Rink Four was the smallest of the four indoor facilities at Olympia—tucked at the far end of campus, past the sports medicine building and the nutrition lab and the auxiliary gym where the speed skaters trained their starts. It didn’t have stadium seating. It didn’t have an announcer’s booth or LED scoreboard. What it had was clean ice, overhead fluorescents that hummed at a frequency only I seemed to notice, and the kind of cathedral silence that made you feel like the only person left in the world.
Perfect.
I turned the key in the ignition and pulled out of the lot, navigating the winding campus road past the main athletic complex. Olympia Academy sprawled across three hundred acres of Northern Vermont mountainside, all pine trees and granite and the kind of crisp, relentless cold that turned your breath to crystal the moment it left your lips. The buildingswere a mix of modern glass and old stone—training facilities that looked like they’d been designed by someone who couldn’t decide between a ski lodge and a space station. The dormitories sat at the campus perimeter. The rinks occupied the center, like a heart.
Everywhere I looked, athletes moved with purpose. A cluster of cross-country skiers jogged past in matching thermal compression gear, their strides synchronized, their breath fogging in unified plumes. Two hockey players—massive, broad, unmistakably Alpha even from a distance—carried equipment bags slung over their shoulders, their scents cutting through the cold air in sharp bursts of iron and adrenaline and something feral that I filed underdo not engage. A group of ice dancers stretched on a patch of grass near the entrance to Rink Two, their bodies folded into positions that would’ve sent a civilian to the emergency room.
This was Olympia. Every body a weapon. Every stride a statement. Every scent a declaration of rank, ambition, and biological intent, layered so densely in the corridors and training halls that the first week of acclimation felt less like orientation and more like sensory warfare.
I parked near Rink Four, grabbed my bag, and headed inside.
The cold wrapped around me like a homecoming.
Rink Four was empty, just as promised. The Zamboni had finished its last pass recently—the ice gleamed under the fluorescents, smooth and untouched, a pristine white canvas waiting for the first blade to claim it. The air was sharp, clean, carrying the faint mineral scent of fresh ice and the subtle tang of the cooling system that hummed beneath the concrete floor. No pheromones. No competing scents. Justthe ice and the hum and the vast, open silence that made my lungs expand.
This. This is where I breathe.
I laced up on the bench beside the boards, pulling each lace taut with the methodical precision of someone who’d performed this ritual ten thousand times. Left boot first—always left, a superstition I’d carried since my first competition at six years old. Two firm tugs at the ankle, three wraps around the hooks, a final knot that sat snug against the tongue. Right boot. Same sequence. Same tension. The pressure settled around my feet like armor, and I flexed my ankles once, twice, feeling the blade’s edge against the guards.
I stepped onto the ice.
The first stroke was always the best. That initial push—right foot pressing against the surface, left blade catching, body gliding forward with a momentum that felt less like physics and more like permission. The cold climbed through the soles of my boots, through the composite blade, into the bones of my feet, and I welcomed it the way other people welcomed warmth. This was my element. My language. The one place where my body didn’t have to negotiate with the world—it simplymoved.
I started with edges. Inside edge, outside edge, forward, backward—the foundational vocabulary of every figure skater, as basic as scales to a pianist and just as essential. My blades carved clean, symmetrical arcs into the fresh surface, each stroke producing that satisfyingshhhhthat was equal parts whisper and blade song. I could feel the ice responding beneath me—firm, consistent, the kind of sheet that held an edge without crumbling.
From edges, I transitioned into footwork sequences.Mohawks, Choctaws, rockers, counters—each turn executed with the kind of deliberate control that separated competitive skaters from recreational ones. My arms moved in concert with my lower body, maintaining the clean lines and extended positions that judges scored under the program component umbrella. Every finger had a purpose. Every tilt of my chin told a story.
Alone on the ice, with no audience and no partner and no music beyond the rhythm of my own blades, I could drill the elements that pairs skating demanded without the variable of someone else’s timing. The side-by-side spins. The solo jump approaches. The positional holds for lifts and throws where my body needed to be a specific shape at a specific moment with zero margin for error.
I ran through my combination spin—sit spin into camel spin into upright—and held the final position for six rotations, my free leg extended behind me in a line so clean it could’ve been drawn with a ruler. The spin was tight. Centered. Not a single travel across the ice.
Good. That’s good.
I launched a triple toe loop from a back outside edge—toe pick strike, vault, three rotations with my arms pulled flush, and a landing that sang. Clean. Controlled. The free leg extended on the exit, my body settling into the flow of the glide like the landing was just another transition, not a destination.
For thirty minutes, it was just me and the ice and the quiet, brutal work of preparing a body for the most unforgiving stage in the world. No Angelo. No Alphas. No pheromones clouding my senses or ex-boyfriends haunting my periphery.
Just the scrape of a blade. The cold in my lungs. And the stubborn, ferocious certainty that I belonged here.
I glided to a stop near center ice, my breath coming in measured clouds, my muscles warm beneath the chill, and looked around the empty rink. The fluorescents hummed. The boards stood silent. The ice stretched out in every direction, scarred now with the evidence of my work—loops and lines and spirals carved into the surface like a map of everything I refused to give up on.
Angelo had one more chance to show up. One more chance to prove that this partnership was worth the patience I’d been hemorrhaging since November. And if he didn’t—if Saturday morning came and that rink was empty—I’d find another way. I always did.
I pulled my phone from the pocket of my jacket draped over the boards and checked the time. Early still. The afternoon stretched ahead of me, wide open, full of ice and solitude and the particular kind of peace that only came from being alone in the one place that had never let me down.
I tucked the phone away, pushed off the boards, and skated back to center ice.
This was my new home. My new arena. My new proving ground.
Olympia Academy.
CHAPTER 2
The Ice Remembers
~OCTAVIA~
“The bravest thing she ever did was stay soft in a world that kept trying to harden her.”
