So I was there when the ice decided it had opinions about her.
But then she was gone. And I kept freezing the rink each year. Maintained the surface. Ran the cooling system. Resurfaced with the Zamboni on the same schedule I’d always kept. Not because I intended to skate on it—I hadn’t, not once in five years, not until tonight. Because the rink was the last thing we’d shared that I hadn’t dismantled or stored or filed away, and maintaining it was the only form of hope I could express without admitting I was hoping.
Until today.
I lifted her from the ice.
The carry was less graceful than Renzo’s choreographed,look-at-me-being-charming scoop from the bedroom and more functional—one arm under her knees, the other across her back, the wet, shivering, chattering weight of her pressed against my bare chest as I skated toward the rink’s edge with the urgent, controlled speed of a man who was aware that every additional second of exposure compounded the risk of hypothermia and that the path between the rink and the bathroom contained approximately forty feet of ground that needed to be covered immediately.
She was trembling. The shivers had escalated from intermittent to continuous—the sustained, involuntary, thermoregulatory response of a body that had been submerged in near-freezing water and was now exposed to November air in saturated clothing, the combined thermal assault producing a heat loss rate that my hockey-trained cold-weather awareness flagged asget her warm now, not in five minutes, NOW.
More ice cracked behind us as I stepped off the rink and onto the solid ground beside the boards. The sound of the surface continuing to fail—additional fracture lines propagating outward from the original breach, the structural damage cascading through the weakened areas with the domino-chain inevitability of a system that had passed its threshold and was now accelerating toward complete failure.
The rink’s done for the night. Possibly the week. The breach will drain the subsurface basin and the refreezing process will take days of sustained below-zero temperatures to restore. But the rink isn’t the priority. The shivering woman in my arms is the priority, and the rink can be dealt with when she’s warm and dry and no longer at risk of a core temperature drop that would send us to the emergency room and generate questions I don’t want to answer at four in the morning.
I carried her through the mudroom. Through the hallway. Up the stairs to the main bathroom—my bathroom, the one attached to the master bedroom, the one that Luka had commandeered hours earlier with the territorial provocation of using another Alpha’s shower and that now smelled faintly of rain-soaked stone and dark chocolate beneath the persistent base layer of my own frosted pine.
I set her on the tile floor and turned the faucet. Hot water. The old Victorian plumbing groaning as the system responded—slower than I wanted, the initial output lukewarm at best, the temperature needing time to climb to the therapeutic range that would reverse the cold exposure without shocking her already stressed cardiovascular system.
“Strip.”
The instruction was clinical. Direct. The single-word directive of a man operating in emergency-management mode, where the variables were temperature, time, and the saturated clothing that was actively wicking heat away from her body and needed to be removed immediately.
She gave me a look.
Thelook. The specific, eyebrow-elevated, chin-tilted, I-know-exactly-what-you-just-said-and-I’m-going-to-make-you-uncomfortable-about-it expression that Octavia Moreau deployed when a man issued a directive she considered presumptuous, regardless of the context in which it was issued. The look that saidexcuse mewithout the words andtry againwithout the invitation.
I rolled my eyes.
“You want me to close my eyes and count to ten?”
She huffed. The sound was wet, shivery, and carried approximately twelve percent of its usual indignation—thereduced output of a woman whose body was diverting energy to thermoregulation rather than theatrical disdain.
“I saw you naked already,” I added, “if you don’t recall,Miss I’m-Gonna-Shower.”
The callback to her dismissal in the bedroom—the moment she’d turned from my arrival to request a shower with Renzo instead—landed with the intended combination of irritation and familiarity. Her smirk materialized through the shivers—the corners of her blue-tinted lips turning upward with the stubborn, irrepressible energy of a woman who would produce banter at her own funeral if the eulogist provided an opening.
“Just say you’re fucking jealous,” she said, and her voice was chattering but her tone was absolute, “because you miss this coochie instead of being a stubborn prick.”
This woman. Hypothermic, soaked, standing in my bathroom in saturated sweats that are pooling water on my tile, and she’s delivering sexual commentary with the confidence of someone who isn’t actively shivering.
God, I missed her.
“Hurry up and get in,” I muttered, turning to check the water temperature—warmer now, climbing toward the range that would help without harming, the steam beginning to rise from the surface in wisps that the bathroom’s cool air caught and suspended.
She followed the instruction. Reluctantly—because Octavia Moreau did not follow instructions without first registering her objection to the principle of being instructed—but efficiently. The wet sweats peeled off. The saturated t-shirt. The compression shorts. Each garment hitting the tile floor with the heavy, waterlogged slap of fabric that had absorbed approximately three times its dry weight. Shelowered herself into the tub with the careful, controlled descent of an athlete managing a body that was simultaneously sore from a four-day heat, stiff from a midnight skating session, and shivering from an unplanned submersion in water that was technically above freezing and practically indistinguishable from it.
The bathwater was tepid. Intentionally. The protocol for cold-water exposure recovery started with lukewarm—not hot, never hot—to allow the body’s core temperature to rise gradually rather than shock the cardiovascular system with a sudden thermal spike that could cause arrhythmia. I adjusted the faucet. Let the hot water run in a thin, steady stream that would incrementally raise the bath temperature while she acclimated.
She stared at me.
From the tub. The water lapping at her collarbones. Her damp hair spreading across the surface in purple-turquoise-platinum tendrils. Her storm-gray eyes—wide, watchful, carrying the specific, assessing focus of a woman whose body was warming but whose mind was still processing the revelations that had preceded the submersion—fixed on my face with a directness that the steam couldn’t soften.
By the time she was settled—the shivers subsiding, the blue receding from her lips, her body relaxing into the rising warmth with the gradual, incremental surrender of a system that was accepting the temperature intervention—the bathroom was thick with steam and the soft, persistent sound of water flowing from the faucet.
I sat on the tile floor beside the tub.
Not on the edge. On thefloor. Back against the wall, legs extended, my bare feet on the cold tile and my eyes level with hers where she rested in the water. The positionwas deliberate. Below her. Looking up rather than down. The spatial language of a man who was choosing, consciously, to occupy the lower ground—to cede the height advantage that his six-foot-four frame normally provided and to meet her at the level the conversation required.
