Then her eyes dropped to the registration tablet in her hand.
“However.” The word landed like a period in the middle of a sentence. “I’m noting that there is no pack affiliation registered under your athlete profile. The IOF mandate requires verified pack documentation for all Omega competitors entering the Winter Games qualifying pipeline. Can you confirm your pack status?”
The temperature in my body dropped by approximately ten degrees.
The elation that had been ballooning in my chest—the buoyant, helium-filled, three-perfect-tens-and-an-8.5 elation—punctured. Not deflated.Punctured. A clean, surgical hole through the center of the joy, and the warmth escaping through it left behind a vacuum that the cold air of the arena rushed to fill.
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
“I—my pack status is?—”
Luka stepped forward. “Does the pack confirmation need to be submitted now?” His voice was calm. Measured. The goaltender’s composure deployed in a bureaucratic context, redirecting the conversation the way he redirected pucks: with positioning and timing rather than force.
Coach Fontaine regarded him over the rim of her glasses. The look she gave his hockey jersey suggested she was still formulating her professional opinion about the sartorial choices made during the performance.
“It would be strongly advised,” she said. “The IOF requires pack documentation to be filed within twenty-four hours of qualifying advancement. Failure to provide verified documentation within that window results in automatic disqualification of the qualifying score.” Her gaze returned to me. Level. Not unkind, but absolutely, immovably clear. “In the event of disqualification, the qualifying position would advance to the next highest scorer.”
The next highest scorer.
I didn’t need to look at the board. I already knew. The brunette from Montreal. The technically flawless, emotionally absent performer who had skated to the same song andreceived a 7-7-6.5-5 and whose combined total sat directly beneath mine on the rankings.
I glanced toward the competitors’ tunnel.
She was standing at the edge of the barrier, still in her competition attire, her dark hair pulled into a sleek bun. And she was watching.Listening. Her expression was carefully composed—the practiced neutrality of a competitor who had been trained to maintain grace under pressure—but I could see it. In the slight lift at the corners of her mouth. In the brightness that had entered her eyes the moment Coach Fontaine had saiddisqualification.
Joy.
The specific, barely suppressed, trying-not-to-show-it joy of a woman who had just realized that the obstacle between her and the qualifying position was not talent or performance but paperwork, and that the paperwork was going to do what her skating hadn’t been able to: eliminate me.
Fuck.
I took a breath. Slow. Controlled. The 4-7-8 pattern, automated now, running in the background of my awareness the way a cooling system ran beneath the ice. My hands were shaking. My chest was hollow. The tears that had been falling from joy were now threatening to resume from a different source entirely, and I clenched my jaw against them with the ferocity of a woman who refused—refused—to cry in front of a judge who had just given her an 8.5.
It was nice while it lasted.
Three perfect tens. An 8.5 from the glacier. A program that made an audience cheer instead of whisper. A throw triple Salchow landed clean on the strong leg. Forty-five seconds of genuine, uncomplicated happiness—the first in two years.
And now it ends because of a checkbox.
I straightened my spine. Lifted my chin. Arranged my expression into the composure that competition had taught me and heartbreak had reinforced—the mask of a woman who had practiced losing with dignity enough times that the performance was indistinguishable from the real thing.
“Coach Fontaine, I?—”
I was going to forfeit. The word was forming in my mouth. The syllables assembling on my tongue with the resigned, mechanical precision of a sentence I’d been constructing subconsciously since the moment the judge had saidpack affiliationand the air had left the room. I was going to say it. Was going to release the dream with the same controlled, graceful surrender I’d been trained to apply to every landing and every loss and every moment that demanded the appearance of acceptance over the reality of devastation.
“She has a pack.”
The voice came from behind me.
Deep. Authoritative. Slightly breathless, as if the person it belonged to had been running—or skating, or sprinting across a three-hundred-acre campus in full hockey gear at an hour of the morning that most human beings associated with unconsciousness rather than heroic intervention.
Every head turned.
Mine included.
The man approaching the officials’ table was not Luka. Was not Kael. Was not anyone I recognized from any context in my current or former life, and that fact alone was disorienting enough to temporarily override the emotional catastrophe I’d been in the process of experiencing.
He was tall. Six-three, perhaps. Broad through the shouldersin the specific, disproportionate way that identified a defensive enforcer—the hockey position that demanded upper-body mass for checking and lower-body explosiveness for gap control, resulting in a physique that looked like it had been designed by someone who believed that human bodies should be capable of functioning as both athletes and barricades. He was in full hockey gear. Practice jersey bearing the Ironcrest crest in silver and navy. Pads. The works. And he was visibly, audibly winded—chest heaving, a sheen of sweat on his forehead, the flushed complexion of a man who had gotten from wherever he’d been to wherever he was now at a speed that had cost him his composure and his steady breathing and possibly several traffic laws if any of the distance had been covered on foot.
