A welcoming candle. Would it have killed him to light a single welcoming candle?
The girl’s eyes found mine upside-down from her inverted position, and she let out a shriek that was more theatrical than genuinely startled—a high, breathy gasp that she probably used in all her dismount landings. Angelo, to his minimal credit, froze. His tongue stopped. His grip on the headboard went slack. And when my voice finally registered through whatever post-rut haze had turned his brain into mashed potatoes, he had the decency to look?—
Well.Almostremorseful.
More like a golden retriever who’d been caught chewing the couch and knew he was about to lose treat privileges. Embarrassment flickered across those amber eyes of his—a brief, guilty flash that lasted approximately one point five seconds before it was swallowed by the natural shamelessness that seemed to come standard-issue with every Alpha enrolled at this godforsaken institution.
“Octavia—”
“You know what?” I held up a hand, palm out, fingers splayed. The universal gesture fordo not. “Let me not disturb you. You’re clearly not serious about this.”
His mouth opened. I didn’t let him fill it with anything other than regret.
“Or about theobviousupcoming Winter Olympics that we need to qualify for,” I continued, my voice gaining that razor-sharp edge that my mother always said would either make me a very effective attorney or a very lonely woman. “But clearly that isn’t going to happen at this rate, so why thefuckdo I bother.”
It wasn’t a question. Questions implied I was interested in his answer, and I absolutely was not.
I spun on my heel—a clean, tight pivot that would’ve scored beautifully on the ice—and walked out.
The hallway of the Alpha dormitory wing hit me with a fresh wall of pheromones, because of course it did. Every step was a new olfactory assault: the sharp, piney musk of someone who’d just finished a workout drifting from under a door to my left; the smoky, leather-bound scent of an Alpha mid-study session leaking from the communal lounge; and somewhere, faintly, the bright citrus-and-gunpowder snap of aggression—probably from the wrestling guys who occupied the third floor and seemed to exist in a perpetual state of low-grade combat.
Olympia Academy was an assault on every sense I owned, and I’d been here less than seventy-two hours.
I took the stairs two at a time, my skating bag bouncing against my hip, and shoved through the exterior door into the biting January air. The cold slapped my face—a crisp, merciful reprieve from the greenhouse of hormones I’d just escaped—and I sucked in a breath that tasted like pine trees, fresh snow, and the distant mineral tang of the outdoor rink being resurfaced three buildings over.
My car was parked in the visitor lot adjacent to the dormitories—a sensible black Civic that had survived two cross-country drives, one fender bender involving a deer in Vermont, and the emotional wreckage of my entire competitive skating career. I was twelve steps from the driver’s side door when I heard it.
“Wait! Octavia—fuck—wait!”
A series of car horns erupted behind me. Not one. Not two.Fourin rapid, scandalized succession, accompanied by a wolf whistle and someone shouting something in Italian thatI was fairly certain translated to either “put on pants” or “nice ass.”
Oh, you have got to be kidding me.
I turned.
Angelo Reyes was sprinting across the parking lot in nothing but a pair of navy boxer briefs that he was actively fighting to pull up over his hips while running at full speed. His legs were pumping, his abs were still glistening with what I refused to categorize, and his bare feet were slapping against the frozen asphalt with the kind of reckless disregard for frostbite that only a twenty-one-year-old Alpha with more testosterone than brain cells could muster.
He was hopping now. Literally hopping on one foot, trying to get the elastic waistband past his left thigh, and the visual was so absurdly, hilariously pathetic that I almost—almost—cracked a smile.
Almost.
But this was Olympia Academy, and if there was one universal truth about this campus, it was that the Alpha population would happily parade naked down the main quad if it earned them so much as a glance. I’d been warned about this during orientation—the subtle disclaimer buried in the welcome packet between “meal plan options” and “rink reservation protocol” that essentially boiled down to:You will see abs. You will see a lot of abs. This is normal. Please do not file a complaint unless someone is actively blocking your path to the training facility.
And this was the first year Omegas had been permitted to enroll.
The first year the Winter Games selection committee had opened its doors to Omega athletes—not just as spectators, not just as support staff, but as actual, credential-carrying,medal-chasing competitors. Olympia Academy, the most elite athletic training institution in the northern hemisphere, had historically operated as an Alpha-and-Beta stronghold. The rinks, the gyms, the coaching staff, the dormitories, the entire ecosystem—built by Alphas, for Alphas. The kind of place where pack dynamics dictated seating arrangements and the scent of dominance was baked into the architecture.
Until this year.
Until the International Olympic Federation had finally, after a decade of lobbying, protests, and one very public lawsuit filed by a Beta pairs skater from Helsinki, ruled that designation-based exclusion in Olympic qualifying violated about nine different international athletic codes. The ruling had been handed down in October. Enrollment opened in November. And by January, forty-seven Omegas had walked through the gates of Olympia Academy with credentials, portfolios, and the kind of quiet, simmering fury that came from being told your entire life that your biology was incompatible with gold.
I was one of them.
And I was standing in a frozen parking lot watching my Alpha skating partner chase me in his underwear.
Progress.
Angelo skidded to a halt in front of me, finally—finally—getting his boxers situated. He was breathing hard, his chest heaving, each exhale a thick plume of white fog in the frigid air. His scent rolled off him in waves: that cedarwood-and-black-pepper base note I’d grown accustomed to over two years of skating together, now laced with the unmistakable afterburn of interrupted sex—all heat, no resolution. He smelled like a candle that someone had blown out mid-flame.
