His expression was—shattered was too dramatic. Shocked was too simple. He looked like a man who had just been handed a map of a landscape he’d suspected existed but had never seen in full, and the scale of it—the sheer, sprawling, devastating topography of what I’d been carrying—had momentarily overwhelmed his ability to respond.
I didn’t realize I’d been shouting until the echo died. Didn’t register the tears still tracking down my cheeks until the cold air chilled their paths and my skin tightened. My chest heaved. My lungs burned. My hands were clenched into fists at my sides, nails biting into the pads of my palms hard enough to leave crescents.
I’ve been holding that in for years.
Maybe longer.
Maybe since the stretcher. Maybe since the hospital. Maybe since the day I realized that healing my body was the easy part and healing the rest of me was going to take a kind of strength that no physical therapist could prescribe and no surgeon could reconstruct.
I hadn’t forgiven anyone. Not truly. Not the federation that had abandoned me. Not the coaches who’d moved on. Not the teammates who’d sent theirstay strongtexts and then stopped texting. Not Garrison, who’d engineered my destruction and profited from my sympathy. Not Kael, who’d vanished before the fall. Not Luka, who’d vanished after. Not my mother, whose calls had lasted four minutes and felt like invoices.
Not myself.
For trusting any of them.
I unclenched my fists. Let out a huff—one sharp, emptied exhale that carried the last of the pressure and left me feeling hollow rather than relieved. Scraped clean rather than healed.
I turned away from him.
“I just have to accept that I’m fucked,” I said, and my voice was flat now. Wrung out. The aftermath of a storm that had spent itself. “I’ll go in there. I’ll perform solo. I’ll be humiliated in front of the evaluation panel for showing up to a pairs audition without a partner. And then I’ll try again next year for the Winter Games and pretend that another twelve months of this”—I gestured at the empty rink, at the silence, at the entirety of the situation—“will somehow produce a different result.”
I was skating toward the gate when his hand caught my wrist.
Not a grab. A catch. The way a goaltender caught a puck—the hand positioning itself in the trajectory rather than chasing after it, the contact arriving with precision rather than force. His fingers wrapped around my wrist gently, the pads settling against my pulse point, and I felt my heartbeat kick against his grip like a trapped bird.
I stopped.
Didn’t turn. Stood with my back to him, my free hand hanging at my side, my blades motionless on the ice. His scent wrapped around me from behind—stone, clove, chocolate—and his voice, when it came, was barely louder than the hum of the cooling system beneath us.
“Show me the routine.”
I turned my head. Looked at him over my shoulder—one slow, guarded, measuring glance from storm-gray eyes thathad cried themselves dry and weren’t sure they had the reserves to trust the thing being offered.
We stared at each other.
The fluorescent lights hummed. The ice gleamed. His green eyes held mine with the steady, patient intensity of a man who had positioned himself exactly where he needed to be and was prepared to wait for as long as the play took to develop.
“You can’t help me,” I whispered.
“I didn’t ask that.” His thumb shifted against my wrist. A small motion—a micro-adjustment, a recalibration of pressure. The goaltender’s instinct: read the trajectory, adjust the angle, hold the position. “I simply asked you to show me the routine.”
I faced forward again. Stared at the ice stretching out before me—blank, scarred, waiting. The surface I’d bled on and fallen on and rebuilt myself on, one edge at a time, for two decades.
He wasn’t offering to fix it. Wasn’t promising a partner or a pack or a solution to the logistical catastrophe that was about to unfold in one hundred and eight minutes. He was asking to see the work. The program. The four-and-a-half-minute accumulation of every skill and every scar that I’d poured into a routine no one had bothered to watch.
And the truth—the quiet, grudging, inconvenient truth that I didn’t want to acknowledge but couldn’t deny—was that Luka Petrov had always paid attention. Even when he’d been terrible at everything else—the commitment, the communication, the basic human decency of not disappearing from someone’s life without explanation—he had watched my skating with a focus and a reverence that bordered on devotional. He’d noticed things my coachesmissed. Offered adjustments that tightened my entries and smoothed my transitions. Sat in the stands during my practice sessions with the quiet, analytical stillness of a man studying a language he intended to become fluent in.
He watched. He always watched.
If I was going to perform this audition solo, every pairs element would need to be restructured—the lifts eliminated, the throws converted to solo jump entries, the synchronized spins replaced with individual combination sequences. It was a fundamental reimagining of a program designed for two bodies, compressed into a single skater’s capabilities. The kind of emergency choreographic overhaul that required a second set of eyes, a critical perspective, an external intelligence willing to identify the weak points before the judges did.
And I’m running out of time to sulk about the inevitable.
I bit my bottom lip. Tasted the dried salt of my earlier tears and the faint, metallic edge of a decision being made.
“Fine.”
The word was quiet. Rough-edged. Wrapped in layers of reluctance and pragmatism and the exhausted, hard-earned understanding that pride was a luxury I couldn’t afford at five in the morning with the clock counting down and the ice waiting.
