“Why do you think they’ll speculate we’re faking the pack?”
I recrossed my legs on the couch. Settled the notepad against my thigh. Crossed my arms. The posture of a woman transitioning from preliminary banter to operational briefing—the specific, composed,you-asked-so-listenconfiguration that I adopted when the subject matter required the room’s full, undivided attention.
“Garrison and his pack are pathologically self-interested,” I began. “Every action they take is filtered through a single question:does this benefit us? Not the sport. Not the competitors.Not the integrity of the Games.Us. Their decisions are transactional. Their loyalty is conditional. Their strategy is built on the assumption that everyone else operates with the same moral flexibility, which makes them both predictable and dangerous—predictable because self-interest follows consistent patterns, dangerous because the patterns include sabotage as a standard tool.”
I looked at them. Four pairs of eyes. Each one carrying a different frequency of attention but all four converging on the same point with the unified, pack-level focus that was becoming, with each meeting, less a novelty and more a configuration my nervous system recognized ascorrect.
“If they took it upon themselves five years ago to orchestrate the destruction of my careerandmy connections with Luka and Kael by ensuring you couldn’t contact me through any available channel, they’re not going to stop now that the stakes are higher. The Winter Games aren’t a federation event. They’re the global stage. The audience is hundreds of millions. The sponsorship implications, the media exposure, the career trajectory that a medal performance produces—the incentive structure for sabotage is exponentially larger than it was at Nationals.”
A breath. The room was still. The four scent signatures holding their ambient positions in the air like instruments sustaining a chord between movements.
“They’ll try again. Different methodology. Different vectors. But the same objective: dismantle the threat. Becausewe area threat.” I held Kael’s gaze specifically. “Your hockey team just secured top seed. My figure skating qualification is the highest score in the Olympia cycle. Luka is performing dual-discipline at a level that makes the athleticestablishment uncomfortable because it challenges the institutional assumption that specialization is the only path to excellence. And the pack itself—assembled in four minutes, surviving a heat, producing a qualifying victory from a three-goal deficit—is a narrative that the media is going to find irresistible.”
“Which means Garrison will notice.” My voice dropped. The briefing register shifting from analytical to personal, the temperature of the words changing as they approached the territory where strategy and emotion intersected. “The moment the opening ceremonies air and the cameras find me on the ice, the narrative from five years ago resurfaces. The fall. The injury. The blood. The announcers will reference it because trauma is content and my trauma is their highest-performing archive footage. And Garrison’s team will push that narrative from behind the scenes—anonymous tips, strategically timed social media activity, leaked ‘insider perspectives’ designed to frame my comeback as unstable, emotional, a liability rather than an asset.”
Renzo’s jaw tightened. The clean-zesty-mint scent sharpening at its peppermint edge—the olfactory indicator that the playboy’s usually relaxed pheromone profile was registering a protective response.
I continued.
“Or—and this is the scenario I consider more likely—he’ll pivot.” My fingers drummed against the notepad. The rhythm unconscious, the body processing the strategic calculation through percussive output while the mouth delivered it. “Garrison is the jealous type. Controlling. The kind of Alpha who doesn’t want a thing until someone else has it, and then wants it desperately. When he sees me performing at Olympic level with a pack he didn’t build andAlphas he can’t manipulate, his instinct won’t be to destroy. It’ll be toreclaim. To ditch whatever Omega he’s parading around as his current partner—who is almost certainly a tactical accessory rather than a genuine bond—and attempt to reinsert himself into my orbit under the guise of reconciliation, nostalgia, or the specific, calculated vulnerability that sociopaths deploy when they want access to someone they’ve already proven they’re willing to harm.”
They nodded. Each one processing the analysis through the filter of their individual experience—Kael through the strategic, captain’s lens; Luka through the protective, goaltender’s read; Maddox through the enforcer’s threat assessment; Renzo through the forward’s instinct for identifying the play before it developed.
“If he makes advances,” I said, “I pretend I’m not fazed. Don’t confront him. Don’t reveal that I know about the letters or the intercepted communications or the deliberate sabotage of the throw. Let him believe the narrative he constructed—that I think the silence was genuine, that I hold the Alphas who didn’t reach me responsible rather than the man who ensured they couldn’t. The ignorance is my armor. The moment he thinks I’m unaware, he underestimates me. And underestimation is the most valuable currency a competitor can hold.”
Renzo raised his hand.
The gesture was earnest, almost academic—the raised-palm, waiting-to-be-called-on posture of a man who had been following the briefing with engaged attention and who had reached the section of the narrative where the required background exceeded his available context.
“If it’s okay,” he said, his voice carrying the specific, respectful,I-recognize-this-is-sensitiveregister that I’d come toassociate with Renzo at his most genuine—the tone beneath the playboy, the one that emerged when the subject matter warranted sincerity rather than charm. “Can the newer members of this pack get the full lore? Because Maddox and I are operating on approximately thirty percent of the available intelligence, and I’d rather strategize with a complete picture than patch the gaps with assumptions.”
Maddox nodded. The enforcer’s near-black eyes moving from me to Kael to Luka with the quiet, thorough,I-have-been-patient-but-the-patience-has-reached-its-productive-limitfocus of a man who had been observing the dynamics between the three of us—the charged glances, the loaded references, the specific, encrypted,we-share-a-history-you-don’t-have-access-tofrequency of our interactions—and who was now, with characteristic directness, requesting the decryption key.
He looked specifically at Kael. His deep voice quiet but carrying the weight of a man whose loyalty had been demonstrated through sprinting across campus in hockey gear and who was now requesting reciprocal trust.
“And what’s this about you being on blockers?”
The room’s ambient tension recalibrated.
Kael’s eyebrow arched—the reflexive,who-told-youelevation that preceded his standard response to unauthorized disclosures about his private medical status. The frosted-pine scent sharpened at its steel edge—not aggressively butdefensively, the pheromone equivalent of a man whose hand had moved to a wall he’d built and was testing its structural integrity before deciding whether to open the door.
Luka frowned. “Who’s spreading that?”
Maddox’s response was measured. Honest. Delivered with the blunt, fact-first, no-packaging directness thatcharacterized every piece of information the enforcer produced. “Heard it in the locker room after the win. Some chatter. The guys shut it down—said it was probably residual bullshit from the ex-goalie’s campaign. But I wanted to bring it directly to the source rather than let it circulate as rumor.”
He’s not confronting. He’s confirming. There’s a difference, and the difference matters—Maddox is offering Kael the opportunity to control the narrative rather than having the narrative controlled for him. That’s pack behavior. Real pack behavior. The kind that says: I heard a thing about you, and instead of speculating behind your back, I’m standing in front of your face and asking you to tell me whether it’s true.
Kael huffed.
Then he walked to the couch.
The movement was decisive in the way that his movements were always decisive—a captain’s stride, carrying the specific,I-have-made-a-determinationenergy that preceded every significant action he took on the ice and that he was now bringing to the considerably more vulnerable context of sitting on a couch in an Omega’s dorm room beside the woman whose hand he was about to feel on his leg.
He sat beside me. My right side. The couch groaning beneath the addition of two hundred and twenty pounds of Alpha, the cushions compressing, the proximity bringing his frosted-pine scent into my immediate airspace with the concentrated, intimate,I-am-choosing-to-be-next-to-youdirectness that I recognized as a statement rather than a convenience.
He didn’t look comfortable.
The jaw was tight. The arms recrossed. The posture rigid with the specific, preparing-for-impact stiffness of a manabout to disclose information he’d been guarding for years to people he was learning to trust in real time.
