“The audience will wonder if we’re faking it for the cameras. That’s the reaction wewant. The speculation generates coverage. The coverage generates visibility. The visibility generates public favor. And public favor is the armor that Garrison can’t penetrate—because an audience that’sinvested in your love story is an audience that will defend you when the villain tries to rewrite the narrative.”
Maddox was nodding. The motion slow, considered, carrying the enforcer’s specific,I-have-evaluated-the-structural-integrity-and-it-holdsapproval.
“That’s actually brilliant,” he said. His cedar-and-embers voice grounding the assessment in the practical, operational vocabulary that his position on the ice demanded. “The training camp produces the performance. The performance validates the pack. The pack’s public visibility generates the narrative. And the narrative creates a protective layer that makes external sabotage visible rather than hidden. If Garrison tries to undermine us once the audience is invested, the audience becomes the witness.”
“Exactly.” I grinned. “Smart psychology. The kind that uses the system’s own machinery against the people trying to manipulate it.”
I felt a weight on my shoulder.
Warm. Heavy. The specific, full-skull, surrendered-to-gravity pressure of a head that had stopped holding itself upright and had found the nearest stable surface to rest against—which happened to be the curve of my shoulder, and which happened to belong to Kael Sørensen.
I looked down.
He was asleep.
Not dozing. Not the half-conscious, I’m-still-listening approximation of rest that men produced during meetings they found tedious.Asleep. Fully, genuinely, completely out—the platinum-blonde head resting against my shoulder with the trusting, boneless weight of a man whose body had been denied rest for four consecutive days and whose nervous system, upon being provided with the combination ofOmega proximity, disclosed secrets, and the specific, post-crisis relief of a man who had finally said the things he’d been carrying, had simply…shut down. The composure offline. The vigilance suspended. The captain surrendered to the most basic biological need he’d been denying himself since the night Octavia’s scent had first drifted through his ventilation system.
His frosted-pine scent had settled to its lowest, warmest register. The cold steel receded. The aged whiskey dominant—the warm, patient, deep-barrel note that lived beneath the permafrost and that I’d only encountered at this concentration in the dark, in the quiet, in the specific, enclosed, four-walls spaces where Kael permitted the man beneath the captain to exist.
He’s sleeping on my shoulder. In front of his pack. In my dorm room. With the door closed and his secrets on the table and his medication status disclosed and his panic attack acknowledged.
That’s more vulnerability than this man has displayed in the combined total of every interaction I’ve witnessed since he arrived at Olympia Academy.
Luka whistled. Low. Quiet. The sound carrying genuine, undisguised surprise. “Damn. That’s the first time he’s napped.”
Renzo nodded. The expression on his face carrying the specific, soft,I-didn’t-know-he-had-this-in-himrecognition of a man observing a version of his captain he’d never been permitted to see.
Maddox spoke. His deep voice carrying the analytical, caretaker’s assessment that the enforcer brought to every observation about his pack’s wellbeing. “He’s probably relieved. To actually say his piece. After being judged by so many—or specifically, after worrying thatwewould judgehim. Holding information back from the people you’re supposed to trust is its own kind of exhaustion. The kind that sleep deprivation and pharmaceutical management can’t address, because the fatigue isn’t physical. It’s structural. The weight of the secret compresses everything else.”
Renzo murmured agreement. “We didn’t judge him. We supported him either way—the hockey, the captaincy, the pack decisions. But maybe the weight of what he was withholding was heavier than the weight of what we’d have thought if he’d told us. And now that the weight’s been set down…” He looked at Kael’s sleeping profile. “His body’s collecting the debt.”
Luka nodded slowly. His green eyes on Kael’s head resting against my shoulder, and the expression on his face was layered—protective, tender, carrying the specific, complicated,I-have-loved-this-man-in-a-way-I-couldn’t-name-and-I’m-only-now-beginning-to-accept-itweight that their dynamic had been accumulating since a hotel room in Stockholm and that the events of this week had finally given permission to exist in the open.
“Well,” Luka said, and his voice carried the warm, resolved,this-is-settledtone of a man who had arrived at a conclusion and was announcing it to the room with the quiet authority of someone who expected agreement because the conclusion was correct. “Now we don’t need to hide a thing. Not from each other. Not from the world. We prove that we’re not just a pack but future Olympic winners. We get our revenge. And we enjoy every second of the process.”
His green eyes found mine.
“Right, Diamond?”
I smirked.
Took a breath. Nervous. The kind that preceded commitments rather than performances—the inhale that a body produced when the mind was about to authorize a decision that the heart had already made and that the strategic brain had validated and that the only remaining variable was the voice that would make it real.
I looked at Kael’s sleeping face on my shoulder. The platinum-blonde lashes resting against cheeks that had regained their color. The jaw finally,finallyunclenched. The expression carrying a peace I hadn’t seen on this man’s features in…ever. Not in the years we’d been together. Not in the brief, bright window when things between us were good. This was new. This was the face of a man who had set down the weight and discovered that the ground beneath him was solid enough to stand on without it.
Sixty letters.
Written by hand. On cream-colored stationery. One every two days. Four months of a man sitting at his kitchen table with a pen, learning to practice vulnerability on paper because he couldn’t do it in person. Apologizing. Confessing. Offering the specific, agonizing, self-excavating honesty that his composure wouldn’t permit his mouth to produce.
And not one of them reached me.
Because a man who should have been my partner decided that my isolation was more valuable than my recovery, and the people who were trying to reach me were rerouted by a gatekeeper whose cruelty was indistinguishable from efficiency.
We deserve the payback.
For the letters. For the hospital room. For the blood on the ice and the silence that followed and the five years of distance that was manufactured rather than chosen destiny.
We deserve the glory.
