Fantastic. Really encouraging. Great foundation for the redemption arc, Petrov.
The scent trail led to Rink Four.
I’d already changed into my practice gear—goalie pads strapped, chest protector fitted, skates laced with the meticulous tension I’d been drilling since my first peewee league in Newfoundland. The original plan had been Rink One for solo crease work before the rest of the roster arrived. Lateral shuffles. Butterfly drops. The T-push transitions and post-integration sequences that formed the skeletal framework of modern goaltending. Simple, solitary, focused.
Instead, I was following an Omega’s scent through the training complex like a bloodhound who’d abandoned hishandler and bolted into the woods after a trail he had no business pursuing.
Dignified. Very dignified, Petrov. The Olympic selection committee would be proud.
The corridor leading to Rink Four was empty. The facility lights were dimmed to their half-power setting—the energy-conservation mode the academy employed when a rink wasn’t officially scheduled for use. The air grew colder as I approached the entrance, the temperature dropping by perceptible degrees with each step, and beneath the standard institutional scent of chilled concrete and refrigerant, her aroma intensified.
It saturated the atmosphere of the smaller rink like perfume trapped in a closed room. Rich. Warm. Layered with a sweetness that had an almost narcotic quality—the kind of scent that didn’t just attract butheld. Gripped. Wrapped around the Alpha receptors at the base of my brain andsqueezedwith a possessiveness that should have belonged to me, not to her.
My heart was hammering. Not the controlled, athletic percussion of exertion—the wild, arrhythmic kick of a man standing on the edge of a conversation he’d been avoiding for half a decade. This would be the first time we’d occupied the same room in actual, countable,years. The distance between us hadn’t been measured in miles but in cowardice, and now the gap was closing whether I was ready or not.
A frown pulled at my mouth. Heavy. Weighted with the kind of disappointment that was directed inward rather than out—the specific, corrosive breed of self-contempt reserved for people who knew they’d failed someone and couldn’t point to a single external factor to blame. She was in there. In Rink Four. Training alone, from the strength of the scenttrail. No entourage. No training partner. No pack of friends or support staff or admirers flanking her the way there’d always been before.
That detail nagged at me. Octavia Moreau was a gravitational force. In every context I’d ever witnessed her—competitions, training camps, the brief, incandescent months we’d spent in each other’s orbit—she’d been surrounded. Not because she sought attention, but because sheemanatedit. People orbited her. Coaches deferred to her. Fellow athletes watched her train the way physics students watched demonstrations—with the quiet, awed recognition that they were witnessing principles made physical. She was a leader without a title, a center without a constellation, and the idea that Olympia Academy had somehow stripped that from her?—
Or that the trauma had.
The thought landed like a slap.
What did you expect, Petrov? You left. Her partner destroyed her. The people who were supposed to be her foundation crumbled like wet sand, and you were one of them. You don’t get to be surprised that she’s alone. You contributed to the blueprint.
I pushed through the entrance and stepped into Rink Four.
The cold wrapped around me immediately—familiar, biting, carrying the clean mineral scent of fresh ice beneath the overwhelming, intoxicating layer ofher. The rink was small by competition standards. No stadium seating, no scoreboard, no announcer’s booth. Overhead fluorescents cast a flat, industrial glow across a sheet of ice that was scarred with blade marks—loops and spirals and the precise, geometric traces of a figure skater who’d been drilling edges and footwork sequences with the kind ofobsessive repetition that separated Olympians from enthusiasts.
She’d been working.Hard. The depth of the blade marks told the story—the deeper the tracing, the greater the force, and some of these cuts were carved with enough pressure to suggest that whoever had made them was channeling considerably more than choreography.
I skated out onto the ice. My blades were hockey blades—flatter, wider, designed for rapid lateral movement and explosive stops rather than the precision edge work of a figure skater—and they cut a different sound into the surface. Heavier. More percussive. Theshk-shk-shkof a goaltender’s stride versus the silk-whisper of a skater’s glide, and I was hyperaware of the contrast as I moved deeper into the rink.
Her scent grew stronger with every stride. Thicker. More dimensional. It was doing things to the underside of my brain that would have embarrassed a first-year biology student—triggering cascades of dopamine and oxytocin and the low, persistent throb of arousal that pooled in my abdomen and made my gear feel approximately three sizes too tight in the crotch.
Focus, Petrov. Focus on literally anything other than?—
I rounded the curve of the boards, and there she was.
Lying on the players’ bench. One hand draped across her face, fingers spread, obscuring everything from her brows to the bridge of her nose. Her body was completely, unnervingly still—the kind of motionless that existed on the knife’s edge between relaxation and collapse, and from this angle, from this distance, I couldn’t immediately determine which.
Relief flooded me first. Warm, instantaneous, involuntary.She’s here. She’s real. She’s not a hallucination manufacturedby caffeine and guilt and five years of compounding regret.Her chest rose and fell in slow, measured intervals, and I locked onto that rhythm the way I locked onto the puck during a penalty kill—tracking it, reading it, letting it tell me the story that her covered face couldn’t.
And then the concern arrived. Swift, sharp, displacing the relief like a wave overtaking a smaller one. She wastoostill. The hand across her eyes wasn’t casual—it was pressed there with force, the knuckles blanched, as if she were holding back the light or holdinginsomething she didn’t want to escape. Her breathing, though steady, had a deliberateness to it that I recognized. Counted breathing. Clinical. The rhythm of someone actively managing their nervous system rather than resting comfortably within it.
Is she hurt? Is it the knee? Is the dizziness back—does she still get the dizziness? Fuck, I don’t even know if she still gets the dizziness because I haven’t been around to know anything about her recovery because I’m a worthless, spineless?—
Don’t panic. Don’t rush in. If she’s managing a dizzy spell, startling her will make it worse. Be normal. Say something normal. Say something that doesn’t immediately broadcast the fact that your heart is performing a drum solo against your ribs and your palms are sweating inside your gloves.
My mouth opened. My brain, in an act of self-sabotage that I would reflect on with exquisite regret for years to come, chose the first words it found.
“Should I assume my diamond is dying, or are you taking those power naps again?”
Diamond.
That’s what she’d always been. Not a gemstone in the decorative, ornamental sense—not the kind you set in a ring and displayed under glass. A diamond in the geologicalsense. Forged under pressure. Composed of the same element as everything else around her but arranged with a structure so fundamentally different that it became the hardest substance in the room. In a sea of coal—raw, unrefined, indistinguishable—she was the one that had crystallized into something that could cut through anything.
Five years of silence, and that hadn’t changed. Not by a single degree.
