Chapter 10 Spaghetti And Scheming #2
The expression was involuntary—a full-facial contraction that traveled from my eyebrows to my jaw and communicated, with the efficiency of a body that had given up on verbal diplomacy, that the sentence she’d just completed was about to be corrected in a direction she would not enjoy.
“Yeah,” I said. “About that.”
Her face shifted. The glow of celebration dimming by approximately thirty percent, replaced by the focused, narrowed-eye expression she deployed when her instincts detected incoming information that would require her to reassess a situation and potentially ruin someone’s life.
“What.” Not a question. A command disguised as a monosyllable.
“He’s not my partner anymore.”
The silence that followed lasted approximately one and a half seconds, during which Candy’s expression transitioned through four distinct emotional states—confusion, disbelief, processing, and the specific, deadly calm that preceded a conversational detonation—before settling on the fifth: outrage.
“Why?”
“He didn’t show up.” I pulled my legs onto the couch, tucking them beneath me and arranging the fleece blanket over my lap with the casual, deliberate movements of a woman who was about to deliver a narrative that would require her audience to remain seated.
“Actually—no. That’s a lie. He did show up.
At the end. After my audition was finished.
After the scores were posted. After the judges had packed up their tablets and the audience had clapped and the entire evaluation was officially, irrevocably, permanently over. ”
Candy’s mouth opened. Her jaw descending with the slow, horrified disbelief of someone watching a car drift toward a guardrail in real time.
“No. Fucking. Way.”
I nodded. “The auditions wrapped early, actually. Three pairs didn’t show up at all, which shortened the schedule.
So not only did he miss my time slot—he missed the entire session.
Every single evaluation. Gone. Vanished.
A ghost with a registration number and an athletic scholarship he’s doing his absolute best to waste. ”
“What was his excuse?”
“He was practically half-dressed when he skated in. Shirt buttoned wrong—two holes off, collar crooked, the whole disaster. Hair wrecked. Kiss marks on his neck that he either didn’t notice or didn’t bother to conceal, which honestly I’m not sure which option is more insulting.
” I paused. Let the image settle. “Clearly enjoying an active and fulfilling intimate life while the goals and the reason we enrolled in this academy dissolved into irrelevance.”
Candy lowered herself onto the arm of the adjacent chair with the controlled, deliberate descent of a woman managing her blood pressure.
Her strawberry-cinnamon scent had shifted—the warm, sweet top notes retreating as the sharper, more astringent base notes of Omega irritation pushed forward.
The olfactory equivalent of a storm front replacing a summer afternoon.
“So you performed solo?”
“I started solo.” A beat. I let the distinction breathe. “Then my saving grace arrived.”
Her eyes widened. The gold flecks in her hazel irises catching the afternoon light from the dorm window. “Who?”
I bit my bottom lip. Not to suppress information—to manage the delivery. Because the name I was about to say carried a weight that Candy would feel immediately, and the look on her face when it landed was going to be worth the theatrical pause.
“Luka Petrov.”
The sound that left Candice Hollister Holmes’s mouth was not a word.
It was not a sentence. It was not any recognized unit of human language.
It was a frequency—a high-pitched, sustained, vibrating emission that began in her diaphragm and exited through her vocal cords at a pitch that startled both of us and possibly alerted campus wildlife.
“Get the fuck out!” She was on her feet. Hands pressed flat against the sides of her face. The Prague hoodie billowing like a cape. “No fucking way that hot, bulky-ass goaltender was on the fucking ice for you as your partner!”
“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 as real.
“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. The floor. 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, “by watching you from hallways. And then performed it. In hockey gear. At an Olympic qualifying audition.”
“Correct.”
“And it was good?”
“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 a complicated 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 IOF mandate 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. “Another Alpha?”
“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 S?rensen sent a member of his pack to tell an Olympic qualifying judge that you’re his Omega so 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 even know you 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 the you two fucking each other exchange, 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. “Since when?”
“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. ”