The true calm before the storm.
Because the storm is coming. Registration. Training. The pack dynamics that will need to be navigated with three Alphas—four, technically, if Kael’s involvement extends beyond sending proxies—who have their own histories, their own rivalries, their own reasons for being here that may or may not align with mine. The coachingassignments. The competition schedule. The physical demands of performing at Olympic qualifying level while managing Omega biology in close proximity to a pack whose scent chemistry has already demonstrated its capacity to short-circuit my higher brain functions.
Later. All of it, later.
Right now, I’m in pajamas, and Candy is home, and for the first time in two years, the news I’m sharing is good.
She was magnificent in her joy.
Squealing. Jumping. The kind of full-body, vertical-displacement celebration that only a trained gymnast could execute without injuring themselves or the furniture—her feet leaving the ground with genuine height, her hands clapping at the apex of each jump with the rhythmic precision of a woman whose motor skills did not take days off. Her ginger hair bounced in its messy bun. The oversized Prague Gymnastics Academy hoodie she’d thrown on after her own morning session billowed with each landing. Her scent—wild strawberries, fresh-cut grass, warm cinnamon—intensified with her excitement, the Omega pheromones responding to the elevation in her emotional state and broadcasting the joy at a frequency that my receptors absorbed like sunlight after a long winter.
She stopped mid-jump. Her eyes went wide—round, bright, the particular shade of hazel-green that turned almost gold when she was experiencing an idea she considered brilliant.
“Oh my God, do you get a video? Did they film it? Tell me they filmed it—I need to see this with my own eyes.” She pressed her palms together in a prayer position and aimed them at me. “I cannotbelieveAngelo actually pulled through and showed up. I take back twelve percent of the horriblethings I’ve said about him. That’s honestly props—huge props, because that man has the reliability of a weather app in March.”
I winced.
The expression was involuntary—a full-facial contraction that traveled from my eyebrows to my jaw and communicated, with the efficiency of a body that had given up on verbal diplomacy, that the sentence she’d just completed was about to be corrected in a direction she would not enjoy.
“Yeah,” I said. “About that.”
Her face shifted. The glow of celebration dimming by approximately thirty percent, replaced by the focused, narrowed-eye expression she deployed when her instincts detected incoming information that would require her to reassess a situation and potentially ruin someone’s life.
“What.” Not a question. A command disguised as a monosyllable.
“He’s not my partner anymore.”
The silence that followed lasted approximately one and a half seconds, during which Candy’s expression transitioned through four distinct emotional states—confusion, disbelief, processing, and the specific, deadly calm that preceded a conversational detonation—before settling on the fifth: outrage.
“Why?”
“He didn’t show up.” I pulled my legs onto the couch, tucking them beneath me and arranging the fleece blanket over my lap with the casual, deliberate movements of a woman who was about to deliver a narrative that would require her audience to remain seated. “Actually—no. That’s a lie. Hedidshow up. At the end. After my audition was finished. After the scores were posted. After the judges hadpacked up their tablets and the audience had clapped and the entire evaluation was officially, irrevocably, permanently over.”
Candy’s mouth opened. Her jaw descending with the slow, horrified disbelief of someone watching a car drift toward a guardrail in real time.
“No. Fucking. Way.”
I nodded. “The auditions wrapped early, actually. Three pairs didn’t show up at all, which shortened the schedule. So not only did he missmytime slot—he missed the entire session. Every single evaluation. Gone. Vanished. A ghost with a registration number and an athletic scholarship he’s doing his absolute best to waste.”
“What was his excuse?”
“He was practically half-dressed when he skated in. Shirt buttoned wrong—two holes off, collar crooked, the whole disaster. Hair wrecked. Kiss marks on his neck that he either didn’t notice or didn’t bother to conceal, which honestly I’m not sure which option is more insulting.” I paused. Let the image settle. “Clearly enjoying an active and fulfilling intimate life while the goals and the reason we enrolled in this academy dissolved into irrelevance.”
Candy lowered herself onto the arm of the adjacent chair with the controlled, deliberate descent of a woman managing her blood pressure. Her strawberry-cinnamon scent had shifted—the warm, sweet top notes retreating as the sharper, more astringent base notes of Omega irritation pushed forward. The olfactory equivalent of a storm front replacing a summer afternoon.
“So you performed solo?”
“I started solo.” A beat. I let the distinction breathe. “Then my saving grace arrived.”
Her eyes widened. The gold flecks in her hazel irises catching the afternoon light from the dorm window. “Who?”
I bit my bottom lip. Not to suppress information—to manage the delivery. Because the name I was about to say carried a weight that Candy would feel immediately, and the look on her face when it landed was going to be worth the theatrical pause.
“Luka Petrov.”
The sound that left Candice Hollister Holmes’s mouth was not a word. It was not a sentence. It was not any recognized unit of human language. It was afrequency—a high-pitched, sustained, vibrating emission that began in her diaphragm and exited through her vocal cords at a pitch that startled both of us and possibly alerted campus wildlife.
“Get thefuckout!” She was on her feet. Hands pressed flat against the sides of her face. The Prague hoodie billowing like a cape. “Nofuckingway that hot, bulky-ass goaltender was on thefuckingice for you as your partner!”
