Candy shrugged, settling deeper into her cross-legged position. The cinnamon base note of her scent sharpened slightly—the way it did when she was concentrating, parsing information, assembling a narrative from fragments. “I don’t know all the details. Don’t quote me on any of this—it’s campus gossip filtered through three layers of athletic department hearsay. But apparently there was a family situation. Financial. His family went bankrupt, or close to it, and then his father threatened to cut him off entirely.” She ticked the points off on her fingers. “Drama central, basically. The kind of behind-the-scenes disaster that doesn’t make the sports page but absolutely decimates the person living through it.”
I said nothing. Processed. Let the information settle into the spaces where knowledge should have existed and didn’t.
“But if he’s back,” Candy added, her tone brightening strategically, “that could be a good sign. For the program. For the Games. For?—”
“Not for me.”
I handed her phone back with the deliberate finality of a woman returning a document she had no intention of signing. “I’ll avoid him. Completely. Every corridor, every rink, every dining hall and common area and accidental line of sight. I will engineer my entire existence at this academy around never occupying the same room as Kael Soren.”
Candy groaned. The sound was theatrical, agonized, and delivered with the full-body commitment of an athlete whose dramatic range extended well beyond the gymnastics floor.
“But the sex wasamazing, wasn’t it?”
“Candy.”
“Plus—” She held up a finger, her expression shiftingfrom scandalized cheerleader to strategic advisor with the speed of someone who’d been preparing this argument in advance. “You need a pack, Octavia.”
The sentence landed in the room like a brick through a window. Not because it was unexpected, but because it was true, and true things had a particular weight when spoken aloud that they didn’t carry in the privacy of your own denial.
“How are you going to participate in the Olympics without pack exclusivity?” Candy pressed, her voice dropping the playful edge in favor of something more earnest. More worried. “The International Olympic Federation requires it for Omega competitors in contact-adjacent sports. It’s not a recommendation—it’s a mandate. Pack affiliation verified through the designation registry, scent-bonding documentation on file, the whole bureaucratic nightmare. You can’t just walk into the Opening Ceremony as an unaffiliated Omega and expect the committee to wave you through.”
I know.
Believe me, I know.
The pack requirement was the invisible wall I’d been pretending didn’t exist since the day I’d signed my enrollment papers. The IOF had instituted the mandate three years ago—ostensibly for the “safety and physiological stability” of Omega athletes competing at the elite level, a phrasing that sounded progressive on paper and tasted like paternalism in practice. The official reasoning cited the hormonal volatility of unbonded Omegas under extreme competitive stress, the risk of unsuppressed heats disrupting event schedules, and the nebulous, catch-all concern of “designation-related welfare.”
Therealreasoning, according to every Omega athlete I’d ever spoken to, was simpler and uglier: the federation didn’t trust us to manage our own biology without Alpha supervision, and the pack requirement was a leash dressed in policy language.
But leash or not, it was law. No pack, no participation. No participation, no medal. No medal, no dream.
I arched an eyebrow at Candy. “Look who’s talking.”
She grinned—that bright, incorrigible, freckle-scrunching grin that had been getting her out of consequences and into trouble in equal measure since we were fourteen. “Hey.” She spread her hands, palms up, the picture of calculated innocence. “I’m aiming for thesummerOlympics. Which is six months away, mind you. Six months is an eternity in pack-bonding timelines. I’ve got runway. I’ve got breathing room.” Her grin sharpened. “You, on the other hand, have—what? A few weeks before the winter opening ceremony?”
She let the math hang in the air.
“C’mon, girl.” Candy leaned back on her palms, her tone balancing perfectly on the wire between supportive and merciless. “I always encourage the delulu. You know I do. I am thepresidentof the delulu fan club. I have the membership card and the tote bag. But you are reaching heights that evenIcan’t follow. This isn’t delulu—this is stratospheric denial with a view.”
I sighed. The sound came from somewhere beneath my ribs—a deep, surrendering exhale that carried the weight of every logistical impossibility I’d been stacking into a tower of willful ignorance for weeks.
“I’ll figure it out.”
The words sounded less convincing out loud than theyhad in my head, which was saying a lot, because they hadn’t been particularly convincing there either.
“If I have to use Garrison for the pack affiliation paperwork,” I continued, the sentence tasting like battery acid as it left my tongue, “then I will.”
Candy’s expression underwent a transformation so swift and so violent it should have been scored for artistic merit.
“Fuck to theno.”
She was upright now—no longer casually folded into a stretch but sitting bolt straight, her spine rigid, her shoulders squared, the cinnamon in her scent flaring hot enough that I could practically taste it on the back of my tongue. The strawberry sweetness vanished entirely, replaced by the sharp, aggressive spice that her body produced when her protective instincts moved from standby to full deployment.
“That bastard can stay dead in your books, Octavia.” Her voice had dropped an octave. Lower. Harder. The vocal equivalent of a door being locked from the inside. “Hegot you into this. He put you on that ice with insufficient height and watched you fall and stood there with that smile on his face while your knee exploded and your blood froze into the surface. He hurt you forlife. Not for a season. Not for a recovery window. Forlife.”
I said nothing. There was nothing to say. The facts were the facts, and Candy recited them with the prosecutorial precision of someone who had memorized the evidence and would never, under any circumstance, allow the defendant to plea-bargain his way back into relevance.
“And if you bring him back in,” she continued, her index finger raised and aimed at me like a weapon, “he will use every single thing he does for you as leverage. Every favor. Every form he signs. Every practice session he shows up to.It’ll become currency, and he’ll spend it on access—access to your time, your space, your orbit—until he’s embedded again. That’s how men like Garrison operate. They don’t ask for the door to open. They wedge their foot in the crack and wait.”
