-bone register that I’d heard her use exactly twice in the years I’d known her: once when her father’s diagnosis was delivered, and once in this moment, standing on an outdoor rink in my sweats at three in the morning, asking a question that the little girl in her had been carrying for five years and that the woman she’d become had never permitted herself to voice.
I stopped. A few feet from the boards. Looked back.
Fuck.
She looked tiny.
Not physically—Octavia Moreau was five-foot-six of competition-trained, audition-dominating, three-perfect-tens-scoring athletic excellence, and she occupied space with the sovereign confidence of a woman who had decided, long ago, that the world would accommodate her rather than the reverse. But standing there—alone on the ice, the moonlight turning her borrowed sweats silver and her damp curls dark, her arms wrapped around herself in the specific, self-holding posture of a person who had been holding herself for so long that the gesture had become involuntary—she lookedsmall. The way a building looked small when you understood the weight it was supporting. The way a structure looked fragile when you realized it had been carrying the load alone.
“So…you didn’t abandon me?”
Fucking hell.
The way my shoulders sank.
Not dropped.Sank. A slow, heavy, gravity-assisted descent that had nothing to do with posture and everything to do with the raw, undisguised vulnerability in her voice detonating in the center of my chest and collapsing every load-bearing wall I’d built to keep the guilt contained. Because Octavia never spoke like that.Never. Not in public. Not on the ice. Not in the bickering, combative, I’ll-die-before-I-show-weakness mode that characterized every interaction the world was permitted to witness. Her emotions were indoor things. Private. Expressed between sheets in the dark, whispered between four walls, shared only in the enclosed, intimate spaces where the audience was limited to the person she’d decided could see her.
