And I am going to make sure Garrison and his damn pack will have no choice but to witness me shine.
CHAPTER 32
Shine Like A Diamond
~OCTAVIA~
“The costume is the armor.The letters were theweapon. The ice was the battlefield.”
“Damn. We can’t even survive twenty-four hours before a potential scandal?”
Coach Foxwood delivered this assessment with one eyebrow raised and both arms crossed, her posture radiating the specific, compressed,I-have-managed-athletes-for-two-decades-and-THIS-is-what-I’m-dealing-withenergy that had become her signature communication mode in the six weeks I’d trained under her and that I had learned to interpret as simultaneously exasperated and fond. The exasperation was genuine. The fondness was structural—buried beneath the stern exterior like rebar in concrete, invisible but load-bearing.
She was standing in the doorway of the competitors’ preparation room—a narrow, mirror-lined, fluorescent-lit space backstage at the Olympic arena that had been designated as the USA figure skating delegation’spersonal staging area. The room smelled of hairspray, competition-grade setting powder, and the mingled, anxiety-laced pheromone output of approximately eight athletes in various stages of pre-performance preparation. Foxwood’s own scent cut through the ambient cocktail with the clean, authoritative, ginger-and-black-pepper Omega signature that I’d come to associate with directives that were nonnegotiable and feedback that was delivered without diplomatic packaging.
I groaned.
The sound was reflexive, defensive, and produced from a seated position at the lighted vanity mirror where the costume designer had just completed the final adjustments to the outfit that was going to carry me onto Olympic ice for the first time in my life.
The costume was a statement.
Not in the subtle, understated, let-the-skating-speak-for-itself way that conservative coaches preferred and that I had been ignoring since my first junior competition. This was adeclaration. A golden leotard whose base color transitioned from pure, liquid gold at the neckline into a warm, sunset-orange ombré that deepened toward the hem—the gradient catching the preparation room’s fluorescent lights and scattering them in warm, amber-toned fragments that made the fabric appear less like textile and more like molten metal that had been poured onto a body and allowed to solidify in the shape of the woman wearing it. The bodice was encrusted with crystals—Swarovski, hand-applied, each one positioned by the costume designer with the obsessive precision of someone who understood that competition lighting transformed individual stones into a collective radiance that could be seen from the upper decks of an Olympic arena. The skirt was short—performance-standard, permitting fullrange of motion for jumps and spins while displaying the muscular, twenty-years-of-skating legs that the training had built and that the costume’s designer had chosen to feature rather than obscure.
My hair was pulled into a high ponytail—tight, sleek, secured with enough pins and elastic to withstand the centrifugal forces of competition-speed spins. The purple-to-turquoise-to-platinum gradient cascaded from the elastic in a waterfall of color that would catch the arena’s lighting during rotations and create a chromatic trail—a visual signature that distinguished my silhouette from every other skater on the roster and that I’d maintained through years of federation pushback because the colors weremine, and the identity they represented was not negotiable.
The makeup was intentional. Peachy-orange lips—warm, complementing the costume’s sunset gradient, applied with the specific, camera-aware precision that competition makeup demanded because the audience included judges at thirty feet AND cameras at two hundred feet AND screens at infinite distance, and the pigment needed to perform at every scale. The YSL blush—peach-toned, high-quality, applied to the cheekbones in the specific, angled, light-catching configuration that my aesthetician had developed for arena conditions and that produced the warm, healthy,glowingcomplexion that the cameras loved and that I deployed with the same strategic intentionality I brought to every element of my competitive presentation.
And the skates.
The skates.
These were not the Burlington pair. Not the cream-leather, gold-bladed, Kael-bought competition boots that I’d been wearing since the audition and that carried five years ofemotional weight in their lacing. These werenew. Custom-built for the Games. White leather, competition-grade, fitted by the same specialist in Toronto who’d built every pair I’d owned since sixteen—but decorated, transformed,bedazzledby the hands of Candice Hollister Holmes, whose craft skills extended far beyond gymnastics and into the specific, detailed, Instagram-worthy realm of rhinestone application that she approached with the same precision she brought to a Yurchenko double pike.
Candy had wanted my first partnered Olympic performance to be the most talked-about visual event of the opening competition day, and she’d addressed this desire by spending forty-seven hours—I’d timed it, because the woman had been sitting cross-legged on our dorm floor with tweezers and adhesive for the better part of two days—applying individual crystals to the boot leather in a pattern that cascaded from the ankles to the heel in a gradient that matched the costume’s golden-to-sunset transition. The result was a pair of skates that looked less like athletic equipment and more like artifacts from a collection whose curator had decided that function and fantasy were not mutually exclusive.
The sparkle-glamour department delivered. No question. If the performance itself is half as visually arresting as this outfit, the cameras won’t know where to focus.
I was nervous.
And excited. And nauseous. And buzzing with the specific, full-body,every-nerve-ending-is-liveenergy that preceded competition performances and that I’d been managing since my first juvenile-level event at twelve years old. The nervousness was standard. Expected. The biochemical reality of a body preparing to perform under conditionsof maximum pressure, maximum visibility, and maximum consequence. What wasnotstandard was the additional layer of anxiety being contributed by the conversation I was currently having with my coach about photographs that had apparently been taken approximately nine hours ago and that were now circulating on platforms I’d been banned from accessing.
“Getting caught sitting on Luka’s lap while being kissed by Kael, and Luka simultaneously kissing my neck,” I said, deploying the specific, detailed,let-me-describe-the-scene-to-demonstrate-how-normal-it-wasdefense strategy that I’d developed over six weeks of pack-related PR management, “isnota scandal.” I looked at Foxwood pleadingly. “We’re a pack! Everyone and their auntie knows we fu?—”
Her eyebrow climbed a millimeter.
“—puck,” I corrected, the substitution arriving with the specific, self-censoring,I-know-what-word-she’ll-accept-and-I’m-choosing-the-path-of-minimal-resistanceprecision that six weeks under Foxwood’s coaching had trained into my vocabulary. “Happy?”
She rolled her eyes. The gesture was brief, professional—approximately forty percent of the orbital commitment that my own eye-rolls achieved, but carrying twice the authority because it came from a woman whose emotional range operated within the narrow band between stern and sterner and whose eye-rolls functioned as official reprimands rather than casual expressions of exasperation.
She pinched the bridge of her nose. The universal, cross-cultural, cross-designation gesture of a human being managing a situation that required patience they hadn’t budgeted for.
“I’ll try to manage the paparazzi.”
I laughed. The sound carrying the genuine, startled,you-cannot-be-seriousdisbelief of a woman who had spent her entire athletic career navigating competitions with media coverage measured in single-camera crews and regional newspaper reporters.
“There’s no way there’s paparazzi for little old me.”
Foxwood’s expression told me, in the efficient, no-words-needed language of a coach whose face communicated faster than her mouth, that my assessment was incorrect.
