Candy was already folding back down toward the floor, her body transitioning into a pancake stretch with the boneless fluidity of a woman whose skeleton had been replaced with a series of well-oiled hinges. “It’sflexibility,” she called after me, her voice carrying through the door as I pulled it open. “But good luck tomorrow. Breathe and slay!”
The hallway of the Omega dormitory wing swallowed me in its familiar cocktail of overlapping scents—jasmine from the room two doors down, the clean cotton and lemongrass of a laundry cycle drifting from the communal machines, the faint, sweet musk of half a dozen Omegas winding down for the evening behind closed doors. I navigated the corridor on autopilot, my body carrying me toward my own room while my mind ran the numbers it had been avoiding all day.
Audition in nine hours. Partner status: uncertain bordering on nonexistent. Pack affiliation: none. Olympic qualifying timeline: a window so narrow it made a needle’s eye look like a cathedral entrance. Physical readiness:compromised by a knee that functioned on a sliding scale of cooperation. Emotional readiness: a question I refused to answer honestly because the honest answer would require a therapist and a sedative.
I reached my door, pressed my keycard to the reader, and stepped inside.
The room was small, sparse, and mine. A twin bed with sheets I’d brought from home. A desk stacked with training schedules and the dog-eared paperback of a hockey romance I’d been reading before bed—the irony of which was not lost on me. A window that overlooked the east quad, where the outdoor rink sat under stadium lights that wouldn’t be switched on for another two months.
I dropped my bag, kicked off my shoes, and sat on the edge of the mattress.
Breathe and slay.
Candy’s words echoed in the small room, mingling with the hum of the heating unit and the faint, distant scrape of a Zamboni running its final pass on a rink somewhere on the far side of campus. Two words. Simple, ridiculous, entirely Candy—and somehow, despite every rational assessment of my situation suggesting that tomorrow morning was going to be a disaster of unprecedented proportions, they settled into my chest like a small, stubborn flame.
Breathe.
I could do that. I’d been doing that—breathing through pain, through panic, through the suffocating weight of a world that kept handing me reasons to stop and a body that kept refusing the invitation.
Slay.
That was the harder part. The part that required more than survival—that demanded performance, excellence, theruthless, glittering precision of an athlete who stepped onto the ice and became untouchable. I’d been that woman once. Before the fall, before the stretcher, before the blood on the ice and the smile on his face and the months of darkness that followed.
I could be her again.
I have to be her again.
I pulled the covers back, slid into bed, and stared at the ceiling. The same way I’d stared at a thousand ceilings in a thousand rinks and hospitals and hotel rooms—searching the blankness for a sign, a script, a guarantee that the morning would deliver the miracle I needed.
The ceiling offered nothing. It never did.
But I closed my eyes anyway.
Four a.m. would arrive whether I was ready or not.
And when it did, I would lace up. Step onto the ice. And do the only thing I’d ever known how to do when the world decided to test whether I’d break.
Breathe and slay on the ice.
CHAPTER 5
The Fall Before The Fall
~OCTAVIA~
“She didn’t break because she was weak.She broke because she’d been strong for too long with no one holding the weight.”
Angelo’s phone went to voicemail on the second ring.
Not the fifth. Not the eighth. Thesecond—which meant either his phone was dead, or he’d seen my name on the screen and actively declined the call, and I genuinely could not determine which scenario was more infuriating at five in the morning.
I pulled the device from my ear, stared at the screen’s cold glow in the pre-dawn darkness of Rink Three, and watched the call-ended notification blink once before dissolving.
The arena was empty.
The lights were set to their half-power conservation mode, casting the ice in a pale, anemic glow that made the surface look less like a performance venue and more like a frozen holding cell. The Zamboni had finished its pass an hour ago—I’d been here since four-thirty, lacing up in silence, running edge work bythe bluish light of the emergency overheads while the rest of Olympia Academy slept.
I dialed again.
