Chapter 1 #2
Angelo groaned, dragging both hands down his face.
“I’m not trying to purposely hang you out to dry, Tavi.
I swear. I’m serious about this—about qualifying, about the program, about all of it.
” He dropped his hands and met my eyes, and to his credit, the amber in his gaze had the decency to look strained.
“I just needed to blow off some steam. You know? Like—you’re an Omega. You get heats and shit.”
And shit.
He said “and shit.”
I rolled my eyes so hard I’m fairly certain I caught a glimpse of my own prefrontal cortex. “And what do you get, Angelo? Ruts that send you on a horny freight train with every new Omega you meet who gives you the time of day?”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
“We do get ruts,” he said, as if this were news. As if I hadn’t been navigating the minefield of Alpha-Omega dynamics since I presented at fourteen. “And my actions are justifiable. She’s hot, Tavi.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose between my thumb and forefinger and inhaled slowly through my teeth.
The air tasted like ice crystals and the faint, distant sweetness of someone baking in the athletic nutrition lab—brown butter and toasted oats—and I let it ground me.
Breathe in the bakery. Breathe out the urge to commit homicide.
“Everyone and their aunty is hot here, Angelo.” My voice was flat.
Surgical. “We’re training for the fucking Olympics.
You actually have to look decent and maintain a six-pack to even be acknowledged at this rate.
Half the Betas on campus are walking around looking like marble sculptures that someone accidentally animated, and the Alphas—” I gestured at the general vicinity of his body with a level of exasperation that bordered on violence.
“You’re just fucking her because she’s flexible and you have some fetish revolving around girls who can do the splits and suck cock. ”
A passing Beta in a track jacket nearly tripped over the curb.
“That’s not true,” Angelo said, but the denial was weak. Watered-down. The vocal equivalent of skim milk pretending to be whole.
I uncrossed my arms, planted both hands on my hips, and leveled him with a glare that had once made a senior judge at the U.S. Figure Skating Sectionals excuse himself to get a glass of water mid-score announcement.
Angelo lasted approximately four seconds under it.
“Fuck—okay, okay.” He scrubbed the back of his neck with one hand, his jaw tight. “You’re right. I’ve got… a bit of a thing for flexible women. I’ll own that. But do you see me hitting on you?”
I tilted my head. Just slightly. The way a cat tilts its head before deciding whether to destroy something.
He groaned—deep, guttural, genuinely pained.
“Listen. If it wasn’t because you’re a terrifying fucking force of nature when we’re on the ice, I would’ve made a pass at you a long time ago.
But also—” He swallowed. Actually swallowed.
“That douche you used to be involved with threatened to disembowel me if I tried to make a move on you. So I’ve been following the rules. ”
Every cell in my body went rigid.
Don’t say his name. Don’t you dare—
“That was five years ago,” I said, and the words came out sharp enough to cut glass.
Kael S?rensen.
He usually went by Kai, because apparently even his name had to be abbreviated to accommodate the oversized ego housed inside that six-foot-four frame of pure, unrepentant Alpha arrogance.
The mere mention of him—not even by name, just by implication, by the shadow of his existence drifting into a conversation I was already losing patience with—sent a wave of something hot and acidic crawling up the back of my throat.
Kael S?rensen was the kind of Alpha that poets wrote sonnets about and therapists built retirement funds on.
Broad shoulders that blocked doorways. A jaw that could’ve been carved by someone with a personal vendetta against soft features.
Platinum hair that he wore slightly too long, always falling into those pale, storm-colored eyes that had a way of making you feel like you were being studied, cataloged, and filed under mine in the span of a single glance.
He was also the single most overprotective, possessive, territorial, growling waste of exceptional bone structure I’d ever had the catastrophic judgment to get between the sheets with.
And the only reason we’d ended up tangled together in the first place was the sheer, undeniable physics of it.
Massive Alpha. Petite Omega. A dynamic so textbook it was practically a case study.
I’d been twenty years old, freshly enrolled in my first elite training program, navigating the hormonal minefield of a body that had spent years being suppressed by competition-grade heat blockers.
My sexual history prior to Kael had been—politely—underwhelming.
A Beta in college who treated foreplay like a speed run.
A fumbling encounter with another Omega during heat week that had been more confusing than satisfying.
And then Kael.
Kael, who fucked like it was a performance art piece he’d been rehearsing his entire life.
Kael, who could make me forget my name, my ranking, and the entire governing body of the International Skating Union with one hand on my hip and his mouth against my neck.
Kael, who was the blessing my body had been begging for—the kind of ruthless, thorough, bone-deep satisfaction that required a minimum of five business days of recovery time and left me walking like I’d just dismounted a particularly aggressive mechanical bull.
God, he was good.
For a cold, emotionally constipated bastard with an ego the size of the Western Hemisphere, the man was devastatingly good.
But that was then. We’d “broken up”—or whatever version of that story he told potential hookups to keep his options open—and in the aftermath, Kael had apparently decided that the appropriate post-breakup protocol was to declare me permanently off-limits to every Alpha in a five-hundred-mile radius.
Not through conversation. Not through any reasonable, adult exchange of boundaries.
No. Through the time-honored Alpha tradition of low growls, direct eye contact, and the occasional heavily implied threat of physical violence directed at anyone whose gaze lingered on me for more than three consecutive seconds.
Bastard.
Five years. I hadn’t seen Kael S?rensen in five years, and his shadow still clung to me like a cologne I couldn’t scrub off.
I’d moved on. At least, I’d tried. And one memorably disastrous date with a figure skating choreographer who’d spent the entire dinner asking if Kael and I were really done or if this was just “a break.”
The common thread? Alpha hockey players—and Alphas in general—had an abysmal track record when it came to committing to anything that existed off the ice.
They’d die for their team. They’d bleed for a puck.
They’d sacrifice their bodies in ways that made orthopedic surgeons weep.
But ask them to show up on time for dinner, or text back within a reasonable window, or acknowledge that their partner’s career had value equal to their own?
Crickets.
Did I understand it? Fuck yeah. The competitive drive, the tunnel vision, the way the ice became a world that made everything else feel muted and secondary—I lived that.
But understanding something didn’t mean accepting it.
And it certainly didn’t mean tolerating a man who’d heightened every expectation my body had about what sex could be and then vanished like he’d never existed.
Don’t waste my time if you’re not ready to commit. Simple rule. Revolutionary concept.
Angelo must have read the murder forming behind my eyes, because he shifted his weight backward—a subtle, instinctive retreat that Alphas only performed when they recognized a threat they couldn’t outmuscle.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and for once, the apology didn’t sound rehearsed. “Look—I’ll get on my knees right here and beg if that’s what it takes.”
I glanced at the frozen asphalt beneath his bare feet, then back at his face. “The cement would be good for those knees, since you clearly do more bending and begging to lick coochie than getting your legs on the ice to practice with me.”
His mouth twitched. The faintest ghost of a smirk that he immediately smothered when he caught my expression.
“I’ll take it seriously,” he said. “I promise you. For real this time.”
I studied him. Searched those amber eyes for the lie I’d grown accustomed to finding there—the charming deflection, the easy grin that said trust me while meaning forgive me.
But what I found instead was something rawer.
Strained. The expression of someone who knew he was one excuse away from losing the only partner willing to drag his ass to the Olympics.
I exhaled. Long, slow, visible in the cold air like a white flag neither of us acknowledged.
“One more shot,” I said. My voice was steady.
Non-negotiable. “You show up, Angelo. We need to run through the program start to finish—just once, clean, no missed elements—to have a shot at nailing the qualifying evaluation. That means the side-by-side triple Lutzes land clean. That means the death spiral entry is smooth and your grip doesn’t slip on the exit.
That means the throw triple Salchow hits full rotation and I don’t end up compensating for your launch angle because you skipped leg day for a week and a half. ”
His jaw tightened at the last part, but he nodded. Hard. Definitive.
“I’ll be there,” he said. “One hundred percent. Seven a.m. Rink Three. I’ll even bring coffee.”
“I don’t want your coffee. I want your commitment.”
“You’ll have both.”
I held his gaze for three more seconds—long enough to make the promise feel carved in stone rather than scribbled on a napkin—and then stepped around him. My shoulder didn’t brush his. I made sure of it.