“Since Olympia Academy decided to write its own pack regulations independent of the IOF standard, which only requires three. The judge was determined to enforce it. Maddox didn’t know about the rule—you could see the fraction of a second where his cover story hit a wall he hadn’t anticipated. And the Montreal girl’s smile was rebuilding in real time, like watching a soufflé rise.”
“So who was the fourth?”
“Luka.”
Candy blinked. “Luka volunteered as tribute?”
“Volunteered, constructed an alibi involving a visa transfer and the headmaster’s personal invitation, and delivered it with enough institutional authority that the judge decided the conversation wasn’t worth escalating.” I pulled the blanket higher across my lap. “I don’t think she fully believed it. But Luka mentioned the headmaster by name,and the temperature in the room dropped by approximately ten degrees.”
Candy let out a long, low whistle. The sound was appreciative, impressed, and faintly alarmed in equal measure. “I’ve already heard the rumors about the headmaster. Scary as hell. No mercy. Zero tolerance for bureaucratic incompetence. Half the coaching staff won’t even make eye contact with her in the hallway.” She whistled again, shaking her head. “Iguaranteethat judge would rather swallow a balance beam than report anything that might require her to walk into that woman’s office and explain why she disqualified the student the headmaster personally recruited.”
“So now,” I said, folding the narrative into its final, absurd shape, “I have a qualifying score, an Olympic pathway, a performance video, and—temporarily, I think—a pack consisting of Kael Sørensen, Maddox Hale, a third Alpha named Renzo Viteri whom I haven’t met, and Luka Petrov, who is technically a goaltender masquerading as a figure skating partner masquerading as a fourth pack member. And I have one week to make the registration official before the whole arrangement collapses.”
Candy stared at me from the floor for approximately four seconds. Then she launched.
She crossed the distance between the floor and my couch in a single, gymnast-propelled bound that would have earned a 9.8 on the vault and tackled me sideways into the cushions with the affectionate, full-body enthusiasm of a golden retriever greeting its owner after a three-year deployment. My back hit the armrest. The fleece blanket twisted around us both. Her arms wrapped around my torso with the structural commitment of a woman who had spent her life gripping apparatus and was now applyingthat grip strength to the task of physically communicating pride.
“I amsofucking proud of you,” she said into my shoulder, and her voice—which had been operating at full theatrical volume for the past ten minutes—dropped to a whisper. The shift was immediate, tonal, the sonic equivalent of a spotlight narrowing from flood to spot. “You went to that rink this morning without knowing if you’d even have a partner. Without knowing if anyone would stand beside you on the ice. And look.” She pulled back. Held my face between her palms—her hands warm, her calluses rough against my cheekbones, her hazel eyes bright and wet and fierce. “Look at how the universe came through for you.”
Her eyes glistened.
Candy didn’t cry easily. The woman had competed through stress fractures and torn calluses and the crushing, systematic pressure of an elite gymnastics pipeline that treated emotional vulnerability as a technical deduction. She maintained composure through situations that would have hospitalized lesser mortals. But the sheen in her eyes now—the unshed, brimming, barely contained tears that caught the afternoon light and turned her irises to liquid gold—was not the product of distress. It was the specific, devastating moisture that appeared when Candy Hollister Holmes loved someone fiercely enough for their happiness to overwhelm her own capacity for composure.
“My bestie,” she whispered, and her voice cracked on the second syllable, “is going to the Winter Games.”
And there it goes.
The tears. Mine. Again. Because apparently the reservoir that I’d emptied on the shower floor had been silently refilling during the retelling, and Candy’s cracked whisperwas the pressure that exceeded the dam’s capacity. They spilled—hot, quiet, tracking down my cheeks into the warmth of her palms—and I nodded because words were a currency I’d temporarily exhausted.
“Yeah,” I managed. Rough. Wet. Small. “I’m finally gonna have a shot at the dream. And this is the furthest I’ve gotten.”
Candy’s lip trembled. A single, rapid oscillation that she conquered with a clench of her jaw and a sharp inhale through her nose—the Candy method of emotional regulation, refined over years of competition: feel it, acknowledge it, don’t let it take you off the beam.
She kissed my forehead. Fast, firm, the affectionate punctuation mark of a woman who expressed love through contact and cuisine and the occasional felony-adjacent scheme.
Then she stood. Brushed off her knees. Rolled her shoulders back. And the storm of emotion that had passed through her was replaced, instantaneously and completely, by an expression I recognized from years of friendship as heroperational mode—the focused, bright-eyed, slightly manic composure of a woman who had identified a task and was about to execute it with the same precision she brought to a floor routine.
“We have to celebrate.” A statement. Not a suggestion. The verbal equivalent of a starting pistol being fired. “Butfirst—” She pointed at me with the authority of a woman issuing military orders. “Let me feed you.”
She was already moving toward the kitchenette—the compact, dormitory-standard cooking space that Candy had transformed, within the first forty-eight hours of our residency, into an operation center that would have impressed a restaurant sous-chef. Her spice rack alone occupied anentire shelf. The pasta collection was organized by shape and brand. There was a dedicated section of counter space that she referred to as “the station” and that I was not permitted to touch, place objects on, or breathe near without express written authorization.
She paused mid-stride. Turned. The mischief was already building in her expression—a visible, escalating luminosity behind her eyes that I recognized as the precursor to a plan I was going to agree to regardless of its advisability.
“Do you have a saucy outfit?”
I blinked. The tonal shift from “emotional best-friend moment” to “sartorial interrogation” was abrupt enough to induce conversational whiplash.
“Probably. Maybe one or two frisky dresses. Why?”
Candy’s grin widened. The kind of grin that started at one corner of her mouth and traveled the full width of her face with the inexorable, gathering force of a wave approaching shore. Her strawberry-cinnamon scent brightened—the top notes surging, the warmth intensifying, the entire aromatic profile shifting from comfort tochaoswith the pheromone equivalent of someone turning on all the lights in a dark house.
“Go take your ritual victory power nap,” she commanded. One hand on her hip. One finger pointed toward my bedroom door. The stance of a woman who had never, in her entire life, issued a suggestion when an order was available. “While I cook the best spaghetti bolognese with avocado platter you’ve been craving for months.”
She let the promise of food settle over me—because sheknew. Knew that the bolognese was my weakness. Knew that the avocado platter—thick slices fanned on a plate with cherry tomatoes, microgreens, a drizzle of chili oil, and thespecific brand of flaky sea salt she ordered from a boutique supplier in Prague—was the comfort meal I’d been requesting since we’d moved in and that she’d been “saving for a special occasion,” which I’d interpreted as code for “I enjoy having leverage over you.”
Then the grin reached its final, thermonuclear configuration, and the mischief in her eyes detonated into full, unrestrained, Candy-grade scheming energy.
“We have a party tonight!”
