I am Octavia Moreau, and I have an Olympic qualifying certificate with my name on it, and the next person who wastes my time is going to discover exactly how much I’ve learned about walking away from people who don’t deserve to watch me stay.
I pushed open the locker room door. Stepped inside. Let it close behind me with the soft, definitive click of a chapter ending.
The mirror above the sinks caught my reflection—tear-streaked, crystal-studded, flushed with exertion and emotion, mascara migrated to coordinates my aesthetician would weep over. But my eyes were clear. Steady. Lit from within by a frequency I hadn’t generated in two years.
CHAPTER 10
Spaghetti And Scheming
~OCTAVIA~
“Every warrior needs a best friendwho brings both the celebration and the chaos.”
“YOU MADE IT TO THE WINTER OLYMPICS?!!!!”
The volume at which Candice Hollister Holmes delivered this question could have shattered laboratory-grade glass, reorganized the molecular structure of the dorm walls, and been registered by seismic equipment on at least two adjacent campuses. Her voice hit a frequency that existed somewhere between ecstatic screaming and ultrasonic dolphin communication—a register I’d only ever heard her achieve during three specific life events: when she’d landed her first Yurchenko double pike in competition, when she’d discovered that the dining hall at Olympia Academy stocked high-protein Greek yogurt in six flavors, and now.
A happy Candy was a force of nature. A happy Candy in possession of a fully stocked kitchen was a culinary hurricane with a ponytail and a talent for baked goods thatbordered on weaponized. The woman processed joy the way a reactor processed uranium: the input was emotional, but the output was tangible, measurable, and frequently covered in powdered sugar. I had learned, over the course of our friendship, that the surest indicator of Candy’s internal barometer was not her words or her facial expressions but the complexity of whatever she produced in the kitchen within the following six hours. Mild happiness generated cookies. Moderate happiness generated a full dessert spread.Thislevel of happiness—the full-body, squealing, airborne, clapping-hands level—was going to generate a feast that would require multiple sittings and possibly structural reinforcement of the dining table.
Which, honestly, I need. Because the last twelve hours have metabolized every calorie I’ve consumed in the past week and replaced them with cortisol and tears.
I’d come straight home from the rink.
No detours. No cooldown walk through Olympia’s sprawling, frost-dusted campus with its Gothic stone buildings and manicured evergreen hedgerows. No celebratory stop at the smoothie bar that occupied the ground floor of the athletics complex. Straight from the locker room to the dormitory, my competition leotard stuffed in my bag and my blade guards clicking against the pathway pavers with a rhythm that was less triumphant march than survivor’s stagger. The walk had been automatic. My legs knew the route; my brain had been elsewhere—somewhere between the scoreboard and the officials’ table and the expression on Luka’s face when he’d saidyou called, and the unreadable depths of Maddox Hale’s near-black eyes, and the Montreal brunette’s collapsing smile, and the click of the locker roomdoor behind me that had sounded so much like a period at the end of a sentence I’d been writing for years.
I’d made it to the shower before it hit.
The water was scalding. I’d turned the temperature dial to the maximum the dormitory plumbing would permit—which, in a building constructed during the Carter administration and retrofitted with approximately zero urgency, meant a generous lukewarm that aspired to hot on its better days. Steam filled the narrow stall. The water hit my shoulders and ran down the length of my body, dissolving the residual sweat and competition-grade setting spray and the dried salt tracks of the tears I’d shed on the ice.
And I sobbed.
Not cried. Notteared up.Sobbed. The ugly, gasping, full-diaphragm, sound-producing kind that came from the deepest basin of the chest and emptied itself with the violent, cathartic thoroughness of a system purging toxins it had been storing for years. My back against the tile. My knees buckling until I was sitting on the shower floor with the water streaming over my head and my arms wrapped around my shins and my forehead pressed against my kneecaps while the sobs racked through me in waves that seemed to originate somewhere beneath the building’s foundation.
Thank God the dorm had been empty.
Candy was at her morning gymnastics intensive. The neighboring suites were vacant—most athletes had early training blocks on Saturdays, and the Omega wing had the deserted, held-breath quality of a space waiting for its occupants to return. The only audience for my breakdown was the showerhead, the grout, and whatever microbial communityhad colonized the drain, and I gave them a performance that deserved its own standing ovation.
I hadn’t cried like that in a long time. Not since the hospital. Not since the night six weeks into my rehabilitation when the physical therapist had told me, with the calibrated gentleness of someone delivering a diagnosis they’d rehearsed, that full competitive recovery would take longer than the initial estimate and that the Olympic qualifying window I’d been counting down to would almost certainly close before my knee opened.
But this wasn’t that cry.
This wasn’t grief. Wasn’t despair. Wasn’t the hollow, exhausted weeping of a woman watching her future narrow to a point. This wasrelease. The pressurized, long-overdue expulsion of a thing I’d been holding in a container too small for its volume, and the container had finally cracked, not from damage but from the sheer, overwhelming force of the contents expanding.
I cried because I’d made it.
I cried because Angelo had let me down,again, and the disappointment was so predictable it had almost lost its ability to wound—almost, because the cruelty of reliable disappointment was that it never fully stopped hurting; it just stopped surprising you, which was its own distinct category of pain.
But more than any of that—more than the achievement, more than the betrayal—I cried becausesomeone showed up.
Twosomeones.
For the first time since Candy had burst through my hospital room door with a duffel bag and a box of Turkish baklava and the energy of a woman who had decided that abandonment was a problem she could solve throughproximity and pastry, someone had stood between me and the machinery that was designed to grind me down. Luka had skated onto competition ice in a hockey jersey and performed a pairs routine he’d learned in ninety minutes. Maddox had sprinted across campus in full gear to claim a woman he’d never spoken to as his pack’s Omega. Luka had looked a judge in the face and constructed a bureaucratic alibi on the spot, invoking the headmaster’s name with the composed audacity of a man who understood that sometimes the only thing standing between a dream and its disqualification was the willingness to be strategic under pressure.
They defended my dream.
I don’t even fully understand why, and I haven’t begun to process the implications of what they’ve committed to, and there are approximately forty-seven questions I need answered before I’ll trust the arrangement further than the length of my arm. But the fact remains: when the system tried to erase my score, two Alphas planted themselves in the system’s path and refused to move.
And I haven’t really settled on what that means yet. I’ll need a few nights. A few long, quiet, ceiling-staring sessions where the adrenaline has fully metabolized and the emotional residue has been cataloged and filed and the rational, strategic sector of my brain has had time to examine the situation from every angle without the interference of tears and scent-memories and the ghost sensation of Luka’s palm against my cheek.
