“In full hockey uniform, no less.”
Her hands dropped. Her jaw followed. The combined effect produced an expression of such theatrical disbelief that she could have been cast, without audition, in any production requiring a woman confronted with information that exceeded her processing capacity.
“Hockey uniform?”
“Jersey. Practice pants. Hockey skates. He’d stripped the pads, the helmet, the gloves, and the mouth guard somewhere between the entrance and center ice, but the rest of it—full gear. On a figure skating surface. During an Olympic qualifying evaluation.” I delivered this information with the measured, factual cadence of a woman recounting a series of events that she herself was still struggling to categorize asreal. “How he managed the flexibility requirements is genuinely beyond my comprehension. Hockey skates have a completely different blade profile than figure blades—the rocker is flatter, the toe pick is nonexistent, the edge geometry is built for lateral explosiveness rather than sustained curves. He was essentially performing pairs choreography on equipment designed for a different sport, and he did it in sync with my program, which he’d learned by watching me practice from observation galleries and adjacent rinks for the past week without my knowledge.”
Candy sat down. Slowly. Onto the floor. Not a chair. Thefloor. Legs crossed, hands in her lap, the posture of a woman who needed to lower her center of gravity in order to safely absorb the information still incoming.
“He learned your entire program,” she said, “bywatchingyou from hallways. And then performed it. In hockey gear. At an Olympic qualifying audition.”
“Correct.”
“And it wasgood?”
“Three perfect tens and an 8.5 from the judge who hadn’t given higher than a 6.2 all morning.”
Candy pressed her fingertips against her closed eyelids and whispered something in Czech that I didn’t catch but suspected was either a prayer or a profanity.
“But that’s not even the complicated part.”
Her fingers parted. One hazel eye peered at me through the gap. “There’s acomplicated part?”
“The judges tried to disqualify me.”
Both eyes opened. Both hands dropped. She was on her feet again with the explosive vertical force that years of vault training had embedded in her muscular reflexes. “What?”
“No pack affiliation registered in the system. The IOFmandate requires verified pack documentation for Omega competitors in the Winter Games pipeline. Without it, the qualifying score gets voided and the position advances to the next highest scorer.” I exhaled. “Who happened to be a brunette from Montreal who skated to the same song I did with about a third of the emotional range and was standing in the tunnel looking like Christmas had arrived early.”
“So what happened?”
“Another Alpha showed up.”
Candy’s expression shifted from outrage to bewilderment with the speed of a channel change. “AnotherAlpha?”
“Out of nowhere. Full hockey gear. Completely winded. Walked up to the officials’ table and said, and I quote:She’s our Omega.”
“Who the fuck was it?”
“Maddox Hale. Defensive enforcer. Ironcrest pack.” I held her gaze. “Sent by Kael.”
The name detonated in the living room like a flashbang.
“KAEL?!” Candy’s voice hit the upper atmosphere again. “Kael Sørensen sent a member of his pack to tell an Olympic qualifying judge thatyou’re his Omegaso you’d keep your score?!” She pressed both hands against the top of her head as if physically preventing her skull from departing her spine. “How did he evenknowyou were auditioning?”
I shrugged. The gesture was casual, but the question beneath it was not, and I could feel it vibrating in the back of my mind like a tuning fork struck against a surface it hadn’t expected to resonate with.
“No clue. We had a…confrontation, I suppose, in the rink corridor around seven this morning. He walked in on me and Luka leaving Rink Three after a training session.” I opted to omit the details of theyou two fucking each otherexchange, because Candy would have required medical intervention. “Maybe he’d been observing the schedule. Maybe someone on his team noticed. Maybe it’s Kael being Kael—the man has always had an intelligence network that operates on a frequency the rest of us aren’t cleared for.”
“But he saved your ass.”
“He saved my ass,” I confirmed. “And then it got worse.”
“Worse?”
“Apparently packs at Olympia Academy are required to have four Alphas. Not three. Four. It’s in the competitor handbook, Section 4, Subsection B, which I’m certain exactly zero athletes have read because the handbook is four hundred pages of regulatory prose that reads like it was generated by a committee of lawyers with a thesaurus addiction.”
Candy gawked. “Sincewhen?”
