Chapter 28 #4
Both hands, actually. One on each side of my face, fingers pressing against the bone with the firm, deliberate, hold-still-I-need-to-look-at-you pressure that a goaltender applied to a mask he was adjusting—practical, focused, carrying zero tolerance for the restless, deflection-driven head movements I’d been producing.
My face stilled in his grip. My rambling collapsed into silence.
His green eyes held mine from six inches with the concentrated, unblinking, I-am-going-to-ask-you-one-question-and-you-are-going-to-answer-it intensity that characterized every important conversation we’d ever had.
“You’re actually going to stop those blockers,” he said, and the sentence was framed as a statement but delivered as a question—the inflection rising at the end, the green eyes searching mine for the confirmation that the words alone hadn’t provided. “And try to have Octavia as an Omega?”
I stared at him.
For a long time. The kind of sustained, unbroken, neither-of-us-is-blinking eye contact that we’d produced in every proximity event since the day he’d arrived at Olympia Academy—the loaded, dense, frequency-saturated exchange that the rest of the team had been commenting on with increasing volume and decreasing subtlety and that I’d been dismissing as rivalry when it was actually the thing I’d been too afraid to name for three years.
I whispered.
“The bastard never gave her my letters.”
Luka blinked.
The processing time was brief—three seconds, maybe four.
His analytical mind receiving the sentence, cross-referencing it against the archive of available context (the letters, the hospital, the lack of communication during Octavia’s recovery), and arriving at the conclusion with the rapid, pattern-matching efficiency that made him an elite goaltender and a devastating interpreter of human behavior.
The click was audible.
I watched it happen behind his eyes—the moment the information resolved from fragment to picture, the expression transitioning from processing to comprehension to the specific, hot, Alpha-protective fury that knowledge of deliberate betrayal produced in a man whose protective circuitry was already running at elevated capacity.
“Does she know?”
I nodded. Slowly.
His teeth clenched. The jaw tightening into the rigid, structural, I-am-restraining-a-violent-impulse configuration that I’d seen him produce approximately twenty minutes ago before his fist had overridden his jaw’s containment protocol and rearranged a goaltender’s nasal architecture.
His hands were still on my face. The grip intensifying by a degree as the implications of the disclosure assembled themselves in his awareness with the gathering, compounding, this-is-bigger-than-I-thought momentum of a realization that was expanding its scope in real time.
He grit his teeth. Released my face. The hands dropping to his sides where they clenched into fists—the swollen, split-knuckled right and the undamaged left—with the unified, ready-to-deploy energy of a man who had identified a new target and was calculating the logistics of reaching it.
Then he stopped.
The fists unclenched. The jaw loosened by a fraction.
The green eyes—which had been cycling through fury, protectiveness, and the specific, I-am-going-to-find-this-man-and-end-him focus of a goaltender tracking a shooter—developed a new expression.
Slower. More analytical. The look of a man whose pattern-recognition system had just detected a connection that the emotional response had been obscuring.
“That motherfucker.”
The words were quiet. Carrying not the explosive, volume-driven fury of the ice-surface confrontation but the cold, calculated, I-have-just-identified-the-play intensity that made him lethal in the crease—the recognition that arrived when you saw the shot developing before the shooter released it and your body began moving toward the save point before the puck left the stick.
I arched an eyebrow. “What?”
He looked at me. His green eyes locked on my gray with the specific, I-need-you-to-follow-this-thought-with-me focus of a man who was about to present a hypothesis and who required his audience’s full cognitive participation.
“Who do you think,” he said, and his voice had dropped to the sub-conversational register that we used when the information was classified and the walls were potentially compromised, “is the captain of the Canadian team?”
I frowned.
The question sat in my awareness for approximately two seconds.
My strategic mind—the sector that analyzed formations and predicted opponent behavior and constructed game plans from incomplete intelligence—received the query and began processing it against the available data: a Canadian team actively recruiting defectors from our roster, text exchanges guaranteeing roster positions, the systematic, coordinated, someone-is-orchestrating-this quality of the sabotage we’d just experienced.
My eyes widened.
“No fucking way.”
“Yes fucking way,” Luka murmured. His voice carrying the grim, confirmed, the-pattern-matches certainty of a man whose hypothesis had been validated by the reaction it produced.
“Garrison was on the figure skating side, but the rest of his pack were hockey players. And we made sure they couldn’t compete on the US program after the incident with Octavia—we blocked their federation access, flagged their records, ensured that the sabotage, even without a formal conviction, generated enough institutional resistance to prevent them from representing this country. ”
He held my gaze.
“So where does a disgraced pack of athletes go when their home country’s federation has unofficially blacklisted them?
Where do hockey players with Olympic-caliber talent and a grudge against the US program land when they need a new national affiliation and a new roster and a new opportunity to compete? ”
Our competitor.
Canada. The team that’s been recruiting our players.
The program that offered Volkov a guaranteed roster spot.
The national federation that would have every strategic incentive to welcome athletes whose intimate knowledge of US training methods, play systems, and roster vulnerabilities made them the most valuable intelligence assets available on the international transfer market.
Garrison isn’t just on the Canadian team.
He’s RUNNING it. Or his pack is. They’re using their inside knowledge of our program to recruit our players, destabilize our roster, and engineer the same kind of systematic, trust-exploiting, embedded-saboteur destruction that they used against Octavia—except this time the target isn’t a single skater. It’s an entire Olympic hockey team.
“The probability,” Luka continued, “that Garrison’s pack is now embedded in the Canadian program and actively orchestrating the recruitment of our players is approximately the same probability that a man who sabotaged his own skating partner’s throw and intercepted sixty handwritten letters from the Alpha who was trying to reach her would be willing to extend that same methodology to a larger target. ”
He paused.
“High.”
I exhaled. The breath carrying the compressed, restructured, the-game-just-changed weight of a captain who had entered a locker room expecting to manage a halftime crisis and was now confronting an adversary whose scope exceeded a single goaltender’s betrayal and encompassed an entire campaign of competitive sabotage spanning years, countries, and disciplines.
“Think you can handle getting back on the ice?” Luka asked.
I huffed.
The sound was reflexive. Carrying the automatic, don’t-insult-my-capacity indignation of a captain whose pride had survived a panic attack and a public outing and the invocation of his dead mother’s name and was now being asked whether he could perform the one function that had never, in fifteen years of competitive hockey, failed him.
“Obviously.” I straightened. Shoulders squaring.
The posture reassembling itself from the collapsed, post-panic configuration into the upright, broadened, I-am-the-captain-of-this-team architecture that the ice demanded and that I refused to withhold from it regardless of the condition of the man inside the posture. “Don’t need your fucking—”
He kissed me.
The word interruption didn’t apply. Interruptions were accidental.
This was a strategic insertion—a deliberate, timed, I-am-choosing-this-moment-with-full-awareness-of-its-weight decision executed with the goaltender’s impeccable timing and the man’s accumulated, years-in-the-making, I-am-done-waiting resolve.
His hands found my face again. Both of them.
Cupping my jaw with the same firm, directional grip he’d used to still my rambling, except this time the stillness he was creating wasn’t verbal.
It was total. My body freezing. My breath catching.
My brain—which had been running approximately forty-seven parallel processes involving roster mathematics and Garrison conspiracy theories and the cardiovascular aftermath of a panic attack—shutting down every single one and allocating its entire bandwidth to the single, overwhelming, world-restructuring input being delivered to my mouth.
The kiss was short.
Firm. Deliberate. Carrying the specific, concentrated, this-is-not-a-question pressure of a man who was not requesting permission, was not testing boundaries, was not dipping a toe into water whose temperature he hadn’t verified.
He was making a statement. A declaration delivered through lip pressure and jaw grip and the seven sustained seconds of contact that communicated, with more efficiency than any sentence he’d ever spoken: I am here.
I am choosing this. I am not leaving the way I left a hotel room in Stockholm, and you are not closing the door the way you closed it that morning.
He broke the kiss.