She grinned. Squeezed my hand once more.
Then the arena’s speaker system crackled—the brief, electronic tone that every competitive figure skater recognized at the autonomic level and that produced the specific, breath-held, stomach-dropping sensation of a human being confronting the moment where preparation met verdict.
The announcer’s voice began. My hand in hers. Her hand in mine. Our fingers interlaced on the kiss-and-cry bench, surrounded by roses that had been thrown and cameras that were rolling and hundreds of people whose attention was focused on a scoreboard about to illuminate with the numbers that would tell us whether the girl who bled on the ice and the goaltender who learned to fly had done enough.
We held our breaths in wait, as the announcer was about to reveal the scoreboard.
CHAPTER 34
Gold
~OCTAVIA~
“They tried to bury her.They forgot she was a seed.”
One hundred and sixty point four.
The number materialized on the scoreboard with the cold, digital, mathematically indifferent precision of a system that did not understand what it was quantifying and that delivered the data with the same neutral efficiency it would have applied to a utility bill or a weather forecast. Six digits. A decimal point. The segment score that the judging panel had assigned to the four and a half minutes of athletic, emotional, and existential output that Luka and I had just deposited on Olympic ice, translated from artistry into arithmetic by six officials whose job was to reduce the unreducible to numbers.
One hundred and sixty point four.
Combined with our short program score from the previous day’s segment, the total climbed to two hundred and thirty-five point five five.
Two hundred and thirty-five point five five.
My jaw dropped.
Not figuratively. Not the metaphorical, oh-how-surprising variety that people invoked in casual conversation when the surprise was moderate and the jaw remained firmly in its anatomical position. My mandible physically descended. The masseter muscles releasing their habitual clench for the first time in approximately four and a half minutes, the joint hinge opening to its maximum comfortable range, and the mouth producing the specific, wide, airway-exposing configuration of a woman whose cognitive system had just received numerical confirmation that the thing she’d spent twenty years pursuing and five years being told was impossible had just been achieved on the largest stage competitive figure skating offered.
Gold.
Gold. The word cycling through my awareness like a skater cycling through a spin—each rotation revealing a new facet, each pass adding depth and speed and centrifugal force until the word occupied not just a thought but an entire neural territory, displacing the anxiety and the anticipation and the breath-held, stomach-dropped, scoreboard-dependent suspended animation of the last ninety seconds and replacing it with a single, comprehensive, every-system-engaged reality: we won.
Luka was already losing it.
The composure—the goaltender’s controlled, read-the-play, measured-response exterior that he maintained in every public context with the disciplined, professional consistency of a man whose job required him to remain calm while objects traveled toward his face at ninety miles per hour—disintegrated. Completely. The green eyes went wide. The mouth opened. A sound emerged that was less languageand more pure, undiluted, designation-level Alpha elation—a whoop that echoed off the kiss-and-cry area’s enclosure and reached the crowd, who responded in kind with a roar that confirmed the scoreboard’s verdict with hundreds of voices of corroboration.
He picked me up.
Off the bench. Off my feet. His arms wrapping around my waist and lifting with the explosive, goaltender’s upper-body strength that I’d relied on during every lift in the program and that was now being deployed for the considerably less choreographed but equally committed purpose of getting the woman he loved as far off the ground as physics and joy would permit.
“You won GOLD.” His voice was rough. Raw. Cracking at its edges with the specific, trying-not-to-cry, emotion-exceeding-vocal-capacity quality that I’d heard from him exactly once before—in the corridor outside the locker room, after the qualifying match, when two Alphas had stood in their gear and breathed and said nothing because the silence carried more data than words. Except now the silence was gone. Replaced by a man whose mouth was operating at full, unrestricted, joy-fueled output. “Gold, Diamond. You won GOLD.”
I blinked. The tears that had been accumulating behind the competition-trained, cameras-are-watching, do-not-cry-in-high-definition discipline finally breaching the containment. One. Two. Running parallel tracks down my flushed cheeks, carrying mascara and the residual peachy-orange blush and approximately twenty years of compressed, accumulated, I-have-been-waiting-for-this-since-Montreal emotion that the scoreboard’s six digits had finallygiven permission to exit.
“Wait—” I managed, my voice thick, my arms still locked around his neck from the lift that had become an embrace. “WE won. Not just me. We.”
Then I squealed.
The sound was involuntary. High-pitched. Carrying the specific, unfiltered, Octaviana-grade, every-filter-has-been-removed frequency that I produced approximately once per decade and that Candy would have recorded for blackmail purposes had she been present instead of somewhere in the stands losing her gymnast’s mind. I hugged him. Tightly. The embrace carrying the full, compressive, I-am-squeezing-the-joy-into-your-body force of a woman whose arms were strong from twenty years of skating and whose current emotional state had converted that strength into a grip that Luka’s ribs would remember.
The arena was buzzing. The sustained, collective, hundred person hum of an audience that had just witnessed a score confirmation and was now processing the emotional aftermath through the available channels: cheering, applauding, the rhythmic, synchronized clapping that crowds generated spontaneously when the moment exceeded individual expression and required collective participation. The sound wrapped around us like a living thing—warm, vast, carrying the specific, we-are-happy-for-you frequency that distinguished genuine audience investment from polite acknowledgment.
They ushered us back to the ice. The medals ceremony—the formal, protocol-governed, IOC-administered ritual that transformed athletic achievement into tangible, wearable, photograph-ready hardware. The volunteers in their Olympic uniforms guiding us toward the podium that had been assembled at center ice with the efficient, practicedspeed of a crew that performed this setup multiple times per competition day.
And then I saw him.
Garrison.
