Candy groaned. The sound was long, pressurized, and carried the specific frequency of a woman who knew exactly what awaited her on the other side of the video call and was gathering the fortitude to face it the way she faced a vault: with speed, commitment, and the knowledge that hesitation was more dangerous than the obstacle itself.
“Bye, sexy bitch.” She waved without looking up from her phone, already navigating to the Zoom app with the grim determination of a soldier entering a known conflict zone. “Don’t get pregnant!”
I rolled my eyes—a final, comprehensive, orbital farewell that encompassed the entirety of the conversation and the woman who had made it possible.
“I’m on birth control,thanks.”
I pulled the door shut behind me.
The corridor was warm. Lit by the amber sconces that lined the Omega dormitory wing, casting a golden glow across the hardwood floors and the stone walls that gave Olympia Academy its Gothic, institutional grandeur. The ambient scent was soft—jasmine, vanilla, the clean citrus of evening skincare routines drifting from beneath closed doors. Somewhere down the hall, music was playing. Bassvibrating through the walls. The distant, muffled pulse of a party that was already underway somewhere on campus, generating the kind of low-frequency energy that you felt in your chest before you heard it in your ears.
I walked toward it.
Heels clicking against the hardwood. Curls bouncing with every stride. The red lipstick catching the amber light and glowing like an ember against the brown of my skin. My reflection flickered in the windows I passed—a woman in a black dress walking through a golden corridor toward a night that held no guarantees and every possibility.
Three perfect tens.
A qualifying certificate.
A pack I didn’t ask for but might just need.
And a dress that is going to ruin someone’s evening in the best possible way.
I grinned.
Ear to ear. Full. Unrestrained. The grin of a woman who had started this morning on the floor of an empty rink in a fetal position and was ending it in heels and red lipstick with the bass of a party vibrating through the walls of the most prestigious training academy on the continent.
Tonight is gonna be a good fucking night.
CHAPTER 12
Shots And Surrenders
~OCTAVIA~
“The smartest woman in the roomis always the one who makes the strongest man kneel.”
First: it had been awhilesince I’d had a drink.
Not in the casual, polite, “I’ve been cutting back” way that adults deployed when they wanted to sound responsible at dinner parties. In the genuine, calendar-verified, my-body-has-forgotten-what-ethanol-tastes-like way. Months before the incident, I’d gone dry with the disciplined, joyless commitment of an athlete who understood that the qualifying window was approaching and that every variable within her control needed to be optimized—including the one where she didn’t pickle her liver forty-eight hours before an audition that would determine whether almost two decades of training had been an investment or a hobby.
I knewhow I got at parties. That was the issue.
The sober version of Octavia Moreau was composed, strategic, and maintained the kind of social perimeter that would have made a Secret Service agent nod in professional approval. The post-tequila version was a different organism entirely—one who had no perimeter, no filter, and an absolute, unwavering conviction that the dance floor was her sovereign territory and that anyone occupying it was either an ally or an obstacle, and obstacles got dancedaroundwith a level of hip movement that had once prompted a nightclub bouncer in Montreal to ask if I was a professional dancer and, upon learning I was a figure skater, to nod slowly and say, “Yeah. That tracks.”
I wasn’t necessarilycrazy.
Well.
Maybe.
The honest answer was that I could not reliably vouch for my own behavior once the combination of tequila, Ciroc, and the specific confidence that came from knowing I looked phenomenal converged into the cocktail that Candy had accurately described as “The Real Octaviana.” That version of me was the life of the party on the dance floor, and being the life of the party when you possessed a competition-trained body, a red lipstick situation, and a dress that made your ass look like it had been engineered by a team of specialists with advanced degrees in structural aesthetics—that attractedattention. The kind that vibrated at a frequency only Alphas could detect and that turned every head in a room like a compass needle swinging toward magnetic north.
And I haven’t gotten high either.
The thought arrived with the sheepish, half-guilty energy of a woman who had accepted the joint that the gymnast from the Australian delegation had offered outside the frat house’s back entrance approximately twenty minutes ago, taken three long, slow, practiced pulls, and was now feeling the results settle into the muscles of her shoulders and the base of her skull with the warm, liquid, unspooling sensation of tension being dissolved at the molecular level.
Combining tequila, Ciroc, AND weed after months of abstinence is probably a terrible idea. The kind that comes with consequences and morning-after regret and potentially a hangover that lasts until Tuesday. But here I am.
