Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Dean
The cafeteria had been loud since dawn.
Coffee machines hissed nonstop, chairs scraped across tile, athletes drifted between tables in national team jackets while conversations collided hard enough to blur into static.
I stood just inside the entrance scanning the room anyway, looking for somewhere—anywhere—that didn’t involve another hour of thinking about Luka Davorin.
I knew I’d be back on the ice later—Mark Winton would have my ass if I didn’t—but right then I needed distance from my own head more than another run-through of choreography I could skate half-asleep.
Then I spotted Nathan hunched over a table near the far wall, completely locked into his phone.
Perfect.
I threaded through the crowd and dropped into the chair opposite him.
Nothing.
“Nate.”
No reaction.
I leaned across the table and smacked his shoulder. Nathan nearly launched out of his seat, yanking one earbud free with a glare.
“Jesus Christ, Foster.”
I chuckled. “That’s what you get for ignoring your surroundings.” My gaze dropped toward the phone in his hand. “What are you watching that’s got you this hypnotized?”
“Research.”
“That sounded suspiciously defensive.”
Nathan rolled his eyes. “I’m scouting competition, asshole.”
“Sure you are.”
“I am.” He turned the screen toward me. “Look.”
The headline filled the display.
VELKARYA’S GOLDEN PAIR: A LOVE STORY ON ICE?
Below it sat a photo of Luka and Mila during a lift dismount from last season’s Europeans, her body angled close against his, his hands firm at her waist while both of them stared at each other with enough intensity to feed a thousand fan edits.
Beneath the image:
Their connection is undeniable. Years of shared sacrifice have created a bond deeper than partnership.
Nathan snorted. “Sports journalism really does write fanfiction for adults.”
I barely heard him. “When was this taken?”
“Europeans last year.” He scrolled lower. “Oh, this gets worse. Listen to this one.” He cleared his throat theatrically. “‘In a sport built on trust, trust sometimes becomes devotion.’” Nathan looked up. “What the hell does that even mean?”
I stared at the screen.
Another article appeared.
ARE DAVORIN & KADANEK MORE THAN SKATING PARTNERS?
The accompanying still showed Mila touching Luka’s shoulder in the Kiss and Cry while he looked at her with unreadable intensity.
Taken out of context, it looked intimate as hell.
Nathan kept scrolling. “Fans are eating this up right now. Apparently their free skate is getting called the most emotionally connected program of the season.”
“Can I see?”
He handed me the phone without hesitation.
The clip loaded immediately.
Competition footage.
Luka and Mila moved across the ice with the kind of synchronization most teams spent entire careers chasing and never quite reached.
Every transition flowed cleanly into the next.
Every edge matched. Every rotational adjustment happened so naturally it stopped reading as technical execution and started looking instinctive.
Mila entered his space without hesitation. Luka adapted instantly.
No visible corrections. No second-guessing. No uncertainty anywhere between them.
Nathan leaned back in his chair. “I mean, come on. Even I can admit they’re ridiculous together. Commentators lose their minds over this stuff. Fans too. Everybody loves a chemistry narrative.”
I watched the clip again.
The elements were impressive, but they weren’t what held my attention.
It was everything around them.
The moments before lifts. The split-second adjustments neither of them seemed to think about anymore. The complete absence of hesitation.
Mila entered his space without a second thought.
Luka trusted her to be there.
Every time.
Every movement breathed trust, the kind that only came from years of shared training, repetition….
I handed the phone back and rubbed a hand across my jaw.
“I get why people believe it,” I muttered.
Nathan looked up. “Believe what?”
My gaze drifted back to the paused frame on the screen. Mila’s hand rested against Luka’s shoulder. Luka looking at her, completely relaxed, as though he never expected her to leave.
Something tightened unexpectedly in my chest.
I shook my head.
“Nothing.”
He pushed back from the table. “I need caffeine before Brooke murders me during lifts practice. You want anything?”
I shook my head absently.
“Cool. Don’t spiral while I’m gone.”
Too late.
Nathan disappeared toward the coffee station while I replayed the footage again from the beginning.
This time I stopped looking at Mila and watched Luka instead.
The version of him on the screen looked untouchable, nothing like the man I’d encountered earlier, who’d looked as though one wrong move might split him open.
I scrubbed a hand over my jaw and leaned back harder against the chair.
None of it fit together cleanly.
Athletes laughed nearby. Someone dropped a tray. A coach barked instructions across the room in rapid French.
The man on the screen moved with Mila like they shared the same pulse.
The man at the rink had stood inches from me and never told me to leave.
I stared at the dark screen in my hand.
If Ethan was wrong, and they were a couple, this had become far messier than I wanted to admit.
If Ethan was right, then the version of Luka I’d met at the rink made even less sense.
Luka
By the time I reached the arena again, the conversation with Mila had settled into something impossible to ignore.
I should have gone back to training.
I found myself looking for Dean.
The decision had happened somewhere between the café and the arena. I didn’t bother weighing advantages and consequences, or stopping to ask myself whether it was sensible.
I simply chose a direction and started walking.
The rink had lost the stillness of early morning.
Sessions overlapped now, coaches crowded the boards with clipboards tucked beneath their arms, and music from different programs bled together beneath the constant scrape of blades across the ice.
The entire building had settled into the familiar rhythm of Olympic preparation, ordered and relentless.
I searched the rink once before realizing Dean wasn’t there.
Then I checked again anyway.
The locker rooms yielded nothing. Neither did the adjoining corridors. By the time I reached the far end of the building, I had abandoned any pretense that this search was casual.
He should be here.
“Looking for someone?”
I turned sharply toward the voice.
Tomasz Zieliński leaned against the wall several feet away, arms folded across his chest. I recognized him immediately. Polish singles skater. Reserved in interviews. Publicly out, though careful about his private life in ways I had always understood instinctively.
He watched me too closely for the question to mean nothing.
“No,” I answered.
Tomasz smiled. “Right.” Then he pushed himself away from the wall. “If you’re looking for Foster, you just missed him.”
The name landed like a physical blow.
Whatever expression crossed my face, Tomasz caught it immediately.
“When did he leave?” I asked.
“Ten minutes ago, maybe. Said he was heading back toward the Village for food.”
I nodded, already recalculating the distance in my head.
Tomasz studied me another second before speaking again. “Do you plan to chase him down?”
The question stopped me because I could not answer without exposing far too much.
Apparently my silence did the job anyway.
His eyebrows arched for a moment. “Well, good luck finding him. The cafeteria’s a disaster around this time.”
“Thank you.”
I left before he could continue the conversation.
The cold outside hit hard. I boarded the Metro, found a place to stand, and braced one hand against the pole as the train pulled out of the station.
It rattled through a tunnel, and I stared at my reflection in the glass, trying to decide what I was going to say when I found him.
The first version sounded too clinical, like something I might say to Mila.
The second came across as too careful, as if I was talking to a coach.
By the time I discarded the third version, my jaw ached from clenching it.
Nothing I came up with sounded right, because I wasn’t searching for the perfect thing to say.
I was looking for Dean.
The simplicity of it stripped away every excuse I’d been hiding behind.
I came to find you.
The words sat there in my head, simple, honest, and terrifying. Because there was no federation-approved version of this conversation, no script, no safe answer.
Only the undeniable fact that I had crossed half of Milan looking for one person.
Dean.
Nothing about it needed refinement.
I moved through the Village without slowing, cutting cleanly through the shifting flow of people. The cafeteria was impossible to miss, and what reached me first was the sound, voices layered over each other, the clatter of trays, the low hum of hundreds of conversations happening at once.
I scanned the room.
I had no idea what happened next.
For once, that wasn’t enough to stop me.
Dean
Nathan was midway through a rant about judges overscoring transitions again, and I was doing a decent impression of listening. I nodded in the right places, made the occasional noise of agreement, even reached on autopilot for the coffee sitting beside my tray.
The cup never made it to my mouth.
A sharp wave of heat prickled across the back of my neck so suddenly it felt almost physical. Every muscle in me tightened at once.
I looked up.
Luka stood just inside the cafeteria entrance, his gaze fixed on me.
I pushed back my chair, and Nathan stopped mid-sentence. I ignored him.
Luka was already moving.
So was I.
We met halfway.
Luka swallowed. “I need to talk to you.”
There wasn’t even a greeting. Something in his voice made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
I stared at him. His pulse was visible at the base of his throat.
“Okay.”
“Can we go somewhere private?”
My pulse quickened. “Yeah.” I paused. “Where?”
He didn’t hesitate.
“Your room.”
For a second, I just stared at him.
Luka hated uncertainty. He measured words, planned conversations, thought three steps ahead of everything. Yet he’d shown up looking like he’d set fire to his own exit strategy.
My pulse raced.
Then it hit me.
“Okay.”
Luka hadn’t come looking for answers.
He’d come looking for me.