The thought was distant. Clinical. As if it belonged to someone else watching from very far away.
The announcer’s voice crackled through the arena speakers, tinny and stunned. “It… it appears Octavia Moreau has gone down on the throw quadruple Salchow. That—that looked like her partner did not generate sufficient height for her to complete the full four rotations. She’s down. She isdownon the ice, and the medical team is being called.”
I heard the sharp blast of the referee’s whistle. The clatter of a gate slamming open. Voices—urgent, overlapping, professional—growing louder as bodies in red jackets swarmed onto the ice. Someone was saying my name. Someone was telling me not to move.
Don’t move? Where exactly do you think I’m going?
Hands. Gloved, careful, clinical hands bracing my knee, my hip, my neck. A cervical collar materialized from somewhere and was fastened around my throat with efficient, impersonal precision. Someone was shining a penlight in my eyes. Someone else was cutting the lacing of my right skate boot, and the release of pressure made me gasp—not from relief, but from the fresh wave of agony that accompanied even that slight shift in the joint.
“Octavia, can you hear me? Can you tell me where the pain is?”
Everywhere. The pain is everywhere.
But it was my knee. My right knee. I could feel the swelling already—hot and furious beneath the thin layer ofmy tights—and when one of the medics gently palpated the joint, the world went briefly, brilliantly white.
I might have screamed. I might not have. The crowd’s noise had become a living wall of sound—not cheering, but murmuring, crying, calling out. Someone was chanting,“Get up, get up, get up,”and I wanted to tell them I was trying, I wastrying, but my body had stopped listening to me.
They brought the stretcher.
It appeared in my peripheral vision like a verdict—a flat, rigid board with bright orange straps, carried by four paramedics who moved with the grim efficiency of people who’d done this too many times. The crowd noise shifted when they saw it. The murmur became a moan. There was something final about a stretcher. Something that saidthis isn’t a stumble she’ll recover from.This was an exit.
They log-rolled me onto the board with careful, coordinated movements—one person stabilizing my head, one supporting my torso, two managing my legs with a tenderness that made my eyes burn. The straps went across my chest, my hips, my shins. Tight. Secure. Immobilizing.
I can’t move.
I can’t move, and my blood is on the ice, and my dreams are?—
They lifted me, and the arena tilted sickeningly. The ceiling lights blazed overhead in long, smeared streaks of white and gold. The faces in the stands blurred into a watercolor of open mouths and glistening eyes. I could feel the warmth of blood soaking through my tights, and the cold of the ice leaving my body, and the hard, unforgiving surface of the board beneath my spine.
As they carried me toward the gate, my gaze swept the ice one last time. I could see the marks our blades had carved—the elegant, looping traces of a program that had beenperfect. Flawless. A program that should have sent us to the Olympics. And there, near center ice, a small, dark stain where my blood had pooled and was already beginning to freeze.
And then I saw him.
Garrison stood exactly where I’d left him—where I’d fallen away from him. He hadn’t moved. Hadn’t rushed to my side. Hadn’t so much as flinched. He stood with his arms loose at his sides and his shoulders perfectly relaxed, and when my eyes found his face?—
He was smiling.
It was there for barely a second. A flash of something cruel and satisfied that curved the corner of his mouth and lit a cold, proprietary gleam in those steel-grey Alpha eyes. Not shock. Not guilt. Not even the faintest shadow of remorse. He looked at me the way someone looks at a chess piece they’ve successfully sacrificed. Triumphant. Calculated.Proud.
He killed it the moment the camera swung toward him—schooled his features into a mask of wide-eyed concern so convincing that the audience would weep for him too. His hand came up to cover his mouth. His brow furrowed. He took two stumbling steps forward as if his legs had just remembered how to work.
But I’d seen it.
I saw it.
He did this on purpose.
The announcer’s voice returned, thick with the kind of manufactured solemnity reserved for tragedies witnessed in real time. “This is… this is truly devastating. Octavia Moreauand Garrison Hale were on theguaranteedroad to the Olympic Winter Games. They were the favorites—not justnationally, but globally. And now… now we’re watching Octavia being stretchered off the ice, and the severity of that knee injury… folks, this does not look good.”
The gate passed over me like a threshold between one life and another. Ice on one side. Rubber matting and medical equipment on the other. The roar of the crowd dampened to a muffled hum as they carried me into the tunnel, and I could smell antiseptic and sweat and the metallic tang of my own blood.
Someone was speaking to me. Asking about pain levels on a scale of one to ten. Asking about allergies. Asking if I could wiggle my toes.
But all I could see was that smile.
That single, fleeting, monstrous smile that had rearranged every truth I’d built my life around. My partner. My Alpha. The man whose hands I’d trusted with my body, my career, myfuture—and he’d launched me low on purpose. He’d given me the height for a triple and watched me try to spin a quad, and he’d stood there, stoodright there, with pride blooming behind his teeth like a secret.
Why?
