The question wasn’t rhetorical. It was the question. The one that had lived at the center of every decision I’d made in the two years since the recovery—the decision to take a break, to step away from the circuit, to attempt the incomprehensible, soul-crushing, identity-erasing experiment of living anormal life.
“I tried to walk away from it. Took a break. Told myself I’d be fine doing something normal—working in a coffee shop, taking classes, being a twenty-something who didn’t measure her worth in technical scores and rotational velocity.” I huffed. The sound carried the self-aware, darkly amused recognition of a woman who had known, even during the attempt, that it was doomed. “But fuck. How do we do that? How do we pretend the ice doesn’t exist when we grew up on it? When our summers were spent in rinks and our winters on outdoor surfaces and our entire childhoods were structured around the sound of blades and the feel of cold air and the specific, irreplaceable sensation of a body doing the thing it was built to do at the speed it was built to do it?”
“We grew up in this lifestyle,” I said, and thewewas deliberate—encompassing not just me buthim, the boy who’d been on hockey skates at four and on competitive rosters by twelve and who understood, at the molecular level, that the ice wasn’t a hobby or a career but anidentity, and that asking someone to leave it was asking them to leave themselves. “And suddenly I’m supposed to go do something normal? Make lattes? Stock shelves? Exist in a world without edges and blades and the feeling of a crowd holding its breath while you hold a spiral for six seconds on a single edge? It’s madness.”
I closed my eyes.
The darkness behind my lids was warm. Steam-softened. Carrying the residual, sense-memory glow of the moments that had brought me here—the audition, the three tens, the throw that landed clean, the heat that had been managed by Alphas who showed up, the rink outside that still held the echo of my edges and the memory of the ice giving way beneath me and the arms that had pulled me out before the cold could claim me.
“I knew I’d come back.” My voice steadied. Found its footing on the bedrock beneath the grief. “That I could revive the dream. That I would get into the Olympics—with Garrison or without. Everyone told me to accept the loss. Move on. Find a new path. As if paths were interchangeable. As if the one you’d spent twenty years building could be replaced by a detour sign and a shrug.”
I opened my eyes.
He was watching me.
One hundred percent focused. The pale gray eyes locked on my face with the concentrated, unblinking, absolute-commitment intensity that I’d seen him bring to the most critical moments of his competitive career—the face-offs that decided games, the penalty kills that decided series, the strategic assessments that decided seasons. Except this wasn’t a game. Wasn’t a play. This was the woman he’d claimed through a proxy telling him the story of the years they’d missed, and he was receiving it with the full, undivided,holding-nothing-back attention of a man who understood that listening was the only thing he could offer that had value in this moment.
“So yeah.” I met his gaze. Held it. Let the storm-gray of my eyes deliver the rest of the paragraph that my voice was compressing into summary. “I’m angry. I’m angry at the circumstances. Angry that I allowed myself to be positioned for failure. Angry that a man I trusted studied my mechanics and my personality and my relationships and weaponized every piece of intelligence against me with the precision of a general executing a campaign.”
“And I want revenge.”
The word sat in the steam like a blade laid on a table—sharp, intentional, placed there for examination rather than concealment.
“I want him to see me in the spotlight. Want him to watch me compete at the level he tried to prevent me from reaching, and know—with every cell of his miserable, calculating, sabotaging body—that he failed. That the woman he dropped is standing. That the career he destroyed isthriving. I want him close enough to see it and far enough that he can’t touch it. To lose the access. To grovel for it.” My jaw tightened. “And no matter what he does, I get the power to tell himno. To prevent him from ever having access to me or my talents again.”
I took a breath. Let it settle.
“I want to prove I can enjoy figure skating again. Get lost in the music and the talent and justthrive. Feel that magnetizing sensation of freedom on the ice instead of allowing the past and the trauma to dictate how I move and what I feel and who I let close enough to throw me.”
The bathroom was quiet. The faucet dripping. The steamdrifting. The warm water holding me in its ambient, silent embrace while the words I’d released settled into the space between us like sediment finding the bottom of a riverbed.
“Thanks to you sending Maddox, I was allowed to win. Allowed to remain in the competition.” I paused. Let the acknowledgment carry its full weight. “Thanks to you blindly deciding to get involved—even if you probably didn’t want to. Even if the reasons were strategic and the method was a proxy and the timing was chaos. You did it. And without that intervention, the Montreal brunette would have my qualifying position and I’d be packing my bags.”
I stared into his eyes.
The pale gray, holding my gray. Two shades of the same color looking at each other across the steam and the marble and the five years of engineered separation that a single man’s cruelty had produced.
“Thank you, Kael.”
He blushed.
Kael. Sørensen.Blushed.
The color arrived at the base of his ears—a faint, warm, absolutely unprecedented pink that climbed from beneath the platinum hair and spread toward his cheekbones with the slow, reluctant progression of a phenomenon that his physiology was producing against his explicit instructions. The blush on a man whose resting complexion typically suggested he’d been assembled in a freezer was approximately as subtle as a signal flare in a dark room, and the expression accompanying it—the slight, embarrassed,I-did-not-authorize-this-reactiontightening of his jaw—confirmed that the blood redistribution was involuntary and deeply unwelcome.
He grumbled.
“You’re gonna make my nose bleed again.”
I smirked. The expression arriving with the irrepressible, default-Octavia energy that no amount of emotional excavation could fully suppress.
“So youarea pervert.”
He huffed. “I am not a pervert.” The denial was vehement, clipped, delivered with the defensive urgency of a man who recognized that the prosecution’s case was strengthening with each physiological exhibit he involuntarily produced. “It’s the damn blockers?—”
He stopped.
The wordblockershanging in the steam-thick air of the bathroom like a grenade whose pin had been pulled by accident. His mouth closed. His jaw locked. The pale gray eyes widening by a fraction that would have been invisible to anyone who hadn’t spent months studying the microexpression vocabulary of this face at close range—the specific,I-just-said-something-I-didn’t-intend-to-saydilation that preceded the full, system-wide lockdown of a man whose internal security protocol had just detected a breach.
