“That’s the one thing I can confidently say when it comes to you.” Her breath was warm against my mouth. Her gray eyes holding mine at a distance that required no focusbecause the proximity had eliminated everything peripheral. “You would never hurt me. You’d never do a thing to me that I don’t want. And if it happens—if the withdrawal produces a moment where the control slips—Iknowyou don’t mean it. But we can’t keep playing with your health.”
Her thumb shifted against the corner of my mouth. The lightest possible pressure. A touch that was less contact and more punctuation—the physical emphasis on the sentence she was about to deliver.
“Or your dream. You can’t risk the Winter Olympics by putting your body through pharmaceutical damage that’s going to compromise your performance, your reaction time, and your ability to be the captain this team needs you to be.”
You would never hurt me.
Five words. Delivered as a fact rather than a hope. Not a request for reassurance but a statement of belief—the kind of belief that was tested and verified and load-bearing, the kind that a woman who trusted almost no one was placing in a man who had given her every reason to withhold it and who was, in this moment, in this steam-filled bathroom, receiving it like a pardon he hadn’t applied for and didn’t know how to hold.
She believes me. Not the version of me that the world sees—the composure, the strategy, the pharmaceutical performance of control. The version beneath it. The man who saw her face behind his eyelids and chose medication over the risk of becoming the thing he feared most. She sees THAT man. And she’s telling him: I trust you. Even with this. Even knowing what the withdrawal might produce. Even after five years of silence that was engineered by someone else but that felt, for every one of those years, like a choice you made.
I trust you.
I bit my bottom lip. My eyes dropping to her mouth—notwith the hungry, desire-driven focus of a man looking at a woman he wanted to kiss, but with the specific, overwhelmed,where-do-I-put-this-feelingavoidance of a man who had just been given a gift too large for the shelf he’d reserved for it and was trying to process the receipt while his eyes found somewhere safe to land.
She was still holding my chin. Her grip patient. Steady. The hold of a woman who understood that the man in her hands needed time to arrive at the response and was willing to provide that time without filling the silence.
“I’ll cut back,” I said.
Three words. Quiet. Carrying more weight than sentences I’d composed over hours of deliberation. A concession that was not a surrender but an agreement—the distinction important, because Kael Sørensen did not surrender, but he could be persuaded, and the woman holding his chin had just accomplished what coaches, doctors, and packmates had failed to achieve in two years: a commitment to change.
She smirked.
The expression arriving with the irrepressible, default-Octavia energy that no amount of emotional gravity could permanently suppress—the corners of her mouth turning upward with the specific, victorious,I-knew-you’d-come-aroundsatisfaction of a woman who had fought for the outcome and was going to enjoy the win without being gracious about it.
“Good.” The word was bright. Decisive. Carrying the tone of a woman who had just closed a deal and was proceeding to the next item on the agenda. “I guess I’ll attempt to acknowledge your existence and be a bit nice.”
I groaned. Rolling my eyes with the comprehensive, full-orbital commitment that had become my primary communication mechanism in conversations with this woman.
“Wow. What a saving fucking grace.”
She snickered. The sound bright, warm, cutting through the residual heaviness of the conversation like a beam of light through a crack in heavy curtains. Then she shoved me—both hands against my shoulders, pushing me away from the tub’s edge with the playful, dismissive force of a woman who had extracted what she needed and was now reclaiming her bath as sovereign territory.
“Go away. I want to enjoy my bath.”
I rolled my eyes. Rose from the floor—the cold tile releasing my body with the reluctant, stiff-jointed protest of muscles that had been seated on a hard surface for too long and were filing complaints with every joint in the chain. I stretched. Vertebrae popping. Arms overhead.
“Stay as long as you like,” I said, reaching for the door handle. “But you’re gonna get all pruney.”
“I love prunes.”
I huffed. The sound carrying approximately equal parts exasperation and the specific, concealed,I-missed-this-banter-more-than-I’ll-ever-saywarmth that her responses consistently produced in the region of my chest that I’d been trying to convince myself was nonfunctional.
I was at the door.
Hand on the frame. One foot in the hallway. The transition from the steam-filled, confession-saturated, four-walls-and-darkness intimacy of the bathroom into the cool, quiet corridor of a house that was about to begin its morning—the predawn light now visible through the hallway windows, the first pale suggestion of a day that would bring training schedules and pack registration deadlines and the logisticalreality of five people who needed to determine how to function as a unit when the unit had been assembled from chaos and chemistry and sixty undelivered letters.
“Kael.”
I paused.
Looked back.
She was resting her arms along the edge of the tub—forearms crossed on the marble, chin settled on her hands, the posture of a woman who had arranged herself with deliberate, pictorial care because she understood the power of a final image and intended this one to land. Her damp hair fell around her shoulders. The warm water lapped at the skin of her collarbones. Her storm-gray eyes—no longer heavy with heat or bright with fury or guarded with the defensive composure she wore in public—were simplylookingat me. Open. Quiet. Carrying the specific, undefended expression that she permitted only in enclosed spaces and only with people whose access she had deliberately, personally, irrevocably authorized.
“I wish I got to read the letters.”
The sentence crossed the bathroom like a blade across clean ice—precise, deliberate, leaving a mark that wouldn’t disappear when the surface was resurfaced.
