Chapter 25 #2
The worry that had settled in my stomach when the blood first appeared hadn’t dissolved.
It had deepened. Spread. Migrated from the acute, oh-that’s-concerning response to the more persistent, background-level, is-he-okay frequency that my Omega biology ran when it detected a potential health anomaly in a compatible Alpha.
The nosebleed could be nothing. Dry air.
The cold-to-warm temperature differential between the outdoor rink and the steam-filled bathroom.
Stress. Fatigue. The kind of innocuous, single-incident bleed that athletes experienced routinely and dismissed with a tissue and a shrug.
Or it could be not nothing.
I knew what Kael S?rensen looked like healthy.
Had catalogued his baseline over the years—the complexion, the posture, the specific, kinetic energy that a man in peak competitive condition radiated like body heat.
And the man sitting on my bathroom floor did not match the baseline.
The dark circles. The bloodshot eyes. The pallor that exceeded his standard Scandinavian complexion and entered territory that could be described as depleted.
The weight loss—subtle but present, visible in the sharper angles of his jaw and the slightly more prominent cords of his neck, the kind of reduction that happened when a body was burning more fuel than it was receiving, either through overtraining, under sleeping, or a metabolic disruption that the standard athletic nutrition protocol wasn’t compensating for.
“Are you okay?”
The question was quiet. Stripped of the banter.
Delivered in the register that I reserved for conversations that mattered—the soft, direct, no-comedy-no-deflection tone that Candy heard when the subject was my father’s health and that Luka heard when the subject was the thing we didn’t talk about.
The real voice. The one that lived beneath the confident, cocky, three-perfect-tens exterior and that emerged only when the stakes were high enough to warrant its deployment.
“Like, health-wise.”
He didn’t answer.
The silence was immediate. Dense. The kind of non-response that functioned as a response in itself—not the silence of a man who hadn’t heard the question, but the silence of a man who had heard it and was deciding, in real time, whether the answer was a door he was willing to open.
“Nothing’s wrong with you, right?” I pressed.
My voice climbing slightly—not in volume but in urgency, the specific, escalating register of a woman whose worry was compounding in the silence.
“Like you don’t have a disease or anything.
You have to be healthy—they do health screening checks to get into Olympia.
Blood panels. Physicals. The whole battery. They wouldn’t have cleared you if—”
I trailed off. The sentence dissolving as the scenarios it was constructing grew increasingly alarming and my brain decided that completing them would not improve the situation.
Kael sighed.
The exhale was long. Pressurized. Carrying the specific, weighted frequency of a man whose patience with being interrogated had reached its threshold, and whose threshold was historically low and currently compromised by four days of sleep deprivation, a failed climax, a revelation about intercepted letters, an ice-surface rescue, and a nosebleed that his Omega was interpreting as evidence of a terminal condition.
“Can you stop fucking worrying?”
The words were gruff. Bitten. The verbal equivalent of a man pulling the drawbridge up—the defensive, I-don’t-need-your-concern response that Kael deployed whenever someone approached the perimeter of a vulnerability he hadn’t authorized for discussion.
I was not deterred.
Because Kael S?rensen’s drawbridges were made of the same material as his composure: impressive from the outside, structurally finite, and consistently vulnerable to sustained, targeted application of the one force they hadn’t been designed to withstand, which was a five-foot-six Omega who refused to be dismissed.
“I have to worry,” I said. The words came steady. Firm. Not loud—I didn’t need volume; I needed precision. “Because even though you’re a ruthless jackass doesn’t mean I stopped caring about you.”
The sentence landed in the steam-filled room with a weight that exceeded its word count.
“I was just mad.”
He looked over his shoulder.
Met my gaze.
And I let him see it. The anger. Not the performative, bickering, rom-com-rivalry anger that characterized our public interactions.
The real kind. The kind that lived in the foundation of my chest and had been load-bearing for five years—holding up the recovery, the rehabilitation, the solo training, the audition, the three perfect tens, the entire architectural project of rebuilding Octavia Moreau from a hospital bed to an Olympic qualifying stage.
The anger that had been directed at him—at his absence, at his silence, at the five years of thinking he’d chosen to walk away—and that was now being reclassified, revised, redirected toward a target he hadn’t known she was aiming at the wrong man.
But the anger doesn’t erase the caring. That’s the thing they don’t tell you about loving someone who hurt you: the pain and the love occupy the same space.
They coexist. Cohabitate. Share the same room in your chest without resolving the contradiction, because resolution would require one of them to leave, and neither is willing to vacate.
He could always read me. The same way Luka read me through scent and body language, Kael read me through my eyes.
Had learned, during the months we’d shared, to decode the specific, micro-expressive vocabulary of my irises the way he decoded opposing formations on the ice—rapidly, accurately, with the strategic mind that made him the most dangerous captain in his league applied to the more intimate, more vulnerable, significantly more consequential task of understanding the woman in front of him.
I let out a sigh.
The sound was long. Emptying. The kind of exhale that carried weight on its way out—the accumulated, compressed, held-for-too-long mass of words that had been queued in my chest for years and that the night, the bath, the nosebleed, the letters, and the specific, quiet, four-walls-and-darkness intimacy of this bathroom were finally extracting.
“I was all alone,” I whispered. “Recovering in that hospital room by myself.”
The words were small. Barely louder than the sound of bathwater settling against porcelain.
Delivered not with the fierce, shouting, rink-echoing force of the eruption I’d unleashed on Luka in Rink Three, but with the opposite—the quiet, devastating, speaking-from-the-floor-of-the-well voice of a woman who had descended past the anger and found, beneath it, the sadness that the anger had been guarding.
“Thinking you guys would show up. Thinking someone—anyone—would just be there.” My fingers traced idle patterns on the surface of the bathwater, the movements unconscious, the body’s way of occupying itself while the mouth did the harder work. “And no one came.”
A breath.
“I waited.”
Another.
“I prayed.”
The laugh that escaped me was brief, bitter, carrying the specific, self-deprecating frequency of a woman who didn’t pray and who had, in the depths of her most desperate night, prayed anyway. “Fuck—I’d follow any deity if a single one of my wishes came true so I wouldn’t…”
I swallowed.
“…feel so fucking alone.”
I could see the hurt form on his face.
Not the controlled, managed, composure-filtered version of hurt that Kael S?rensen permitted the world to witness during press conferences and post-game interviews and the rare public moments where his emotional regulation faltered by a visible degree.
The real version. The uncensored, arrived-before-the-mask-could-intercept kind that I’d seen perhaps three times in the entirety of our history and that each time had made me realize that the frozen exterior was not the absence of emotion but the containment of it—that beneath the permafrost was a man who felt things at a depth and an intensity that his composure existed specifically to survive.
His pale gray eyes widened. The jaw loosened by a fraction—the masseter releasing its habitual clench, the mouth softening from its default flatline into a shape that was closer to open than anything his face typically produced.
The hurt was visible in the texture of his expression the way damage was visible in the texture of ice—not a dramatic fracture but a network of fine, spreading, capillary-thin cracks that collectively transformed the surface from solid to fragile.
I looked away.
Sank deeper into the water. Let the warmth close over my collarbones, my throat, until the surface lapped at my chin and the steam wrapped around my face like a veil and the bathwater became a boundary between the words I was about to say and the man I was saying them to.
“I thought I simply wasn’t enough.”
The whisper was the quietest sound I’d produced in this house.
Quieter than the moans that had echoed through the ventilation system.
Quieter than the banter, the laughter, the combative, confident, Octavia-grade declarations that I’d been deploying like armor since the moment I’d arrived at Olympia Academy.
This was the voice beneath all of those.
The voice that lived in the hospital room at three in the morning and spoke to the ceiling and the pulse oximeter and the empty chairs.