His voice had shifted. No longer the raw, protective, post-violence register of the man who’d punched a goaltender for invoking a dead woman’s name. Not the quiet, intimate, forehead-to-forehead voice of the man who’d guided me through a panic attack with a breathing technique he’d learned from my mother. This was a third register. New. One I hadn’t heard before—or rather, one I’d heard fragments of, in moments scattered across years, but had never encountered at full assembly. The voice of a man who had decided.
“And after this—after we’ve won this period and secured the qualification—we start fresh. With the pack.” He held my gaze. “No more secrets. No more uncertainty. No more hiding in rooms and pretending that what’s happening between the five of us is temporary or transactional or a bureaucratic arrangement that we’ll dissolve when the paperwork no longer requires it.”
His hands tightened on my jaw. The grip carrying the specific, physical emphasis of a man punctuating a commitment with contact.
“We come clean. Say our pieces. Every one of us. As a unit. We sit in a room and we put the cards on the table—Stockholm, the letters, the blockers, the heat, everything—and we build the pack on truth instead of the scaffolding ofhalf-disclosures and convenient omissions we’ve been operating on.”
He leaned closer. His green eyes filling my field of vision the way they filled the spaces of every room we occupied together—completely, unavoidably, with the gravitational certainty of a presence that had stopped pretending it could be peripheral.
“And we push Octavia to reach her goals. The figure skating program. The Olympic qualifying pathway. The competition against Garrison’s replacement Omega that she’s going to enter and dominate because she’s the most talented, most stubborn, most magnificently uncompromising athlete either of us has ever met, and she deserves a pack that matches her intensity instead of one that makes her carry the weight alone.”
His voice dropped.
“If Garrison wants to tear us apart, he can try. He’s already tried. Five years ago with the letters. This week with Volkov. Next month with whatever the fuck else he’s planning from behind a Canadian jersey. But he’s not going to win a second time. Because this time, the people he’s trying to isolate are standing next to each other instead of on opposite sides of a silence he manufactured.”
He held me.
Green on gray. The loaded, dense, refuses-to-look-away eye contact that had been the signature of every significant moment between us—from Stockholm to the hallway at Olympia to the confrontation on the ice to this locker room floor where two Alphas were kneeling in their gear with split knuckles and a post-panic sweat and the taste of a kiss that had been three years overdue and that neither of them was going to apologize for.
“We’re going to make this official. No matter what.Deal?”
I looked at him.
Long. Hard. The sustained, evaluative,I-am-measuring-the-weight-of-what-you’re-askingassessment of a captain whose decision-making process was thorough by nature and meticulous by training and who did not commit to formations he hadn’t analyzed from every angle. I weighed the costs. The risks. The vulnerability required, the trust demanded, the specific, terrifying, no-safety-net reality of building a pack on honesty when every previous attempt at honesty had produced catastrophe.
And then I weighed the alternative. More silence. More sulking. More pharmaceutical management of a biology that was designed to be managed by proximity and intimacy and the specific, irreplaceable presence of the people whose scent signatures completed his own. More locked doors and missed opportunities and the slow, steady, compound-interest accumulation of years spent protecting the wrong goal while the one that mattered went unguarded.
I huffed.
The sound carrying less resistance than any huff I’d produced in recent memory. Less pride. Less armor. More of the man and less of the mask, because the mask was on the floor of a competition arena where I’d left it during a declaration I couldn’t take back and—for the first time in my life—didn’t want to.
“As long as you’re the new fucking goalie.”
Luka’s smirk appeared.
Small. Genuine. The quarter-turn, eyes-included,you-just-said-yes-and-I’m-going-to-let-you-pretend-the-condition-is-what-made-it-acceptableexpression that he deployedexclusively in response to concessions I granted while pretending they were demands.
His green eyes warmed. The incandescent, post-violence intensity softening into the color I’d seen through a cracked kitchen door years ago, when he’d watched my mother press her forehead against mine and had decided, without discussion, to carry the tradition forward.
“Deal.”
CHAPTER 29
Game Plan
~OCTAVIA~
“The gold medal isn’t the finish line.It’s the starting gun for everything that comes after.”
“USA GOT INTO THE WINTER OLYMPICS!”
Candy’s scream hit the dorm room at a frequency that sent the coffee mug on my desk vibrating toward the edge in a slow, terror-motivated migration. She was standing three feet from the television—the modest, wall-mounted screen that the dormitory administration had provided and that Candy had immediately commandeered as her personal news, competition replay, and reality-show-binge apparatus—with both hands pressed to the sides of her face in the classic, universally recognized posture of a woman experiencing an emotional event that her body could not contain without the structural support of her own palms.
Her wild strawberry, fresh-cut grass, and warm cinnamon scent had spiked to celebration levels—the bright, sweet, top-note dominant profilethat her Omega pheromones produced when happiness exceeded a specific threshold and began broadcasting itself at a volume that adjacent rooms could probably detect. Her ginger hair was in its post-training bun—messy, secured by two elastic bands and a prayer—and she was still wearing her Prague Gymnastics Academy hoodie, which had become, in the weeks since our arrival at Olympia, less a garment and more a second skin that she removed only for competition and sleep.
I paused.
My attention had been occupied by the stack of documents spread across the desk in front of me—the official training schedule that Olympia Academy’s figure skating division had released that morning with the institutional efficiency of a machine that produced paperwork the way a Zamboni produced smooth ice: relentlessly, on schedule, and in quantities that exceeded any individual’s capacity to process without pharmaceutical assistance.
