The gold. The ice.
The sound of an audience holding its breath while I hold a spiral for six seconds on a single edge, and the world watches Octavia Moreau prove that the girl who bled on the ice at Nationals is not a cautionary tale but a comeback story whose final chapter hasn’t been written yet.
And it was time to experience what sweet revenge feels like.
CHAPTER 31
Knot On Our Pucking Watch
~OCTAVIA~
“The torch doesn’t light itself.It waits for someone brave enough to carry it.”
The stadium was a living thing.
Sixty-two thousand people occupying tiered seating that ascended from the arena floor to the upper decks in a vast, curving, architecturally ambitious bowl whose dimensions I’d studied on paper and whose reality exceeded the blueprints by a magnitude that no schematic could convey. The sound alone was a physical phenomenon—not noise butpressure. The sustained, composite, sixty-two-thousand-voice hum of a crowd that was simultaneously chatting, cheering, gasping at the pyrotechnic displays detonating above the arena’s retractable roof, and generating the specific, kinetic, every-seat-vibrating energy that only gathered when the event they’d paid and traveled and queued for was about to begin.
TheWinter Olympic Games.
The words had existed in my vocabulary since I was four years old and my father had lifted me onto his shoulders in a crowded sports bar in Montreal so I could watch the opening ceremony on a television mounted above the draft taps. I’d watched the athletes walk behind their flags with the wide-eyed, breath-held reverence of a child witnessing a procession she didn’t fully understand but felt, instinctively, was sacred. The uniforms. The tears. The specific, impossible,I-am-here-and-the-world-is-watchingexpression on the faces of competitors who had spent their lives earning the right to occupy that particular piece of ground at that particular moment.
And now I am one of them.
I was walking behind the flag.
The American delegation moved through the stadium’s entrance tunnel in a formation that was less a march and more a controlled, camera-aware, trying-not-to-trip-on-the-person-ahead procession. The flag bearer was a speed skater—a Beta woman whose four-time medal count had earned her the honor and whose upper-body strength made the standard’s weight look negligible in her grip. The rest of us followed in approximate rows of four, the organizational precision loosened by the reality that athletes who had spent six weeks in the tunnel vision of training camp were now being released into a sensory environment that exceeded most of their neural bandwidth.
The official Olympic uniforms were fitted. Crisp. Navy-and-white, the USA designation embroidered across the chest in silver thread that caught the stadium’s lighting system and scattered it in fragments with every step. The jacket was structured—tailored to accommodate athletic frames without the shapeless, one-size-disguises-allcompromise that previous Olympic cycles had produced and that had prompted social media campaigns comparing national delegations’ uniforms to everything from business casual to pajamas. This cycle’s designer had understood the assignment: make the athletes look like the apex competitors they were, and make the world want to wear what they were wearing.
The arena’s scent landscape was overwhelming.
Sixty-two thousand bodies. Alphas, Betas, Omegas—the full designation spectrum represented in the stands and on the arena floor, each person contributing their individual pheromone signature to a collective olfactory output that was less a tapestry and more anocean. Vast, depthless, carrying currents and undercurrents that my amplified Omega nose was attempting to process with the dedicated, category-by-category thoroughness that it brought to every scent environment and that this particular environment was aggressively defeating. The volume was too high. The density too thick. My receptors were running at maximum bandwidth and producing, instead of the neat, separated,this-note-belongs-to-that-sourceanalysis I normally achieved, a blurred, composite,everything-at-onceinput that was approximately as useful as trying to identify individual raindrops in a monsoon.
But through the monsoon—threading through the sixty-two-thousand-person olfactory cacophony with the specific, unmistakable,I-will-always-find-youcertainty that pack-bonded scent chemistry produced in close proximity—I could detect them.
Frosted pine. Rain-soaked stone. Dark cedar. Clean zesty mint.
My four. Walking in the rows behind me. Kael and Lukain the line immediately adjacent—their broader, hockey-built frames occupying approximately one and a half person’s worth of lateral space each and drawing the camera operators’ attention with the reliable, photogenic magnetism that two men who radiated that volume of unresolved tension produced in any visual medium. Maddox and Renzo in the row behind them—the enforcer’s towering silhouette and the forward’s vivid green hair creating a visual contrast that the broadcast coverage would undoubtedly feature in their evening highlights package.
The stadium’s speaker system carried the broadcast commentary to every corner of the arena—the dual-host format that the IOC had adopted for this cycle, featuring an Alpha male anchor and, for the first time in the Winter Games’ broadcast history, an Omega female co-anchor. Their voices echoed through the space with the polished, high-production-value clarity of professionals whose job was to transform athletic competition into narrative spectacle.
The Alpha host’s voice carried the warm, baritone, stadium-filling authority that broadcast networks selected for: rich, composed, carrying the specific,trust-me-I’ve-been-doing-this-for-decadesgravitas that audiences associated with credibility and that sponsors associated with advertising revenue.
“The last six weeks have seen these athletes push through training sessions that would have broken lesser competitors,” he declared, the sentence layered over footage that the arena’s jumbotrons were displaying in synchronized, high-definition splendor—montages of training camps, ice sessions, the grueling, relentless, six-days-a-week grind thathad consumed every participating nation’s delegation and that the broadcast was now compressing into inspirational highlight packages set to stirring orchestral arrangements. “This is the peak moment. The culmination of years of sacrifice and months of preparation. And the energy in this stadium tells you everything you need to know about what’s at stake.”
The Omega co-anchor’s response was immediate, her voice carrying the bright, incisive,I-am-here-because-I-earned-this-seatenergy of a woman whose presence in the broadcast booth represented a first in the Games’ history and who was treating that milestone as a platform rather than a pedestal. Her commentary was sharper than her co-anchor’s—more analytical, less reverential, carrying the specific, insider’s-perspective authority of someone who understood designation dynamics from lived experience rather than institutional observation.
“This is a significant year for designation representation,” she said, and the statement was delivered with the factual,this-matters-and-I’m-going-to-tell-you-whydirectness that I immediately appreciated. “The integration of Alpha and Omega athletes into a unified competitive framework at this level is unprecedented. The IOC’s decision to formalize pack affiliation requirements, to acknowledge designation dynamics as a component of athletic performance rather than a distraction from it, represents a shift in institutional philosophy that will define the trajectory of the Games for decades.”
The Alpha anchor agreed with the measured, genuinely-engaged enthusiasm of a man whose decades of experience had given him the context to recognize the significance. “Itreally is an honor to witness. The growth is visible not just in policy but in participation. And the public eye has been fixed particularly on the Olympia Academy contingent—especially the USA hockey team and their selected figure skaters.”
The Omega co-anchor picked up the thread. “Social media has beenconsumedwith this story for weeks. Because not only is Luka Petrov—the charming, impossibly popular goaltender of the USA’s Ironcrest hockey line—participating in the hockey competition, he’salsocompeting in the partnered figure skating event with Octavia Moreau.”
My name. On a broadcast. In a stadium of sixty-two thousand. To an audience of hundreds of millions watching from screens in every time zone on the planet.
Don’t trip. Don’t trip. Don’t trip.
“And if you’re not familiar with Moreau’s story,” the Omega continued, her voice dropping a register into the specific, respectful,I-am-handling-this-topic-with-carefrequency that broadcasters adopted when the subject matter carried weight, “she previously qualified for Nationals five years ago before suffering a devastating accident during competition—a throw gone wrong that resulted in a career-threatening knee injury that sidelined her for months of intensive rehabilitation. Her return to competitive skating at this level is, by any measurement, remarkable.”
