Delulu Is Not The Solulu
~OCTAVIA~
“Every Omega deserves a pack that fights for her.The problem is finding Alphas who know how to stay.”
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN LUKA PETROV IS HERE?!”
Candy’s voice hit a register that I was fairly certain only dolphins and distressed fire alarms could appreciate. It ricocheted off the walls of her dorm room—a cluttered, chaotic sanctuary of resistance bands, leotards drying on a makeshift clothesline strung between the bedpost and the curtain rod, and an alarming number of motivational sticky notes plastered to the mirror in handwriting that progressively deteriorated from inspirational to unhinged—and landed directly in the center of my already overtaxed nervous system.
I looked back at my best friend from my position on the edge of her bed, lifted the bottled protein shake to my lips,and took a long, deliberate swig before responding. Vanilla bean and collagen peptide. The flavor was tolerable if you didn’t think about the texture, which had the consistency of chalk dissolved in regret.
“I told you exactly that.” I lowered the bottle and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “I saw him a few days ago on the skating rink. Andwell—” I let the word stretch, weighted with implication, “he’s been trying to catch me during practice sessions ever since.”
I took a moment to absorb the full theatrical production of Candy’s reaction.
She was gawking at me. Full, unfiltered, jaw-in-the-basementgawking, those hazel eyes so wide they’d basically consumed the freckled landscape of her face. Her mouth hung open with the kind of dramatic abandon that would have earned a deduction for lack of composure in any competition setting, and her eyebrows had climbed so high they’d practically merged with her hairline.
A smirk pulled at the corner of my mouth. Couldn’t help it.
I let my gaze drift down, taking in the full picture of Candice Hollister Holmes in her natural habitat. Her ginger hair—that wild, unapologetic mane of copper and auburn that she claimed was “low maintenance” and I claimed was a sentient being with its own agenda—was wrangled into a thick braid that hung over one shoulder, loose flyaways escaping at the temples like tiny acts of rebellion against order. She was still in her leotard from the afternoon’s conditioning session: a deep burgundy number with mesh paneling across the shoulders that clung to her compact, muscular frame with the resigned intimacy of a garment that had been through too many chalk clouds and too manyuneven bar rotations to retain any pretense of structural dignity.
And she was doing the splits.
Flat on the floor of her dorm room. Full frontal straddle split, legs extended at a hundred and eighty degrees, torso folded forward with her elbows propped on the carpet and her phone balanced in one hand, as if the position were no more remarkable than sitting cross-legged. Her scent filled the small room—that effervescent burst of wild strawberries layered over fresh-cut grass and underscored by a warm, persistent cinnamon heat that always reminded me of autumn farmers’ markets and the defiant, sun-warmed interior of a bakery that refused to acknowledge winter. Sweet and fierce. Candy in olfactory form.
“Stretching,” she said, as if I’d asked, which I hadn’t, because this was a woman who once held an oversplit during a three-minute phone call with her insurance provider and hadn’t mentioned it.
I shook my head and took another pull from the protein shake. The vanilla-chalk coated my tongue while I organized my thoughts, which had been in various states of disarray since Luka Petrov had materialized in Rink Four like a six-foot-two hallucination wrapped in goalie pads and five years of unresolved abandonment.
“You know he used to follow me around constantly,” I said, leaning back against the wall behind Candy’s bed and pulling one knee to my chest. “Back in the day. Every rink I trained at, every warm-up session—he’d find a reason to be in the adjacent facility. But seeing himhereis different. Luka was never the team-play type. He’s a goalie—solitary position, solitary mentality. Unless he was personally recruited to this program, I can’t figure out why he’d be at Olympiawhen there are independent training camps that would’ve suited his personality better.”
Candy made a sound that fell somewhere between a groan and a growl—the vocalization of a woman who had just been handed a puzzle she didn’t care to solve because she’d already identified the only piece that mattered.
“Whocaresabout that!” She dropped her phone onto the carpet and propped her chin on both fists, her elbows sinking into the cheap dorm-room pile. Those hazel eyes blazed with the specific, terrifying intensity she reserved for exactly two subjects: my love life and underscored gymnastics routines. “That man was fuckingobsessedwith you, Octavia. He watched you like you were the only channel his brain could receive. Like every other signal on the planet was static, and you were the broadcast.”
I opened my mouth to deflect.
She didn’t let me.
“Didn’t you say having sex with him was probably the best you’d ever had?”
Heat flooded my cheeks. Instant, involuntary, and deeply,deeplytraitorous. The blush climbed from the base of my neck to the tips of my ears with the speed and subtlety of a wildfire, and I pressed the cold surface of the protein bottle against the side of my face in a futile attempt to extinguish it.
“I need to remind myself,” I said through slightly gritted teeth, pinching the bridge of my nose with my free hand, “never to get drunk around you.”
Candy’s laugh was immediate, cackling, and entirely without mercy. It erupted from her chest with the force of a gymnast’s tumbling pass—explosive off the launch, airborne for an obnoxious duration, and sticking the landing with a grin so wide it qualified as structural engineering.
“Girl.” She wiped the corner of her eye with one finger, still grinning. “When you get drunk, you becomeunhinged. I’m talking full feral. That version of you would claim everything that belongs to her and becompletelyunapologetic about it. Drunk Octavia doesn’t have abandonment issues. Drunk Octavia haspossessionissues. She’d look an Alpha dead in the eye and say ‘that dick is mine and I want it home by ten.’”
I groaned—a long, exhausted, soul-deep sound—and began downing the remainder of my protein shake with the urgency of a woman trying to drown the conversation in vanilla-flavored collagen.
Candy, unbothered by my suffering and possibly fueled by it, shifted her weight in the splits—deepening into an oversplit that pressed her pelvis another inch toward the carpet with the casual flexibility of someone whose ligaments had surrendered their resistance years ago—and tilted her head.
“Wasn’t there another guy you were into?” Her tone shifted. Lighter on the surface but sharper underneath, like a blade hidden in silk. She drummed her fingers against her chin. “What was his name. Kale?”
I paused mid-swallow.
The protein shake, which had been traveling the well-established anatomical route from mouth to esophagus to stomach, hit a wall of pure, reflexive shock and attempted a U-turn. I fought—fought—not to choke, my throat constricting around the liquid while my brain processed the auditory grenade that had just been lobbed into the conversation.
