Four sets of eyes. Gray, green, near-black, dark. Each one carrying a different frequency of attention—Kael’s analytical, Luka’s steady, Maddox’s quiet, Renzo’s curious—but all four converging on the same point with the unified, pack-level focus that my Omega biology recognized as the specific configuration it had been designed to receive:the Alphas are present, they are attentive, and they are waiting for direction from the Omega at center.
This is the first time all five of us have been in a room together since the heat. The first time we’ve assembled not because biology demanded it but because choice required it. The heat was chemistry. The audition was crisis. What happens next is DECISION. Deliberate, conscious, eyes-open decision-making about whether the arrangement that was built from bureaucratic lies and shared pheromones and the desperate, improvised, held-together-with-duct-tape interventions of a single chaotic week can be converted into a thing that actually functions.
A pack.
A real one. Not the registration-deadline, convince-the-judge,survive-the-heat version. The version that trains together. Competes together. Shows up for each other when the ice gets thin and the stakes get high and the man who sabotaged your career is apparently running the opposing team’s operations from behind a Canadian jersey.
“Well.” I met each of their eyes in sequence—Kael, Luka, Maddox, Renzo—giving each man two seconds of direct, unblinking,I-see-you-and-you-are-being-assessedcontact before moving to the next. “Congratulations on the qualification. I’m sure the story behind it is dramatic as hell and I’ll get the full download eventually.”
Kael and Luka exchanged a glance. Brief. Loaded. The kind of shared look that contained an entire narrative compressed into a single, encrypted, Alpha-to-Alpha transmission that I caught the frequency of but couldn’t decode.
I continued.
“Guess we’re here to get serious, huh?”
The question was rhetorical. The answer was standing in my dorm room in four different sets of athletic wear, carrying four different competition victories, and occupying a combined total of approximately ninety percent of the available floor space with the specific, immovable,we-are-not-leaving-until-the-work-is-doneenergy of men who had come here with an agenda and who were waiting for the Omega at the center to open the meeting.
Time for the ultimate game plan.
CHAPTER 30
Sweet Revenge
~OCTAVIA~
“Revenge isn’t a dish best served cold.It’s a program best skated to perfection.”
I’d been staring at the screen for eleven minutes.
The academy’s internal database—the comprehensive, federation-linked, updated-in-real-time competitor registry that Olympia provided to its enrolled athletes as a scouting resource—was displayed across my laptop in a grid of headshots, team affiliations, and event registrations that I’d been navigating with the specific, methodical, leave-no-cell-unexamined thoroughness of a woman conducting reconnaissance rather than casual browsing.
The Canadian team’s roster filled the screen.
Both divisions. Figure skating on the left panel. Hockey on the right. The headshots arranged in alphabetical order by surname, each one accompanied by the athlete’s designation, event registration, and pack affiliationdata that the IOC required for all competing members of national programs. I’d started with the figure skating division, because the figure skating division was where the name I was looking for would appear first, and because some part of me—the strategic, tactical, need-to-see-the-evidence-with-my-own-eyes part—required visual confirmation before the planning could begin.
And there he was.
HALE, Garrison T.— Alpha. Figure Skating: Pairs (Partnered) / Singles (Solo). Pack: Hale Pack. Representing: Canada.
His headshot stared back from the registry with the practiced, camera-ready, media-trained expression of a man whose public persona had been polished to a mirror finish that revealed nothing beneath it. The jaw. The eyes—dark, warm in the photograph, carrying the specific, manufactured approachability that sociopaths and politicians shared in equal measure. The hair styled with the casual, expensive,I-woke-up-like-this-except-it-costs-three-hundred-dollarsprecision that the federation circuit’s top performers maintained because the sport valued aesthetics and the aesthetics started at the scalp.
There you are.
Representing CANADA. Both partnered pairs and solo. Which means he’s not just on their figure skating roster—he’s their CENTERPIECE. Their dual-event competitor. The man they’re positioning as the face of their program’s Winter Games campaign, which means the Canadian federation didn’t just accept a transfer. They invested. They built around him. They gave him the platform he lost when the US federation informally blacklisted him, and he repaid them by bringing his entire pack.
I scrolled right. The hockey panel.
And the rest of them materialized on the screen with the systematic, one-after-another precision of dominoes falling in a line I’d already predicted would topple. Three names. Three headshots. Three Alpha designations. The members of the Hale Pack who had occupied the periphery of my destruction five years ago—the men who had stood in the coaching zone while I was loaded onto a stretcher, who had participated in the abandonment that followed, who had been part of the machine that Garrison had operated and that had produced my isolation as its primary output.
And at the bottom of the hockey roster, added recently enough that his headshot hadn’t been formatted to match the rest:VOLKOV, Dmitri S.— Alpha. Hockey: Goaltender. Pack: Unaffiliated. Representing: Canada.
The ex-goalie. From our team. Already on their roster. Transferred, processed, and installed in the Canadian program within DAYS of being booted from Ironcrest. The speed of the transition confirming what Luka had hypothesized in the locker room: the recruitment wasn’t opportunistic. It was prearranged. Volkov had been operating as an embedded asset from the beginning—monitoring Kael, cataloging health data, creating internal division—and his “transfer” to Canada wasn’t a departure. It was a RETURN. A completed mission. The operative coming home after the assignment was blown.
I sighed.
Leaned back against the couch. The notepad on my lap was covered in my handwriting—the tight, angular, competition-program-notation script that I’d developed over years of annotating choreography and that was now being deployed for strategic planning purposes that my penmanship instructor had certainly never anticipated.
“Well,” I said, addressing the room at large, “isn’t this iconic.”
