I looked at Luka.
The goaltender stood beside me in his hockey jersey and practice pants, his dark navy-purple hair damp at the temples from the exertion of our performance, his green eyes carrying the quiet, warm, specific expression of a man who had just watched a woman he cared about achieve the thing she’d been fighting for and was content to occupy the background of the celebration. His scent was a familiar geography by now—stone, clove, chocolate—and it settled around me with the ambient comfort of a place I’d been before.
I bowed my head to Maddox.
A small, deliberate inclination. Not deep—not the formal obeisance of an Omega submitting to an Alpha, because I wasn’t submitting to anyone and wouldn’t be until the heat death of the universe or until an Alpha demonstrated commitment skills that warranted the gesture, whichever came second. This was athank you. A physical expression of gratitude delivered in the body language that predated words—the kind of acknowledgment that carried weightprecisely because it was rare and precisely because it came from a woman who distributed it with the parsimony of a miser guarding gold.
His dark eyes widened. A fractional dilation—barely visible, immediately controlled—that told me the gesture had landed.
I turned to Luka and repeated it. The same measured bow. The same weight. The same currency.
His green eyes softened. Not with the smirk. Not with the charm. With the quiet, undisguised vulnerability of a man receiving a gift he hadn’t expected and wasn’t sure he deserved.
“Thank you,” I said. My voice was steady now—cleared of tears, stripped of the tremor that had characterized it for most of the morning, carrying instead the clean, grounded tone of a woman who had cried herself empty and had discovered, at the bottom of the reservoir, a bedrock of resolve she’d forgotten was there. “Neither of you had to go out of your way to do what you did. Claiming a pack affiliation you don’t owe me. Standing in front of a judge and putting your own reputations on the line for someone you barely know—or someone youusedto know.” I held Luka’s gaze on the last phrase, letting him feel the specificity. “I appreciate that you both stood on business for the sake of my chance at the Winter Olympics.”
I smiled.
A real one. Tired, fragile, carrying the residual shimmer of tears that hadn’t fully dried—butreal. The kind I hadn’t produced in front of anyone except Candy in longer than I could calculate.
“I’m going to go change.” I adjusted the bag strap on my shoulder—the familiar groove in my trapezius accepting theweight like a handshake between old acquaintances. “But hopefully I’ll see you both around. And we’ll talk details later?”
Both nodded.
Luka spoke first. The smirk returned—not the full deployment, but the quarter-turn, the precursor, the one that said he was restraining the larger version out of respect for the gravity of the moment. “Guess we’ll see you on the ice.”
I nodded.
Because I knew he would find me. The man had spent days tracking my practice schedule through scent alone, had materialized at my training sessions from adjacent rinks and darkened corridors, had memorized the choreography of a program he’d never been invited to learn. Luka Petrov didn’t need my phone number or my class schedule to locate me. He needed my scent on the air, and the air at Olympia Academy was his to read.
The question isn’t whether he’ll find me. The question is whether he’ll bring this new pack with him. Whether the impromptu alliance built in four minutes of bureaucratic crisis will hold when the adrenaline fades and the actual work begins. Whether Kael Sørensen—who sent an enforcer to claim me but couldn’t come himself—will have the courage to stand in front of me and say the words Maddox said on his behalf.
I’ll believe it when the registration is filed. Not before.
But I’ll let them try.
I walked past Angelo without stopping.
Without looking. Without acknowledging his presence in my peripheral vision or the cedar-and-pepper scent that clung to the space he occupied or the stammered, half-formed apology that was still attempting to assemble itselfon his tongue. I gave him the same amount of attention he’d given our partnership for the last four weeks: none.
He called my name.
I kept walking.
My skate guards clicked against the rubber matting of the competitors’ tunnel in a rhythm that was steady, measured, forward—the cadence of a woman who had decided which direction she was facing and had no intention of turning around. The tunnel was dim after the arena’s lighting. Cool. Carrying the faint, residual scents of the competitors who had passed through earlier—a dozen different perfumes and pheromone signatures blending into an olfactory collage that my nose cataloged and dismissed in the time it took to exhale.
The locker room door was ahead. Twenty feet. Fifteen.
I’m not going to tolerate half-assed commitments anymore.
The thought was clean. Sharp. Forged in the specific, incandescent clarity that arrived after the emotional storm had passed and the debris had been surveyed and the only thing left standing was the truth you’d been too busy surviving to articulate.
Not from partners who show up three hours late smelling like the diving team. Not from Alphas who disappear for five years and reappear expecting the door to still be open. Not from packs who claim me through proxies instead of facing me directly. Not from a world that watched me bleed and moved on to the next headline.
If they want me—any of them, all of them—they’ll have to earn it. With consistency. With presence. With the kind of commitment that doesn’t evaporate when the situation gets difficult or the schedule gets inconvenient or the coaching staff gets territorial.
I scored threeperfect tens today.
I am not the girl on the stretcher anymore. I am not the girl in the hospital bed. I am not the girl whose pack abandoned her or whose partner smiled when she fell.
