Chapter 8 #4
The reference landed in my chest like a key turning in a lock I’d forgotten existed.
An old phrase. Ours. From the months we’d spent together, when the dynamic between us had operated on a principle so simple it had felt radical: you call, I come.
No conditions. No negotiations. No fine print.
The kind of unconditional availability that sounded naive in retrospect but had felt, at the time, like the most honest promise anyone had ever made me.
He held my gaze. The green eyes were steady. Unblinking. Stripped of every defense.
“It’s my turn to show that I’m earning your trust back. I meant that, Octavia.”
His hand found mine. Fingers threading through mine with a gentleness that bordered on reverent—the lightest possible pressure, as if he were holding a thing he knew he could crush and was choosing, with every fiber of his considerable strength, not to.
He squeezed. Once. The kind of squeeze that communicated more than grip: presence, intention, the physical equivalent of a man planting a flag and saying here. I am here now.
“I didn’t know,” he whispered, and his voice cracked on the second word—hairline, barely audible, but I heard it.
“No one told me. About the hospital. The isolation. The pack abandoning you. None of it.” A breath.
“That’s no excuse. I should have been there regardless.
But when you’re ready—whenever that is, even if it’s a year from now—can we talk about it? ”
I swallowed.
The lump in my throat was made of years. Years of silence, years of performing strength, years of telling myself that the absence of the people who’d left was a reflection of their character and not my worth, while simultaneously failing to believe a single word of that reframing.
I looked into his eyes. Searched them with the practiced, survival-honed scrutiny of a woman who had learned to read the truth content of another person’s expression the way a meteorologist reads a radar—looking for the gap between what was being said and what was actually present.
Looking for the tell. The flinch. The microexpression that would confirm what the pattern had always confirmed: that the words were temporary, and the leaving was permanent.
I found remorse. Deep, structural, load-bearing remorse—not the performative kind deployed for immediate forgiveness, but the kind that had been carried for years and had worn grooves into the person carrying it.
He was telling the truth. Not a comfortable truth.
Not an exonerating truth. A truth that acknowledged fault and asked for nothing except the chance to begin the work of repairing it.
I nodded. Slowly.
“Okay.”
The arena erupted.
Not at my whisper—at the scoreboard. The numbers had populated while Luka and I stood at center ice conducting an emotional negotiation that neither of us had been prepared for, and the audience had reacted before I’d registered the cause.
I frowned. Turned toward the illuminated panel.
10.0 – 10.0 – 10.0 – 8.5.
My jaw dropped.
Literally. Physically. The mandibular muscles that had been holding my face in a composed, tear-streaked expression of quiet vulnerability simply released, and my mouth fell open with the unfiltered, slack-jawed astonishment of a woman who was reading a series of numbers that her brain refused to integrate into a coherent reality.
Ten.
Ten.
Ten.
Eight point five.
The 8.5 was from her. The glacier judge.
The silver-chignon, zero-tolerance, hasn’t-given-higher-than-a-6.
2-all-morning her. The woman who had watched technically flawless programs and awarded them scores that suggested she’d been personally offended by the performances, had just given me an 8.
5. The highest mark she’d produced the entire session. By a margin of 2.3 points.
And the other three judges had given me perfect scores.
I scanned the board. The full rankings. Competitor names and cumulative totals arranged in descending order, and my name—MOREAU, O. / PETROV, L.—sat at the top. The highest cumulative score of the entire audition. And I’d been the final competitor, which meant—
“Holy fucking shit.”
Luka’s voice. Pitched higher than I’d ever heard it—the deep, controlled baritone cracking upward into a register that belonged to a man whose composure had just been shattered by arithmetic.
His green eyes were wide, darting between the scoreboard and my face with the rapid, disbelieving oscillation of someone trying to confirm that both sources of information were real.
“That means you made it, right?” He grabbed my shoulders. Both hands. Gripping with the restrained intensity of a man fighting the urge to shake me. “You passed. Octavia—you passed! You have a shot at the Winter Olympics!”
I opened my mouth to respond.
I did not get the chance.
Because Luka Petrov—six-foot-two, dark-navy-purple-haired, hockey-gear-wearing, chronically late, infuriatingly observant, five-years-absent, goaltender-turned-figure-skating-partner Luka Petrov—wrapped his arms around my waist, lifted me off the ice as if I weighed nothing, and spun me.
Full rotation. My blades leaving the surface, my leotard scattering light in every direction, his arms locked around me with the structural certainty of a man whose upper body had been built to absorb full-speed collisions and was now deploying that strength for the infinitely more important purpose of celebrating a woman who had just scored three perfect tens.
“You fucking did it!” He was grinning. Actually grinning—not the smirk, not the quarter-turn, the real thing.
Full teeth. Crinkled eyes. The unguarded, luminous joy of a man who was quiet and observant and kept the world at arm’s length and who celebrated other people’s victories with a ferocity that his own achievements never received, because that was who Luka was.
That had always been who Luka was—a man who saved his brightest light for the people he believed deserved it.
I had to laugh or I was going to disintegrate.
The giggle that escaped me was involuntary, bright, wet with tears that were still falling and would probably continue falling for the foreseeable future because the reservoir had been breached and the floodgates had no interest in closing.
He set me down—gently, his hands lingering at my waist for a steadying moment—and stepped back with a grin that could have lit every rink on campus.
“Fuck yeah,” he said. Simply. Perfectly. With the satisfied, emphatic conviction of a man who had watched the right thing happen and wanted the universe to know he approved.
We skated to the officials’ table.
The administrative aftermath of an Olympic qualifying evaluation was exactly as glamorous as it sounded: a folding table staffed by two federation liaisons and a stack of paperwork that could have supplied a mid-sized law firm for a week.
Certificate of completion. Score verification forms. Athlete registration packets containing medical clearance documentation, anti-doping compliance signatures, and the designation verification forms that the IOF required from every Omega competitor entering the Games pipeline.
I collected the certificate with hands that were still trembling—not from the cold or the exertion but from the sustained, full-body vibration of a nervous system that had been through approximately seventeen emotional states in the last thirty minutes and was now operating on whatever neurochemical reserves remained after the adrenaline, the cortisol, the dopamine, and the tears had finished their respective demolition projects.
The fourth judge approached.
Up close, she was smaller than her scorecard suggested.
Five-foot-three, perhaps. Trim. The silver-streaked chignon was immaculate, and her eyes—dark, sharp, carrying the specific, diamond-cutter focus of someone who had spent decades watching bodies move on ice and had stopped being impressed approximately fifteen years ago—assessed me with the same clinical precision she’d applied to every performer that morning.
“Coach Mireille Fontaine,” she said, extending a hand that was dry, firm, and lasted exactly two seconds of contact.
Her accent was French-Canadian. Her tone was the vocal equivalent of a ruler: straight, measured, unyielding.
“Your program was exceptional, Mademoiselle Moreau. The emotional execution was the strongest I’ve evaluated this season. ”
A compliment from the glacier. I filed it under things I will never tell anyone because no one will believe me.
Then her eyes dropped to the registration tablet in her hand.
“However.” The word landed like a period in the middle of a sentence.
“I’m noting that there is no pack affiliation registered under your athlete profile.
The IOF mandate requires verified pack documentation for all Omega competitors entering the Winter Games qualifying pipeline. Can you confirm your pack status?”
The temperature in my body dropped by approximately ten degrees.
The elation that had been ballooning in my chest—the buoyant, helium-filled, three-perfect-tens-and-an-8.
5 elation—punctured. Not deflated. Punctured.
A clean, surgical hole through the center of the joy, and the warmth escaping through it left behind a vacuum that the cold air of the arena rushed to fill.
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
“I—my pack status is—”
Luka stepped forward. “Does the pack confirmation need to be submitted now?” His voice was calm. Measured. The goaltender’s composure deployed in a bureaucratic context, redirecting the conversation the way he redirected pucks: with positioning and timing rather than force.
Coach Fontaine regarded him over the rim of her glasses. The look she gave his hockey jersey suggested she was still formulating her professional opinion about the sartorial choices made during the performance.