His arm tightened—not aggressively, not with the controlling grip of an Alpha asserting dominance, but with the quiet, certain resistance of a man who had decided he was not leaving this spot and would accept whatever consequences that decision incurred. He pulled me against him, gently but completely, until my back pressed flush against the broad, padded expanse of his chest protector.
His scent closed around me like a room. Stone and clove and dark chocolate, layered and warm andeverywhere—in my lungs, on my skin, woven into the damp strands of my hair. His chin hovered above the crown of my head, not touching, not resting, justpresent. Holding the position the way a goaltender held his crease—still, balanced, ready to absorb whatever came next.
“Octavia.”
My name in his mouth. Low. Rough. Stripped to its syllables and delivered with the weight of a man who understoodthat this was not a conversation he could charm his way through.
“Please.”
I closed my eyes. Willed the walls back up. Demanded that the fortress reassemble itself, that the drawbridge raise, that the moat fill, that every defensive mechanism I’d constructed over five years of learning to survive without him snap back into place and do their goddamn job.
He doesn’t deserve to know. No one does. Not when they’re just going to disappear. Not when the pattern is this established, this reliable, this brutally consistent—people arrive, people access your vulnerability, people leave, and the only variable that changes is the specific shape of the wound they carve on their way out the door.
“I know I don’t deserve your openness.” His voice was a murmur against the top of my head, the vibration traveling through my skull and into the hollowed-out space behind my sternum. “I lost that fucking chance. I know. And I’ll own up to that until the day I die.”
A beat. The ice hummed beneath our blades. The fluorescents buzzed their indifferent hymn.
“Butfuck, Octavia.” His arm shifted against my waist, not tighter—somehowsofter. As if the profanity had loosened something in him, cracked a seal he’d been holding. “I can’t fucking breathe knowing you’re hurting. You don’t need to tell me shit. I’m not asking for the whole story. I’m not asking you to trust me—I haven’t earned that and I know it. I just…”
His exhale was warm against my hair.
“I just need to know you’re okay. Or will be. Or—is there anything I can do?”
I bit my bottom lip. Tasted salt. Tasted the residue oftears that had tracked from my eyes to the corners of my mouth and dried there in thin, crystalline trails that the cold air had preserved like evidence.
And then I pulled out of his hold.
Not violently. Not with the sharp, defensive jerk of a woman fleeing contact. With the slow, deliberate withdrawal of someone who needed to face the person behind her in order to say what she was about to say, because the words wouldn’t survive being delivered to empty air. They required a witness. They demanded to beseenleaving her mouth, so that once they were out, they couldn’t be taken back or softened or denied.
I turned. Faced him.
His green eyes locked onto mine. No smirk. No charm. No performative ease. Just the raw, undefended expression of an Alpha standing on the ice in full goalie gear at five in the morning with tear streaks on the pads of his fingers and an Omega in front of him who was about to detonate.
“My partner isn’t going to show up.”
The words were steady. Measured. A controlled demolition, each sentence wired to the next.
“He hasn’t shown up for a single rehearsal in four weeks. His phone goes to voicemail. His dorm smells like the diving team. My audition is in two hours, and I have no fucking partner.”
Luka said nothing. His jaw tightened. His eyes held mine with the unblinking intensity of a man actively restraining himself from reacting so that I could finish.
I took a breath. It shook.
“I’m realizing I have no one in my corner. And it’s—” My voice cracked. Hairline fracture. I pressed through it. “It’s rather daunting to confirm in your own mind that you’reabout to lose the shot at the Winter Olympics. Not because I’m not capable. Not because I can’t do the fucking elements, or hit the marks, or skate a program that would make every judge in that panel forget how to hold a pen. But because every single person in my life has let me down.”
The volume was climbing. I could feel it—the pressure building behind my ribs, in my throat, in the clenched muscles of my jaw, the words accelerating because the dam was cracking and there was too much water behind it and the structural integrity had been compromised for years and now?—
“And the two people whohaven’tare either fighting for their own dreams or fighting an illness that won’t let them give me their all anymore, so I’malone. I am standing in this rink at five in the fucking morningalone, trying to prove my worth in a world that doesn’t want me to succeed—because even if those judges take sympathy on me for performing without a partner, I’ll still be screwed without a pack, sowhy?”
I was shouting now. The acoustics of the empty rink caught my voice and hurled it back at me from every direction—the boards, the rafters, the plexiglass, the frozen surface beneath my blades—creating an echo chamber of my own unraveling.
“Why the fuck am I enrolled at Olympia Academy? Why don’t I just walk out? Because no matter my talent—no matter my skill, my charisma, myrelentless, exhausting, bone-deep striveto be the best and win that fucking gold medal that I fuckingdeserved—I was set up to fail by a jealous, selfishprickwho abandoned me with his entire pack and turned the world against me as if Ideservedto be injured and to suffer in that hospital roomalone!”
The last word ricocheted off the rafters and dissolved into the hum of the refrigeration system.
Silence.
Luka stared at me.
