Chapter 10 Remi
Five days later - Italy
The arena is enormous.
This is not the first time I've been in an Olympic venue.
I've competed internationally since I was seventeen.
I've stood in arenas as big as this one, heard the crowd noise and how the ceiling amplifies it, and how to stand in the center of all that sound and let it pass through you rather than hit you.
Today, the crowd is a wall of sound. Cheering. There is the bass thrum of thousands of bodies in an enclosed space, cameras going off in cascading flashes like a sequence of frozen moments.
Flags everywhere, every nation here, and the IOC rings on banners flanking the scoreboard.
Beck hasn't made it here yet. His wife, Emmie, found out she was pregnant with their first pack baby and is sicker than expected. I have no-one to watch me; the thought is enough for me to come apart, but I can't come apart. Not out here.
My name goes through the PA. My music queues. The spotlight finds me, and the crowd still cheers me.
I skate to center ice, and I wave, and I smile, and I'm absolutely the girl they expect me to be.
The music starts.
Tchaikovsky. Swan Lake, the Adagio, and I've skated to it so many times that my body moves before my brain catches up.
The crossovers into the opening spiral happen in my muscles and not in my mind. Leg extended, arms out, the crowd already pulling forward in that collective lean competitive audiences do when a skater is doing something right.
My blade bites the ice, and the world contracts to just this.
My footwork sequence is precise with technical work that looks easy. It just looks like water moving.
My knee holds. The cortisone holds. One foot in front of the other.
A double axel. It's clean, tight, and the landing is a single note against the ice.
For the length of the music, I can't be angry at anyone. I'm not sick or furious or any of the things I've been. It's me and the ice and the jump and the landing and the crowd's response that I know will roll over me like a wave.
"You can do this, Remi," I whisper.
I flow into the step sequence.
Mohawks and choctaws, and the intricate footwork that Nikki spent years drilling into my muscle memory until my feet stopped having to think about it.
The blade reads the ice.
My arms move in counterweight, precise as a metronome, and for a stretch of eight bars I'm completely inside the music, the anger transmuted into something useful.
A combination spin. Upright into a camel, into a sit, the rotations tight, the position clean. The crowd claps; their energy lifts me. I come out of it and cross the ice toward the lay-back.
But somewhere between one edge and the next, a scent reaches me.
Bourbon and chocolate and orange, thick and warm and wrong for a refrigerated arena. The kind of scent that doesn't belong here, that belongs to shadows and stone walls, with a hand clamping over my mouth.
My next crossover stutters by half a count.
The crowd wouldn't notice. Nikki would.
My body rights itself, but my pulse has gone from performance-regulated to something rawer and faster, and the scent doesn't go away. It deepens. Richer than I remember, the chocolate note is more forward, bypassing my rational brain entirely and hitting something lower.
I keep skating to the music, trying to finish with the music, but my omega notices as if she's been called.
Don't do this now. It's not real.
The layback spin is next.
I hit it, my head tipping back, the lights spinning above me into a smear of gold, and for the duration of it I can't see anything except the ceiling.
The scent is still there, and my anger rises alongside something else, something worse, because my body doesn't care that Steele and Crew chose someone else. My body doesn't understand that there is a blonde omega living in their apartment.
I come off the spin and scan the boards.
VIP section, slightly elevated, about fifteen meters from where I pass.
But it's not Steele and Crew I see.
Dark hair. A jaw like something carved from granite. And those eyes are locked on me with flat, unblinking attention.
I'm about to set up the next axel combination and see him again. Broad shoulders, an immovable posture, one hand on the railing with the knuckles going white.
He's here.
My chest locks.
He has the same quality of focus I remember from the dark. From across the width of an Olympic rink, his face does something to my nervous system that the cortisone injection categorically does not address.
The music lifts toward the climax.
Focus!
Four seconds before I need to set up the triple axel.
"Stay here. I'll be back in two minutes."
Three.
My scent match has an omega.
I turn away and set up for the jump.
Two.
Arms in.
Weight forward.
Outside edge, the three-turn.
The music crests.
I push off and rotate, and the first rotation is exactly what it should be, and the second rotation is exactly what it should be—
But the third rotation...
My blade catches the ice at the wrong angle. My knee buckles, and the ice rushes up so fast that there's no time to process the impact.
Shoulder first, then hip, then my head a split second later with a crack that sends white light through my vision.
Cold ice under my cheek.
The crowd noise has changed. The roar shifting, excitement curdling into something collective and alarmed, thousands of people understanding that what they've just witnessed is not part of the performance.
Tchaikovsky still plays for a moment, then I blink as it finishes without me.
I try to push up. My arms don't respond the way they should. The spotlight stays on me, doing its job.
Get up. Nikki's voice, from somewhere that might be memory. Get up, Remi.
The gray is coming in from the edges. I blink against it.
He's left the VIP section. He's at the boards now, both hands on the railing, knuckles white as bone, and he's shouting something I can't hear over the ringing.
He looks terrified.
I blink again. The gray thickens.
He's trying to climb over the barrier.
Security has him by both arms, two of them, pulling him back, and his face is doing something I don't have the consciousness left to read, and my cheek is against the ice and the cold is the only clear thing, and I'm trying to hold the image of him there, his hands on that railing, the way he looks at me like—
The darkness takes the rest of it.