“Rink Two. Eight a.m.”
Three words. No elaboration. No negotiation. The verbal equivalent of a coordinates drop—a time and a place, delivered with the implicit understanding that failure to comply would result in consequences that did not require specification to be understood.
Luka nodded. A single, definitive dip of his chin.
Kael’s gaze snapped between us. The pale eyes tracked from Luka to me and back with the rapid, calculating precision of a center reading a developing play, and the questions forming behind those irises were so numerous and so visible they might as well have been printed on his forehead in block letters:What the fuck is happening? Since when? Why him? What did I miss? And why does this bother me more than it should?
I didn’t answer any of them.
I turned on my heel and walked away.
The corridor stretched ahead of me—long, dimly lit, carrying the institutional scent of concrete and rubber and the distant, metallic tang of ice being resurfaced somewhere on the far side of the building. My skate guards clicked against the floor in a rhythm that I forced myself to keep steady, measured, unhurried—the walk of a woman who had just detonated a conversational grenade between two Alphas and was departing the blast radius with her dignity intact and her pulse elevated for reasons she was not going to examine until she was behind a locked door.
Okay.
So that happened.
My brain, which had been operating in combat mode for the duration of that exchange—deploying verbal countermeasures, managing scent overload, maintaining eye contact with two Alphas simultaneously while projecting a confidence that my racing heart actively contradicted—began its post-engagement debrief with the enthusiasm of an intelligence analyst reviewing surveillance footage of a mission that had gone spectacularly, entertainingly sideways.
Point one: Kael Sørensen is at Olympia Academy. In the flesh. Smelling exactly like frozen forests and whiskey and every bad decision I’ve ever enjoyed. And he looked at me like?—
No. Don’t finish that thought. That thought leads to a zip code you evacuated five years ago and the building has been condemned.
Point two: Luka Petrov has apparently had some form of prior relationship with Kael that involves mutual contempt and barely suppressed tension of a variety that my Omega instincts are categorizing as Not Entirely Platonic.
Point three: the idea of those two—SIX-FOOT-FOUR frozen tundra captain and SIX-FOOT-TWO dark-chocolate goaltender—having any type of sexual tension between each other should not,under any rational assessment, make me want to position myself directly in the center of that Alpha tension sandwich and luxuriate in the absolute chaos it would produce.
And yet.
My thighs pressed together as I walked. An involuntary, deeply inconvenient muscular response that I was choosing to attribute to post-training fatigue and absolutely, categorically,notto the mental image of being bracketed between Kael’s frosted-pine dominance and Luka’s dark-chocolate steadiness while both of them directed the full, concentrated force of their Alpha attention toward the single Omega occupying the space where their scents collided.
Nope. Not thinking about it. Not entertaining it. Filing it under “intrusive thoughts generated by sleep deprivation and pheromone exposure” and moving on.
I rounded the corner toward the Omega dormitory wing. The familiar cocktail of softer scents greeted me—jasmine, vanilla, the clean citrus of someone’s morning skincare routine drifting from an open door. The Alpha signatures faded behind me, thinning with every step until the corridor smelled like nothing more threatening than lavender detergent and the faint, sweet musk of resting Omegas.
I swiped my keycard. Pushed into my room. Dropped my bag. Leaned against the closed door and stared at the ceiling.
My reflection in the darkened window stared back—flushed cheeks, damp hair, the slightly unhinged expression of a woman who had just verbally eviscerated two ex-flings in a hallway at dawn and was now standing alone in her dorm room with an audition coming up and a body that was sending signals her brain had expressly forbidden.
I pressed the heels of my palms against my eyes.
Inhaled.
Exhaled.
And delivered, to the empty room, with the quiet, resigned conviction of a woman whose priorities were correct even if her hormones were staging a coup:
After this audition, get fucking laid. Because clearly you’re horny and missing too many dicks that are off limits.
CHAPTER 8
Show Up Or Show Out
~OCTAVIA~
“She didn’t skate for the gold.She skated to prove she still could.”
Center ice.
