She moved her hand.
Her eyes opened.
Storm gray. Sharp. Alive with an intelligence that bordered on predatory. Those irises found mine with the precision of a heat-seeking missile, and the expression behind them was not the soft, startled surprise of a woman being pleasantly reunited with an old friend. It was the flat, assessing,calculatinggaze of an Omega who had just identified an Alpha in her space and was deciding, in real time, whether he constituted a welcome presence or a threat requiring immediate elimination.
Andfuck, I had to physically restrain myself from looking down.
Because five years had donethingsto Octavia Moreau, and every single one of those things was working aggressively against my ability to maintain blood flow to my higher cognitive functions. Those legs—long, sculpted, built by two decades of skating into weapons of muscular elegance that belonged in an anatomy textbook and a fantasy simultaneously—were stretched along the bench in training leggings that clung to every line with a devotion that bordered on worship. The curves of her hips had settled into a slenderness that was less fragile thanefficient—a body stripped to its purest functional form, all power and precision, no surplus.And I was willing to bet—willing to bet my entire Olympic tryout, my gear bag, and every ounce of professional credibility I’d spent fifteen years accumulating—that beneath those leggings, her ass was still as firm and round as the day it had single-handedly ruined my ability to concentrate during warm-ups.
Her practice top was thin. Damp with sweat. Clinging to the small, round breasts I remembered with a specificity that would have horrified my mother and fascinated my therapist, and the cold—theblessed,merciless,thank-you-Godcold of Rink Four—had done exactly what cold did, and her nipples were pressing against that fabric with the kind of shameless visibility that made my cock strain against the cup of my goalie gear hard enough to be genuinely uncomfortable.
Calm down. Calm the fuck down. You are a professional athlete at an Olympic training facility. You are not a fourteen-year-old who just discovered the internet. Get your blood flow under control before she notices?—
She glared at me.
Oh, right.
She’s furious.
Of course she’s furious. She holds grudges the way tectonic plates hold continents—permanently, structurally, with the occasional devastating earthquake to remind everyone they’re still there.
But she was looking at me. Notthroughme—atme. Her eyes tracked from my face to my shoulders, down the breadth of my chest protector, across the goalie pads strapped to my legs, and back up again with the unhurried, unapologetic thoroughness of a woman conducting an inventory she had no intention of being subtle about.Octavia Moreau had never been ashamed of looking. Never coy, never coquettish, never performed the dainty pretense of disinterest that society told Omegas they were supposed to maintain around Alphas. She looked when she wanted to look, and she didn’t apologize for what her eyes landed on.
Which had always made me feel like a giddy, preening, absolutely pathetic mess. Because Moreau didn’tgiveher attention. Didn’t distribute it generously or scatter it like confetti. She rationed it like a wartime resource, allocating it only to the handful of souls she deemed worthy of occupying her line of sight—and the rest of the world could choke on the scraps.
Getting looked at by Octavia Moreau was not a glance. It was averdict.
She rolled her eyes. A full, committed, orbital rotation that I felt in my chest like a physical impact.
“How the hell,” she said, her voice flat and sharp as a blade edge, “of all the academies on the planet, you’d choose to come to this one.”
Not a question. An accusation.
I leaned against the boards, settled my arms along the top edge of the wall, and gave her the smile. The one I’d been told—by teammates, by coaches’ wives, by one very candid bartender in Saskatoon—softened my face from intimidating to approachable in a way that was apparently “unfair.” Eyes relaxed. Mouth curved. The full arsenal.
“The fates have decided we must reunite,” I said.
The look she gave me could have frozen the already-frozen rink a second time.
“Fuck off.”
She sat up. The motion was fluid despite the obvious exhaustion in her limbs—abdominal strength carrying herupright in one clean, controlled contraction that was pure muscle memory, pure athlete, pureher. Her hair—those cascading waves of royal purple fading into turquoise fading into platinum ends that I’d once spent an embarrassing amount of time describing in my own head—was half escaped from its braid, damp tendrils framing her face in chaotic, beautiful disarray.
I pouted. Not strategically—it was reflexive, instinctive, the expression my face defaulted to when this particular woman told me to go away. A muscle memory of its own.
“Come on, Diamond.” I let the name sit between us. Deliberate. Weighted with five years of distance and every unsaid thing that lived inside it. “Don’t be like that.”
Her storm-gray eyes narrowed to a gauge that would have made a weaker man take a step backward. She didn’t blink.
“Last time I remembered,” she said, her voice carrying the surgical precision of a scalpel being drawn from its sheath, “you ditchedyour diamondin a sea of coal filled with abandonment issues.” She stood. Rose from that bench with the controlled, lethal grace of a woman who had mastered every vertical axis her body could occupy. “So don’t try todiamondme, Petrov.”
Petrov.
She used to call me Luka. She used to whisper it. Now it’s Petrov, delivered like a citation.
Deserved. Entirely, completely, catastrophically deserved.
She was standing now, and I was in immediate, life-threatening trouble.
