Chapter 24
Thin Ice
~KAEL~
“Some men bleed on the ice for glory. He was bleeding because his body had finally had enough of his lies.”
I’m going to kill that motherfucker.
The thought didn’t arrive as a figure of speech. Didn’t land with the hyperbolic, immediately-discounted energy of a man venting frustration through dramatic language he had no intention of executing.
It materialized in my skull with the cold, calculated, fully operational clarity of a captain reading a play he had already decided to finish—the kind of certainty that preceded the most dangerous moments on the ice, when the decision had been made before the body moved and the body was simply waiting for the neural signal to execute.
Garrison Hale.
The name sat in my mouth like bile. The man I’d trusted—not liked, never liked, the rapport between us had been professional rather than personal, maintained through the thin, transactional courtesy of two Alphas who occupied adjacent sectors of the competitive skating ecosystem and whose paths intersected at federation events and Olympic pipeline functions.
But I’d trusted him. Trusted him enough to place sixty handwritten letters in his hands and believe they’d reach the woman they were addressed to.
Sixty letters.
Four months of sitting at my kitchen table with a pen and a stack of stationery I’d bought from a shop in Burlington because I’d wanted the paper to feel deliberate—heavy, cream-colored, the kind that said this required effort before a single word was read.
I’d written them in longhand because Octavia didn’t have a phone and the rehabilitation facility’s front desk had confirmed they accepted mail for patients.
One every two days. Thirty words minimum, sometimes three pages.
Every letter an apology wrapped in a confession wrapped in the specific, agonizing, self-excavating honesty of a man who had spent his life avoiding vulnerability and was learning to practice it on paper because he couldn’t do it in person.
And I gave every single one to the man who had already decided to destroy her.
Who pocketed them. Burned them. Threw them in a dumpster.
Whatever Garrison did with sixty handwritten letters from an Alpha begging forgiveness from the Omega he’d left behind—the method of disposal was irrelevant.
The result was the same: she lay in that hospital bed for six months believing the silence was absolute.
That I hadn’t tried. That the man who’d held her on this rink and bought her skates and stolen his mother’s cookies for her at two in the morning had simply… moved on.
But the letters weren’t the real agony.
The letters were the icing on a cake made of something far worse, far more structural, far more deserving of the violence currently organizing itself in my bloodstream with the methodical, patient efficiency of a man who had spent fifteen years learning how to channel aggression into precision and was now confronting a target that warranted both.
He hurt what was mine.
The fall. The throw that went wrong. The insufficient launch height during the quad Salchow at the National Pairs Championship that had sent Octavia into a rotation her body couldn’t complete, that had resulted in the catastrophic landing that snapped her knee and her career and left her blood freezing into the ice while twelve thousand people gasped and a man with a satisfied smile stood at center ice.
He dropped her.
I’d known it was suspicious. Had felt the wrongness at a gut level when I’d watched the live broadcast—the launch height visibly insufficient, the rotation running out of sky a quarter-turn too soon, the angles that my hockey-trained eye had calculated in real time and flagged as off.
But I hadn’t finished watching. Had abandoned the broadcast mid-replay because the sight of Octavia’s body hitting the ice at the wrong angle had produced a physical response in my chest so violent that I’d closed the laptop and sprinted to the airport to get on the first flight to Toronto.
Where I’d been turned away at the hospital door.
No outside visitors. Family and pack members only.
The policy had been delivered by a nurse whose expression said she’d enforced this rule a hundred times and whose indifference to my desperation had been the specific, institutional variety that treated emotional crises as logistical problems rather than human emergencies.
Pack members. I wasn’t her pack. Wasn’t her family.
Was, in the administrative taxonomy of the hospital’s visitor protocol, a man with no verifiable connection to the patient and no right to enter the ward where she was being treated.
And Garrison said she was angry.
The memory reformed with the sharp, re-examined clarity of evidence being reviewed under new light.
Garrison in the hospital corridor. The manufactured sympathy on his face.
The specific, careful, precisely worded explanation that Octavia was furious—at the world, at herself, at everyone who’d been involved in the competitive machinery that had produced the failure.
She doesn’t want to see anyone, S?rensen.
Especially not the Alphas who weren’t in her corner when it mattered.
The implication clear, the accusation implicit: you weren’t there.
She blames you. Your letters are being received and your presence is not welcome.
And I believed him.
Because the narrative fit. Because Octavia’s anger was legendary and her stubbornness was structural and the idea that she’d refuse contact during recovery was not merely plausible but PROBABLE—the exact response that anyone who knew her would have predicted, and that Garrison, with the surgical cunning of a man who understood his target’s psychology as well as her skating mechanics, had weaponized against both of us.
He used her personality against her. Against me.
Constructed a lie so precisely calibrated to our dynamic that neither of us questioned it, because the lie was built from true materials—her stubbornness, my guilt, the patterns of our relationship that he’d studied and exploited with the same analytical precision he’d applied to sabotaging her throw.
Fuck.
FUCK.
“He set you up,” I said.
The words left my mouth with a rawness that surprised me—stripped of the controlled, measured delivery I applied to every other sentence in my life, carrying instead the unfiltered, present-tense fury of a man who was watching the full scope of a five-year deception crystallize in the moonlit air between himself and the woman it had been designed to isolate.
Octavia’s composure fractured.
Not slowly. Not with the gradual, managed dissolution that I’d seen her deploy at the audition and on the frat house dance floor—the controlled demolition of a woman who released her emotions in metered doses so that they served the moment rather than overwhelmed it.
This was instant. Structural. The walls collapsing simultaneously, and what emerged wasn’t the fierce, defiant, I-will-survive-this version of her pain that the world was accustomed to witnessing.
It was the underneath version. The quiet, devastated, gray-eyed vulnerability of a woman who had just been handed evidence that the narrative she’d built her recovery on—everyone abandoned me because I wasn’t worth staying for—had been a lie.
A fabrication engineered by the man who’d broken her body and then, systematically, broken her trust in everyone else.
The betrayal was visible in her face like weather across a landscape—arriving in waves, each one deeper than the last, each one revealing a new layer of the damage.
The anger she’d been carrying for years was being reclassified in real time: not a response to abandonment but a response to manipulation.
Not the rage of a woman whose people had failed her but the devastation of a woman whose people had been prevented from reaching her by a man who had calculated, with sociopathic precision, that her isolation was the final element of his design.
I want to get off this ice. I want to find Garrison Hale. I want to beat the comprehension out of his skull until his face resembles the damage he inflicted on her career and her heart and the five years of her life that he stole from BOTH of us.
“You…didn’t show up.”
Her whisper cut through my murderous internal monologue with the precision of a blade through silk.
Quiet. Fragile in a way that Octavia Moreau’s voice was never fragile—the structural integrity that she maintained in every public sentence, in every confrontation, in every sharp, clever, fuck-you-I’m-still-standing declaration she’d made since the fall—temporarily absent.
Replaced by the undefended, asking-not-accusing tone of a woman whose certainty had just been removed from beneath her like ice cracking under her feet.
“I wasn’t allowed to!”
The frustration erupted. Five years of it.
The compressed, pressurized, never-expressed frustration of a man who had flown to Toronto and been turned away at a hospital door and had spent every day since living with the belief that his letters were being received and his presence was not welcome and that the silence between them was her choice rather than an engineered outcome.