I bit my bottom lip hard enough to feel the pressure through the fog of pheromones and arousal andfucking regretthat was currently occupying every available cubic inch ofmy skull, becauseGod—God—my girl was hotter than five years ago. Not incrementally. Not subtly. Exponentially. The intervening years had taken the raw, electric beauty I remembered and refined it into a weapon so devastating that the Geneva Convention should have had something to say about it.
The sharp cheekbones. The golden-warm skin that caught the fluorescent light and made it look intentional. The storm-gray eyes that held more intelligence per square centimeter than most people housed in their entire frontal lobe. The way she carried herself—not performing confidence butbeingit, inhabiting it, wearing it like a second skeleton.
Fucking hell. I am doomed.
No Omega had attracted me like this since. Not truly. There’d been others—warm bodies during rut cycles, pleasant enough encounters that served the biological function and left the emotional register entirely untouched. Sex as maintenance. Release as logistics. The Alpha equivalent of changing the oil: necessary, periodic, and profoundly devoid of meaning. I could perform the mechanics of intimacy without investing a single authentic synapse, and I had, repeatedly, for five years, because the only Omega who’d ever made the mechanics feel likemorethan maintenance was currently standing six feet away from me looking like she wanted to feed me my own goalie stick.
Commitment like what I had with her—and failed to maintain, obviously, spectacularly, unforgivably—hasn’t existed since. Hasn’t even come close. Hasn’t knocked on the door or left a voicemail. It’s just been... absence. Shaped like her.
She stepped onto the ice.
I followed. Immediately. Automatically. The same way acompass needle follows north—not because it decides to, but because the physics of its construction leave it no alternative. She pushed off from the boards with the effortless economy of a skater whose blades were an extension of her nervous system, and I trailed her, matching her glide with the heavier, less elegant strides of a goaltender whose skates were built for defense rather than artistry.
And I looked.
I looked at exactly what I shouldn’t have been looking at, with exactly the kind of focus that a professional athlete at an Olympic training facility should not have been directing at an Omega’s backside. Her training leggings were black. They were fitted. And they were doing their job with a level of commitment to detail that deserved some kind of industry award, because the view from this angle was?—
She turned around.
Caught.
Red-handed. Red-faced. Red-everything.
Her mouth curved. Not a full smile—she wasn’t giving methatyet—but a smirk. A sharp, knowing, devastatingly amused little smirk that saidI felt your eyes on my ass from twelve feet away, and I turned around specifically to confirm it.
“Still an ass boy, huh?”
A groan—deep, guttural, the sound of a man whose dignity had been measured, weighed, and found wanting—escaped my throat. “Let me at least feast my eyes for five fucking seconds,” I said, because apparently my mouth had decided that if my pride was going down, it might as well go down swinging.
She laughed.
The sound split the cold air of Rink Four like a crack in a frozen lake—sudden, bright, unexpectedly warm. A reallaugh. Not performed, not grudging. The genuine, startled kind that escaped before the person laughing had a chance to decide whether they wanted to permit it. It lasted maybe two seconds, and she killed it with a shake of her head, those turquoise-tipped tendrils swaying with the motion, but it had happened. I’d heard it. And the sound burrowed into my chest and set up permanent residence in a chamber that had been empty for half a decade.
“I doubt my partner is going to show,” she said, the amusement fading from her voice as quickly as it had arrived, replaced by something flatter. Resigned. I’m wondering if she’s telling me the truth or trying to get as far away from me, aka her “ex” as possible. “So I’m going to head out. You can stare at the drywall.”
My eyebrow arched.
“Garrison came with you to Olympia Academy?”
She came to a stop.
Not a gradual deceleration—a stall. A full, immediate cessation of motion that read less like a skating maneuver and more like a circuit breaker tripping. Her arms crossed over her chest, pressing the thin, sweat-damp fabric of her top against her body in a way that simultaneously shielded the very prominent evidence of the rink’s temperature and amplified it, because the compression only made the contours more visible, and I was going to need to invest in a thicker cup if this conversation continued for another thirty seconds.
Don’t look at her chest. Don’t look at her chest. Maintain eye contact like a civilized human being who respects women and values consent and isn’t currently losing a battle with his own peripheral vision?—
“Garrison isn’t my partner anymore.”
Her voice was level. Flat. The emotional equivalent of a whiteout on a blank page—no inflection, no tremor, no crack in the foundation to suggest that the sentence carried any weight at all. Which meant it carriedenormousweight. I’d known her long enough to understand that Octavia Moreau’s emotional landscape operated on an inverse scale: the flatter the delivery, the deeper the wound beneath it.
My frown was immediate. Instinctive. “Good riddance,” I said, and meant every syllable. “He was an asshole.” A pause. The analytical sector of my brain—the part that hadn’t been hijacked by her scent and her legs and the catastrophic nostalgia of standing on the same ice as her—caught up. “But don’t you need a partner for the pairs division you’re applying in?”
Silence.
The kind of silence that wasn’t empty but full—pressurized, loaded, containing everything she wasn’t saying in a container that was visibly straining at the seams. Her jaw tightened. Her eyes, those storm-gray weapons, held mine for a beat that lasted approximately seven centuries.
Then she skated backward. A smooth, controlled,backwardsglide that was both a departure and a statement—because Octavia Moreau did not retreat. Shechose her exits.
“None of your business, Petrov.” The words arrived over her shoulder as she increased the distance between us with the unhurried confidence of a woman who understood that walking away from someone was its own form of power. “Go focus on what matters to you and leave me out of it.”
