The fluorescent lights of the medical room swam above me. An IV needle slid into the crook of my arm. Someone was saying words liketorn ACLandpossible meniscus damageandsix to nine months,and every syllable landed like a nail in a coffin I was building in real time.
Six to nine months.
The Olympics are in five.
My vision blurred—not from the pain, though that was a living, breathing monster devouring my leg from the inside out—but from the tears I couldn’t stop. They slid from the corners of my eyes and tracked down my temples into myhair, and I lay there, strapped to that stretcher in a costume worth three thousand dollars, bleeding through my tights, and watched the fluorescent lights turn to stars through the prism of my tears.
It’s over.
Everything I worked for. Everything I bled for. Everything I starved and stretched and shattered myself to become.
Over.
And the last thing I saw before the sedative pulled me under wasn’t the lights, or the doctors, or even the distant, muffled sound of the crowd still reeling from what they’d witnessed.
It was Garrison’s smile.
Burning behind my eyelids like a brand.
I’ll remember that smile for the rest of my life.
Six to nine months, they told me.
As if months were the only thing I’d lost.
They didn’t tell me how it feels to watch the world you built with your body crumble while the man who destroyed it gets to stand on the same ice, untouched, unbothered, and unblamed.
They didn’t tell me about the silence. The terrible, smothering silence of an apartment that used to be filled with the sound of lacing up skates at five a.m. and the rhythmic scrape of blades on ice and the fierce, desperate hope that this year, this season, this performance would be the one.
They didn’t tell me that the hardest part wouldn’t be the surgery, or the rehabilitation, or even the pain.
The hardest part would be knowing that the person who was supposed to catch me… was the one who let me fall.
CHAPTER 1
One Shot
~OCTAVIA~
“You don’t get many chances at Olympic gold. But you only need one.”
“So you ditched practice with me so you could have the chick from the diving team spread eagle on your shoulders?”
The words left my mouth before my brain could dress them up in anything polite, and honestly? I didn’t want them polite. I wanted them to land like a slap. Because that’s exactly what this moment deserved—the visual equivalent of a full-palm, open-handed crack across the face of my increasingly dwindling patience.
Angelo Reyes, my pairs skating partner—emphasis on the word partner since he seemed to have forgotten its meaning sometime around Thanksgiving—was flat on his back on the unmade twin bed of his freshman dorm room at Olympia Academy, stripped down to nothing but the tattoo of a tiger prowling up his left ribcage and the faded tan line from last summer’s training camp in Malibu.
Hishands were gripping the headboard. His abs were flexed. His head was thrown back in the kind of expression that belonged on the cover of a romance novel, not in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon when he was supposed to be meeting me at Rink Three for our combination spin rehearsal.
And perched on top of him—legs inverted, pointed straight at the ceiling in a flawless needle split that I would’ve admired under literally any other circumstance—was a brunette I vaguely recognized from the diving program. Her thighs were bracketing his head like a vice, and Angelo’s face was buried between them with the kind of single-minded devotion he had never, not once, demonstrated toward a death spiral entry.
His tongue was doing more technical work right now than it had in four weeks of alleged training.
Unbelievable.
The scent hit me before anything else—thick, musky, drenched in Alpha pheromones that clung to the stale air of this shoebox dorm like someone had doused the walls in testosterone cologne and then lit a match. Beneath Angelo’s dominant cedarwood-and-black-pepper signature, there was the cloying sweetness of the girl’s arousal—candied vanilla with an undercurrent of chlorine that screamedpool rat. The combination was so aggressively sexual it practically had a texture, coating the back of my throat like I’d licked a candle at a frat house.
I wrinkled my nose. The room itself was doing absolutely zero favors. Bare walls. A suitcase still half-zipped on the floor, spilling boxer briefs and a single ice skate guard onto the carpet. No curtains. No plants. Not so much as aWelcome to Olympiabanner to pretend this space served any purpose beyond being a den of athletic fornication.
