Because Kael Sørensen—the man who did not follow instructions, who made coaches negotiate for compliance, who treated directives from anyone below the rank of headmaster as suggestions to be evaluated and typically rejected—had always, in every iteration of our dynamic, in every argument and standoff and stubborn, neither-of-us-will-yield confrontation, eventually come when I told him to. Not because I outranked him. Not because I was louder or more persistent or strategically superior. Because somewhere in the impenetrable, frosted-pine interior of his Alpha wiring, my voice occupied a frequency that bypassed the resistance and connected directly to the compliance center, and neither of us had ever fully examined why.
He settled beside the tub. Back against the marble surround. Legs extended across the tile floor. Head tiltedforwardthis time—the begrudging, dignity-preserving concession of a man who had tasted blood and decided that my medical advice was marginally preferable to the alternative. I reached over the tub’s edge and adjusted the tissue in his nostril, pinched the soft cartilage of his nose bridge between my wet thumb and forefinger, and held the pressure with the practiced, ten-minute-timer discipline of a woman who had managed more nosebleeds in athletic contexts than most people managed in a lifetime.
His frosted-pine scent was concentrated at this distance. The cold steel and the aged whiskey layering beneath it in the steam-thickened air of the bathroom, the entire composition warmed and softened by the humidity until it felt less like weather and more like atmosphere—an ambient, enveloping,everywherepresence that my Omega receptors were processing with the quiet, persistent,this-is-compatiblesignal that they’d been broadcasting since the moment his scent had entered my awareness and that four days of ventilation-mediated exposure had only strengthened.
The silence that settled between us was tense.
Not the combative tension of their usual dynamic—the charged, bickering, two-stubborn-people-occupying-the-same-room energy that characterized every interaction the world was permitted to witness. A different kind. Heavier. Structural. The tension of two people sitting in the wreckage of a revelation that had just demolished the narrative both of them had been living inside for five years, and who were now surveying the debris and trying to determine what, if anything, could be rebuilt from the materials that remained.
Garrison fucked us all up.
The thought crystallized with the cold, hard, mineral clarity of a truth that had finished forming and was now sitting in my awareness like a geological fact—immovable, unambiguous, demanding to be addressed.
Not just me and Kael. ALL of us. What if Luka tried to reach me, too? What if there were other letters, other messages, other attempts at contact that were intercepted by a man who had positioned himself as the gatekeeper of my isolation and who had ensured, with systematic, calculated precision, that every bridge between me and the people who might have supported my recovery was severed before I even knew the bridges existed?
What if the loneliness wasn’t a consequence of their failures?
What if it was the PRODUCT of his?
The reframing was seismic. Five years of fury directed at the people who hadn’t shown up, being rerouted—redirected, recalibrated, the targeting system updating in real time as the intelligence was revised—toward the single individual who had ensured theycouldn’t. The anger was the same. The volume was the same. But the address had changed, and the change was producing a kind of vertigo that made the warm bathwater feel unsteady beneath me, as if the foundation I’d built my recovery on—I was abandoned because I wasn’t worth staying for—had just been identified as a structural lie, and the building erected on top of it was swaying.
And now the nosebleed.
His health.
The worry that had settled in my stomach when the blood first appeared hadn’t dissolved. It had deepened. Spread. Migrated from the acute,oh-that’s-concerningresponse to the more persistent, background-level,is-he-okayfrequency that my Omega biology ran when it detected apotential health anomaly in a compatible Alpha. The nosebleed could be nothing. Dry air. The cold-to-warm temperature differential between the outdoor rink and the steam-filled bathroom. Stress. Fatigue. The kind of innocuous, single-incident bleed that athletes experienced routinely and dismissed with a tissue and a shrug.
Or it could be not nothing.
I knew what Kael Sørensen looked like healthy. Had catalogued his baseline over the years—the complexion, the posture, the specific, kinetic energy that a man in peak competitive condition radiated like body heat. And the man sitting on my bathroom floor did not match the baseline. The dark circles. The bloodshot eyes. The pallor that exceeded his standard Scandinavian complexion and entered territory that could be described asdepleted. The weight loss—subtle but present, visible in the sharper angles of his jaw and the slightly more prominent cords of his neck, the kind of reduction that happened when a body was burning more fuel than it was receiving, either through overtraining, under sleeping, or a metabolic disruption that the standard athletic nutrition protocol wasn’t compensating for.
“Are you okay?”
The question was quiet. Stripped of the banter. Delivered in the register that I reserved for conversations that mattered—the soft, direct, no-comedy-no-deflection tone that Candy heard when the subject was my father’s health and that Luka heard when the subject was the thing we didn’t talk about. The real voice. The one that lived beneath the confident, cocky, three-perfect-tens exterior and that emerged only when the stakes were high enough to warrant its deployment.
“Like, health-wise.”
He didn’t answer.
The silence was immediate. Dense. The kind of non-response that functioned as a response in itself—not the silence of a man who hadn’t heard the question, but the silence of a man who had heard it and was deciding, in real time, whether the answer was a door he was willing to open.
“Nothing’s wrong with you, right?” I pressed. My voice climbing slightly—not in volume but in urgency, the specific, escalating register of a woman whose worry was compounding in the silence. “Like you don’t have a disease or anything. You have to be healthy—they do health screening checks to get into Olympia. Blood panels. Physicals. The whole battery. They wouldn’t have cleared you if?—”
I trailed off. The sentence dissolving as the scenarios it was constructing grew increasingly alarming and my brain decided that completing them would not improve the situation.
Kael sighed.
The exhale was long. Pressurized. Carrying the specific, weighted frequency of a man whose patience with being interrogated had reached its threshold, and whose threshold was historically low and currently compromised by four days of sleep deprivation, a failed climax, a revelation about intercepted letters, an ice-surface rescue, and a nosebleed that his Omega was interpreting as evidence of a terminal condition.
“Can you stop fucking worrying?”
The words were gruff. Bitten. The verbal equivalent of a man pulling the drawbridge up—the defensive, I-don’t-need-your-concern response that Kael deployed whenever someone approached the perimeter of a vulnerability he hadn’t authorized for discussion.
I was not deterred.
Because Kael Sørensen’s drawbridges were made of the same material as his composure: impressive from the outside, structurally finite, and consistently vulnerable to sustained, targeted application of the one force they hadn’t been designed to withstand, which was a five-foot-six Omega who refused to be dismissed.
“I have to worry,” I said. The words came steady. Firm. Not loud—I didn’t need volume; I needed precision. “Because even though you’re a ruthless jackass doesn’t mean I stopped caring about you.”
