No one.
The word detonated in my chest.
And what would next year change? Would twelve more months at Olympia Academy magically produce a partner who wanted this as desperately as I did? A pairs skater willing to commit not just their body but theirtime, their discipline, their mornings and evenings and the relentless, unglamorous grind of off-season training that separated Olympic athletes from athletic tourists? Would another year manufacture a pack out of thin air—a bonded, verified, IOF-approved collection of Alphas willing to claim an Omega whose entire public narrative wasbroken girl, betrayed partner, shattered dream?
No.
The denial arrived instantly. Automatic. A reflex so deeply conditioned it didn’t require conscious thought—just the accumulated evidence of twenty-four years of learning that hope was a credit card with a zero-dollar limit, and every time you tried to charge something to it, the transaction declined.
Nothing will be different. Nothing changes. The ice is the same, the politics are the same, the biology is the same. You will be an unaffiliated Omega in a system designed by Alphas for Alphas, and the only variable that shifts between this year and next is the number on your age and the depth of the scar tissue on your knee.
I didn’t feel myself moving.
Didn’t register the transition from vertical to horizontal, from standing at the boards to—wherever I was now. The world had begun to compress. The rink’s dimensions collapsing inward, the ceiling dropping, the walls advancing, the ice shrinking beneath my blades until the vast, openexpanse of Rink Three had contracted to the exact dimensions of my body and there was no air left in the margins.
The flashbacks.
They didn’t creep. Theystruck. Detonated behind my eyelids with the percussive violence of a door being kicked in.
The spin in the air. The sickening, stomach-dropping realization that the height was wrong. The rotation that ran out of sky. Her blade catching the ice at the wrong angle—myblade,myice, the memory so immersive that the tense collapsed and past became present—and thesound. That wet, structural, permanentpopthat had rearranged the fundamental mechanics of my right leg and every plan I’d ever built on top of it.
The humiliation. Twelve thousand mouths forming the same O. The little girl in the front row who’d been shielded by her mother’s hand. The announcers struggling to maintain their professional composure while narrating the end of a career in real time.
The blood. Red on white. Intricate and terrible, spreading across the ice in patterns that looked almost intentional, as if my body were leaving a message in a language I couldn’t read.
The temperature. Simultaneously scorching and freezing—the paradox of shock, the body’s confused attempt to regulate itself amid catastrophic input, running hot and cold simultaneously like a furnace with a broken thermostat.
And then: silence.
The deafening, absolute, world-ending silence that had swallowed twelve thousand voices in a single inhale and replaced them with the distant, rhythmic beeping of a heartmonitor confirming, at intervals that felt too widely spaced, that the body on the stretcher was still technically alive.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Consciousness flickering. In. Out. The fluorescent lights of the medical tunnel strobing overhead like a film reel with missing frames. Faces materializing and dissolving. The sting of an IV needle. The cold of the cervical collar against her throat—mythroat. Always mine. The memory refused to maintain its distance, refused to stay packaged in the third person where it was manageable, insisted on collapsing the wall betweenthenandnowuntil there was no difference at all.
A touch to my cheek.
Not a grab. Not a shake. A touch. Careful, warm, deliberate—the pad of a thumb against the curve of my cheekbone, applied with the specific, calibrated tenderness of someone who understood that the wrong pressure would shatter rather than ground.
My eyes opened.
Green.
A particular, unmistakable green. Deep-water green. Dark-stone green. The green of a man whose eyes had been built for patience and tracking and the kind of sustained, unwavering focus that could read a shooter’s intention from forty feet away and translate it into a save before conscious thought had time to intervene.
Luka’s eyes.
They were close. Closer than they should have been, which meanthewas close, which meant?—
It took me a full minute to reassemble the scene.
I wasn’t standing. I wasn’t at the boards. I wasn’t even on my feet.
I was crouched on the ice. Knees drawn to my chest, arms wrapped around my shins, body folded into a tight, defensive curl that I recognized with a sickening lurch of clarity as a fetal position. My blades were beneath me, tipped on their sides, and the cold of the frozen surface was seeping through my leggings and into the bones of my knees and shins with the indifferent thoroughness of a substance that didn’t distinguish between athletes and rubble.
