Chapter 37
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Dean
By the time Nathan and Brooke cleared the ice, I’d checked my phone often enough to become embarrassed about it.
Still nothing from Luka. No message, no missed call.
What’s going on, baby?
Around me, the arena buzzed with that particular Olympic energy that only existed before the final skate of the night.
Anticipation crackled through the building hard enough to feel physical.
Japan sat in first. The US held second. Velkarya could still blow the standings apart with one clean free skate.
Pressure explained part of what I was feeling.
I leaned forward in my seat near the boards, elbows braced against my knees while arena staff reset the entry gate across the rink.
Then Luka and Mila appeared.
Most people would have looked at him and seen exactly what they always saw: composure, focus, Olympic-level control. He stood beside Mila in his dark warm-up jacket with his shoulders straight and expression unreadable while officials spoke to them near the entrance tunnel.
But I knew Luka now, and I knew what he looked like when he was holding himself together by force.
He hadn’t looked toward me once during warm-up or the introductions. He was avoiding looking in my direction now.
“You’re grinding your teeth,” Mark said next to me.
I blinked. “What?”
“You do it when you’re anxious.”
I forced my jaw to unclench. “Sorry.”
“Quit worrying. Nathan and Brooke will be on that podium, there’s no stopping that now.”
I wasn’t about to tell him Nathan and Brooke were the last thing on my mind.
Yet more evidence that I was a selfish asshole.
He glanced sideways at me before returning his attention to the rink. “No messages?”
“Hmm?” My thoughts were still elsewhere.
“From Luka.”
That startled me enough to look at him. “You noticed that too?”
“Dean.” His tone carried dry affection. “You’ve checked your phone fourteen times in six minutes.”
“Only fourteen?”
“That’s the spirit.”
Normally I would’ve laughed. Tonight I couldn’t quite manage it.
Across the rink Luka adjusted the cuffs of his jacket while Mila spoke to him. He nodded at whatever she said, but the movement looked automatic somehow, delayed by half a second.
Way too controlled.
Mark followed my line of sight. “He looks wound tight.”
“Yeah.” The word scraped out rougher than I intended. Because now that I could see Luka clearly, instinct kept screaming louder inside me.
This didn’t look like nerves, or normal Olympic pressure.
A terrible thought settled on me, heavy and dull.
What if they got to him?
I stared at Luka across the arena, trying unsuccessfully to catch his eye.
Fear inched its way through me, cold and relentless.
Has something changed? Has Luka spent the last twenty-four hours realizing what this could cost him and decided he couldn’t survive it after all?
The possibility lanced through me with a sharpness that felt so fucking acute.
I would survive losing Luka—eventually.
What terrified me was the thought of Luka returning to that carefully managed version of his life where every emotion had to pass inspection before it reached the surface.
Mark shifted on the seat beside me, lowering his voice while arena lights dimmed around us. “You want my honest opinion?”
I let out a controlled breath. “Not sure, but go ahead.”
“He looks exhausted.”
I swallowed. “Yeah.”
Mark was quiet for a second. “Whatever’s going on with him, it doesn’t look like somebody backing away.” I looked at him sharply and he shrugged. “That’s not what people look like when they’re done caring.”
The words hit hard because part of me already knew they were true.
Across the rink, Luka finally lifted his head. For one brief second his gaze found mine.
The arena disappeared.
I knew that look. I’d seen versions of it before competition, but never like this.
Whatever had happened during the last twenty-four hours, it had stripped something away. The fear was still there, the pressure too. But when our eyes met, I had the strange feeling that he had finally stopped arguing with himself.
Then the moment vanished as Luka looked away again, his expression smoothing back into Olympic composure as he removed his jacket, and the pair of them stepped onto the ice, to the sound of rapturous applause.
Mark leaned back in his seat beside me. “Well, whatever’s happening with him…”
I swallowed hard, eyes fixed on Luka. “Yeah?”
“That boy looks as if he’s about to skate like he has nothing left to lose.”
Luka
The first note of ‘Burn’ pulsed through the arena like a heartbeat beneath my skin, and everything else fell away.
The lights, the flags hanging high above the rink.
The cameras waiting for Mila and I to become a story the world could understand for four minutes and fifteen seconds.
All of it blurred into irrelevance the moment I felt Mila settle beside me in our opening position, her shoulder against my chest, our breathing matched while silence spread across the arena.
We did not look at the audience. That was deliberate.
This program had never belonged to them.
The opening edge curved deep beneath my blades as Mila’s fingers slid into mine exactly on count. The music moved low and intimate through the rink, all restrained tension and inevitability, and my body followed instinctively.
But tonight the program felt different, because somewhere during the endless months leading to Milan, obedience had started feeling less like loyalty and more like disappearance.
Mila’s hand tightened around mine before the twist entry, and I drove deeper into the edge, gathering speed until the rink began to blur around us.
Timing narrowed into instinct. I waited half a heartbeat longer than usual before launching her upward, taking the risk because suddenly I no longer cared about playing it safe.
She flew higher than we planned, her body opening late beneath the white glare of Olympic lights while the audience gasped aloud. Then she dropped back toward me, and my hands locked around her waist hard and clean, the impact jolting through my shoulders before the arena erupted.
Mila stayed close on the exit instead of drifting outward, orbiting me with absolute trust.
One mistake could destroy both our lives. Somehow she never hesitated.
The Throw Salchow followed directly from choreography. I felt the pressure building beneath my knees during the entry edge and drove harder instead of easing back. Safer would still medal.
Tonight I did not want safe.
Mila rotated cleanly through the air and landed without hesitation, staying inside my space instead of separating from it while the crowd roared louder.
Good. Let them.
The Reverse Lasso lift approached next, long and exposed and brutal on the body. I pressed Mila overhead and carried her the length of the rink while my arms burned under the strain.
I held the position anyway, one breath longer than planned, not enough for deduction. Mila felt the adjustment instantly and answered it without fear, extending farther above me as though she trusted me completely even now.
That almost undid me.
Then ‘On the Nature of Daylight’ spread through the arena, and suddenly the entire rink seemed to ache with us.
The music wrapped itself around us, all longing and grief and impossible tenderness, and Mila and I moved into the side-by-side Axels together, identical timing, identical flight, landing blade to blade perfectly.
The judges would reward synchronization. I barely saw them anymore, because halfway through the step sequence, I caught sight of Dean seated on the far side of the rink beyond the judges’ table.
Watching me.
Some hidden part of me finally straightened after years bent into the wrong shape.
Normally I released Mila’s hand early during the rocker sequence, but this time I held on half a beat longer, invisible to everyone except her.
Mila’s eyes flicked toward mine, questioning, and in that second I made the decision.
Not later, not after medals.
Now.
I stopped performing restraint.
The choreography did not change. I stopped skating at Mila and started skating with her.
The difference was microscopic but enormous, and I knew she felt it.
The second throw approached, Triple Loop, dangerous this late in the program when fatigue had already begun settling heavily into the legs. I increased the speed anyway.
Mila trusted it, and I launched her into the air. For one impossible second she seemed suspended above the rink while the audience caught their collective breath.
Then she landed perfectly with no hesitation or correction, and the arena exploded again.
I looked at Mila instead of the judges, and she smiled at me, not the practiced smile for cameras and interviews, but a real one that hit hard.
The straight-line lift followed almost immediately. By now my lungs burned and sweat chilled beneath my costume while every muscle in my back screamed under the strain, but I lifted her anyway, higher, longer, with a slower rotation.
The audience had gone quiet now. Somewhere commentators were probably calling this a love story.
They were wrong.
Love had never felt this much like standing at the edge of collapse.
The pair spin accelerated with the swell of the music, our bodies drawing closer together while the rink dissolved into sound and light and motion. Then ‘Elegy’ began, and suddenly everything softened.
The death spiral entered on a whisper of steel across ice.
Mila dropped low, one arm extended while I anchored above her, steady and unwavering while she trusted me completely.
The final rotational lift followed, and Mila rose slowly above me with the swell of the music.
I held her there one fraction longer than planned before lowering her back down.
We crossed the ice together with the exhaustion of people who had given everything and somehow still found more to offer. Mila drifted closer during the final steps until her forehead rested against my shoulder. The audience undoubtedly thought it was choreography.
Maybe tonight it was.