My eyes widened.
“No fucking way.”
“Yes fucking way,” Luka murmured. His voice carrying the grim, confirmed,the-pattern-matchescertainty of a man whose hypothesis had been validated by the reaction it produced. “Garrison was on the figure skating side, but the rest of his pack were hockey players. And we made sure they couldn’t compete on the US program after the incident with Octavia—we blocked their federation access, flagged their records, ensured that the sabotage, even without a formal conviction, generated enough institutional resistance to prevent them from representing this country.”
He held my gaze.
“So where does a disgraced pack of athletes go when their home country’s federation has unofficially blacklisted them? Where do hockey players with Olympic-caliber talent and a grudge against the US program land when they need a new national affiliation and a new roster and a new opportunity to compete?”
Our competitor.
Canada. The team that’s been recruiting our players. The program that offered Volkov a guaranteed roster spot. The national federation that would have every strategic incentive to welcome athletes whose intimate knowledge of US training methods, play systems, and roster vulnerabilities made them the most valuable intelligence assets available on the international transfer market.
Garrison isn’t just on the Canadian team. He’s RUNNING it. Or his pack is. They’re using their inside knowledge of our program to recruit our players, destabilize our roster, and engineer the same kind of systematic, trust-exploiting, embedded-saboteur destruction that they used against Octavia—except this time the target isn’t a single skater. It’s an entire Olympic hockey team.
“The probability,” Luka continued, “that Garrison’s pack is now embedded in the Canadian program and actively orchestrating the recruitment of our players is approximately the same probability that a man who sabotaged his own skating partner’s throw and intercepted sixty handwritten letters from the Alpha who was trying to reach her would be willing to extend that same methodology to a larger target.”
He paused.
“High.”
I exhaled. The breath carrying the compressed, restructured,the-game-just-changedweight of a captain who had entered a locker room expecting to manage a halftime crisis and was now confronting an adversary whose scope exceeded a single goaltender’s betrayal and encompassed an entire campaign of competitive sabotage spanning years, countries, and disciplines.
“Think you can handle getting back on the ice?” Luka asked.
I huffed.
The sound was reflexive. Carrying the automatic,don’t-insult-my-capacityindignation of a captain whose pride had survived a panic attack and a public outing and the invocation of his dead mother’s name and was now being asked whether he could perform the one function that had never, in fifteen years of competitive hockey, failed him.
“Obviously.” I straightened. Shoulders squaring. The posture reassembling itself from the collapsed, post-panic configuration into the upright, broadened,I-am-the-captain-of-this-teamarchitecture that the ice demanded and that I refused to withhold from it regardless of the condition of the man inside the posture. “Don’t need your fucking?—”
He kissed me.
The wordinterruptiondidn’t apply.Interruptionswere accidental. This was a strategic insertion—a deliberate, timed, I-am-choosing-this-moment-with-full-awareness-of-its-weight decision executed with the goaltender’s impeccable timing and the man’s accumulated, years-in-the-making,I-am-done-waitingresolve.
His hands found my face again. Both of them. Cupping my jaw with the same firm, directional grip he’d used to still my rambling, except this time the stillness he was creating wasn’t verbal. It was total. My body freezing. My breath catching. My brain—which had been running approximately forty-seven parallel processes involving roster mathematics and Garrison conspiracy theories and the cardiovascular aftermath of a panic attack—shutting down every single one and allocating its entire bandwidth to the single, overwhelming, world-restructuring input being delivered to my mouth.
The kiss was short.
Firm. Deliberate. Carrying the specific, concentrated,this-is-not-a-questionpressure of a man who was notrequesting permission, was not testing boundaries, was not dipping a toe into water whose temperature he hadn’t verified. He was making a statement. A declaration delivered through lip pressure and jaw grip and the seven sustained seconds of contact that communicated, with more efficiency than any sentence he’d ever spoken:I am here. I am choosing this. I am not leaving the way I left a hotel room in Stockholm, and you are not closing the door the way you closed it that morning.
He broke the kiss.
Pulled back. Six inches. His hands remaining on my face—thumbs against my cheekbones, fingers along my jaw, the hold steady, warm, carrying the patient,I-am-not-going-anywhere-while-you-process-thisstillness of a man who understood that the person he’d just kissed was going to require approximately fifteen to twenty seconds to reconfigure his reality to accommodate the event.
I stared at him.
My expression was—I didn’t know what my expression was. Couldn’t feel it. Couldn’t catalogue it. The facial muscles were receiving conflicting directives from approximately nine different emotional systems simultaneously, and the result was a composite that probably looked less like an expression and more like a man whose face was buffering.
He just kissed me.
In the locker room. During halftime. Of a qualifying match. Twenty minutes after I publicly declared my sexuality to an arena full of people and broke a man’s nose and had a panic attack on the floor of the same room where I’m now kneeling with the goaltender’s mouth still warm on mine.
He kissed me and it felt like the first thing today that wasn’t a crisis.
Luka’s green eyes held mine. Steady. Unapologetic.Carrying the specific,I-meant-that-and-I’ll-do-it-againdirectness that characterized every significant action he’d ever taken and that had, in the seven seconds of that kiss, communicated more than three years of avoidance and five years of silence and one night in Stockholm had managed to obscure.
“Let’s beat those fuckers on the ice,” he said, “and secure our spot in the Olympic Games.”
