I stared at her.
Not at her body—though her body was there, visible beneath the slowly clearing water, the lean, athletic, twenty-years-of-skating perfection that I’d been tormented by through ventilation ducts for four days. At herface. At the expression she was wearing in the privacy of this steam-filled room that she wouldn’t have worn in any public space, because this was the indoor version of Octavia—the one who existed between walls and beneath sheets and in the quiet, vulnerable, four-walls-and-darkness spaces where she permitted herself to be seen.
And I realized, with the slow, devastating, arriving-at-the-scene-of-a-crime-you-didn’t-know-occurred clarity of a man whose guilt had just been expanded from the individual to the structural:
She was all alone.
Six months. In a hospital room. Recovering from an injury that a man she trusted had deliberately inflicted. With no visitors. No pack. No letters that I wrote by hand on cream-colored stationery because I wanted the paper to feel deliberate. No indication that a single person in the competitive skating ecosystem she’d dedicated her life to gave a damn whether she lived or died or ever stepped onto the ice again.
Alone.
Thinking the silence was the truth. Thinking the abandonment was real. Building her recovery on the foundation of a lie that said:no one is coming for you, so you’d better learn to survive this by yourself.
And she did. She survived it. Rebuilt herself. Taught herself to walk. Taught herself to skate. Scored three perfect tens on a reconstructed knee at the most prestigious training academy on the continent. Did all of it ALONE, because a man who should have protected her decided instead to ensure that loneliness was the only companion she’d have during the worst experience of her life.
I couldn’t help the whisper.
“So no one…” My voice was quiet. Stripped. Carrying the specific, raw register that my vocal cords produced when the composure had been fully dismantled and what remained was the man beneath it—not the captain, not the Alpha, not the strategic, chess-playing, everyone-thinks-my-control-is-natural persona that I maintained with pharmaceutical and psychological assistance. The man. “No one visited you?”
She stared back at me.
The look we shared was not the combative, challenge-laden eye contact that characterized our default dynamic. It was the other kind. The rare kind. The kind that had happened between us maybe a dozen times in the entire history of our relationship—in the dark, in the quiet, in the moments when the bickering and the stubbornness and the two-people-who-refuse-to-submit-to-anything-including-each-other energy had temporarily exhausted itself and what was left was just two people looking at each other with the terrifying, undefended honesty that intimacy demanded and that both of us spent most of our lives avoiding.
She didn’t answer. Didn’t need to. The confirmation was in the silence—in the specific, weighted, says-everything-by-saying-nothing quiet of a woman who had been asked a question whose answer was written in the years of her faceand the scars on her knee and the walls she’d built so high and so thick that four Alphas and a four-day heat had only just begun to find the doors.
Fuck.
I feel like shit.
And I rarely felt like shit for anyone. The emotional landscape I maintained was intentionally arid—a desert by design, irrigated only when absolutely necessary, because the alternative—the lush, vulnerable, fully watered version—was a terrain I didn’t trust myself to navigate without the kind of pharmaceutical guardrails that were currently failing in my bloodstream. But the guilt that pulled at me now was not the standard, manageable, file-it-and-move-on variety. It wasoceanic. Vast. The kind that filled every available space in your chest and rose above the waterline of your composure and threatened to overflow through the only exits available—eyes, voice, the crack in the mask that you’d been maintaining for years and that this woman, and this night, and these revelations had finally widened beyond repair.
The woman I loved. The Omega I saw a future with. Left alone to believe that no one had her back, because a single Alpha decided to play god with her life and I was too stupid to verify that my letters had arrived.
All these years wasted. We could have been a pack. Could have trained together. Could have reached our goals together. Could have started a family by now?—
Stop. You’re spiraling. Breathe. 3-7-8. Manage the guilt the way you manage everything else: with discipline and a plan and the understanding that the past cannot be retroactively repaired but the future can be deliberately constructed.
“Octavia.”
I whispered her name with a tenderness I rarely used.The word emerging from my mouth in a register so low, so unguarded, so stripped of every protective layer I normally applied to my speech that it sounded almost like a different language—the private, four-walls-and-darkness language that she and I had spoken only to each other, only in the quiet, only when the stubbornness had been set aside and what remained was just the truth.
Our eyes were locked.
And I wondered if she could see it—the true, unperformed, un-strategized remorse sitting in the depths of my irises like a body of water that had been still for years and was now, finally, being disturbed. The guilt. The recognition. The devastated, too-late, should-have-known-sooner understanding that we had failed her. All of us. Not just Garrison—though Garrison was the architect, the engineer, the man who’d designed the isolation with sociopathic precision. But the rest of us, too. The people who’d believed the narrative. Who’d accepted the silence. Who’d chosen the comfortable interpretation over the suspicious one because investigating further would have required the kind of uncomfortable, boundary-crossing, vulnerability-demanding effort that none of us—not me, not Luka, not the federation, not the world—had been willing to invest in a woman who was already down.
We fucked up. We failed her. And I’m sitting on this bathroom floor at four in the morning looking at the consequences of that failure in the gray eyes of the only woman I’ve ever wanted a future with, and the distance between what we have and what we could have had is measurable in years and letters and the specific, irretrievable currency of time spent alone when it should have been spent together.
She blinked.
The expression on her face shifted. The vulnerability receding—not behind the walls, not behind the composure, but behind a different expression entirely. One I hadn’t seen coming. Her brows drew together. Her eyes narrowed. Not in anger or suspicion but in the focused, assessing,something-is-wrongconcentration of a woman whose analytical mind had detected an anomaly and was flagging it with the priority status of an observation that couldn’t wait for the emotional conversation to conclude.
Worry formed on her features.
“What?” I asked.
She blinked again. Tilted her head. The movement was small, careful, the way you tilted your head when you were trying to confirm that the thing you were seeing was real and not a product of exhaustion or steam or the emotional saturation of an evening that had already exceeded the processing capacity of every person involved.
“Maybe I’m hallucinating,” she said, and her voice carried the genuine, slightly alarmed confusion of a woman who was not accustomed to questioning her own perception and was doing so now with visible reluctance. Her storm-gray eyes were fixed on a point below my eyes and above my mouth. On my face. On a specific, localized area of my face that she was studying with the kind of focused, detail-oriented attention she normally reserved for dissecting the scent profiles of Alphas she’d known for twelve hours.
