The sentence landed in the steam-filled room with a weight that exceeded its word count.
“I was just mad.”
He looked over his shoulder.
Met my gaze.
And I let him see it. The anger. Not the performative, bickering, rom-com-rivalry anger that characterized our public interactions. The real kind. The kind that lived in the foundation of my chest and had been load-bearing for five years—holding up the recovery, the rehabilitation, the solo training, the audition, the three perfect tens, the entire architectural project of rebuilding Octavia Moreau from a hospital bed to an Olympic qualifying stage. The anger that had been directed athim—at his absence, at his silence, at the five years of thinking he’d chosen to walk away—and that was now being reclassified, revised, redirected toward a target he hadn’t known she was aiming at the wrong man.
But the anger doesn’t erase the caring. That’s the thing they don’t tell you about loving someone who hurt you: the pain and the love occupy the same space. They coexist. Cohabitate. Share the same room in your chest without resolvingthe contradiction, because resolution would require one of them to leave, and neither is willing to vacate.
He could always read me. The same way Luka read me through scent and body language, Kael read me through my eyes. Had learned, during the months we’d shared, to decode the specific, micro-expressive vocabulary of my irises the way he decoded opposing formations on the ice—rapidly, accurately, with the strategic mind that made him the most dangerous captain in his league applied to the more intimate, more vulnerable, significantly more consequential task of understanding the woman in front of him.
I let out a sigh.
The sound was long. Emptying. The kind of exhale that carried weight on its way out—the accumulated, compressed, held-for-too-long mass of words that had been queued in my chest for years and that the night, the bath, the nosebleed, the letters, and the specific, quiet, four-walls-and-darkness intimacy of this bathroom were finally extracting.
“I was all alone,” I whispered. “Recovering in that hospital room by myself.”
The words were small. Barely louder than the sound of bathwater settling against porcelain. Delivered not with the fierce, shouting, rink-echoing force of the eruption I’d unleashed on Luka in Rink Three, but with the opposite—the quiet, devastating, speaking-from-the-floor-of-the-well voice of a woman who had descended past the anger and found, beneath it, the sadness that the anger had been guarding.
“Thinking you guys would show up. Thinking someone—anyone—would justbethere.” My fingers traced idle patterns on the surface of the bathwater, the movementsunconscious, the body’s way of occupying itself while the mouth did the harder work. “And no one came.”
A breath.
“I waited.”
Another.
“I prayed.”
The laugh that escaped me was brief, bitter, carrying the specific, self-deprecating frequency of a woman who didn’t pray and who had, in the depths of her most desperate night, prayed anyway. “Fuck—I’d follow any deity if a single one of my wishes came true so I wouldn’t…”
I swallowed.
“…feel so fucking alone.”
I could see the hurt form on his face.
Not the controlled, managed, composure-filtered version of hurt that Kael Sørensen permitted the world to witness during press conferences and post-game interviews and the rare public moments where his emotional regulation faltered by a visible degree. Therealversion. The uncensored, arrived-before-the-mask-could-intercept kind that I’d seen perhaps three times in the entirety of our history and that each time had made me realize that the frozen exterior was not the absence of emotion but thecontainmentof it—that beneath the permafrost was a man who felt things at a depth and an intensity that his composure existed specifically to survive.
His pale gray eyes widened. The jaw loosened by a fraction—the masseter releasing its habitual clench, the mouth softening from its default flatline into a shape that was closer toopenthan anything his face typically produced. The hurt was visible in the texture of his expression the way damage was visible in the texture of ice—not a dramatic fracture buta network of fine, spreading, capillary-thin cracks that collectively transformed the surface from solid to fragile.
I looked away.
Sank deeper into the water. Let the warmth close over my collarbones, my throat, until the surface lapped at my chin and the steam wrapped around my face like a veil and the bathwater became a boundary between the words I was about to say and the man I was saying them to.
“I thought I simply wasn’t enough.”
The whisper was the quietest sound I’d produced in this house. Quieter than the moans that had echoed through the ventilation system. Quieter than the banter, the laughter, the combative, confident, Octavia-grade declarations that I’d been deploying like armor since the moment I’d arrived at Olympia Academy. This was the voice beneath all of those. The voice that lived in the hospital room at three in the morning and spoke to the ceiling and the pulse oximeter and the empty chairs.
“That I must have been a spare. Replaceable. Disposable. Because why else was I discarded so easily?” The words were falling now—not rushing, not erupting, butfalling, the way rain fell when the cloud had been holding it for too long and the weight exceeded the capacity and gravity did the rest. “This wasn’t an error I made. The throw wasn’t my mistake. The landing wasn’t my failure. Yet I was being penalized as if I’d caused this catastrophe in my own life. As if the blood on the ice was evidence of my incompetence rather than someone else’s cruelty.”
I drew a breath. Released it into the steam.
“Then I had to come back. Had to return to the circuit and act like I wasn’t still bleeding internally. That I wasn’t abandoned. That I wasn’t set up. Couldn’t tell my coach thetruth because he was now supporting the very Alpha who’d destroyed me—coaching Garrison’s new pair with the same enthusiasm he’d once brought to coachingmine, as if the transition from my broken body to Garrison’s new partner was a promotion rather than a cover-up.”
“So where was I supposed to turn?”
