Chapter 2 #3
The memory of her settled over me now like a weighted blanket—her untamed ginger curls and scattered freckles and the scent that was purely, unmistakably Candy: wild strawberries and fresh-cut grass layered over a base of warm cinnamon so vivid and aggressive it could disperse a room full of posturing Alpha pheromones in under thirty seconds.
Her scent didn’t ask permission to occupy space.
It declared. Loudly. With exclamation points.
My racing heart eased. The residual vertigo loosened its grip. The ceiling stopped swaying and committed to stillness.
The one person in my life who didn’t vanish.
Every other connection I’d built had evaporated in the aftermath.
Partners. Coaches. The federation contacts who’d spoken about my potential in the present tense and then quietly shifted to the past. Even Kai—especially Kai—who’d been absent for years before the fall but whose ghost somehow grew louder in the wreckage, as if the universe couldn’t resist underlining the lesson: the people built to catch you will always be the first to let go.
Candy stayed. Through the surgery. Through the rehabilitation.
Through the midnight panic attacks and the mornings I couldn’t swing my legs over the side of the bed and the afternoon I’d launched a crutch at the wall hard enough to crater the drywall and then crumpled to the floor and wept until my ribs ached.
She’d restructured her entire training schedule, moved into a sublet three blocks from the facility, and spent five months being the person who arrived.
Every single day.
She was at her own training now—a conditioning block at Olympia’s east-side gymnastics complex, preparing for the summer qualification circuit that would determine her own Olympic trajectory.
Two Omegas chasing two separate Games on two separate timelines, tethered by the kind of bond that didn’t weaken with distance but was immeasurably richer when the distance closed.
I should text her. Tell her I ate the granola bar. Tell her the vertigo passed. Tell her I’m managing.
Am I managing?
My hand drifted to rest across my eyes, blocking the fluorescent glare that leaked through my lids. In the self-imposed darkness, my breathing leveled. My pulse counted its way toward baseline. The rink hummed its electric vespers, and the cold settled on my exposed skin like a second atmosphere.
Five minutes. Just five minutes of not strategizing, not worrying, not bracing for the next detonation. Five minutes of being a body at rest instead of a body at war—
“Should I assume my diamond is dying, or are you taking those power naps again?”
Every voluntary muscle in my body seized.
The voice landed in the center of my chest like a stone dropped into still water—concentric ripples radiating outward through my ribcage, my stomach, the base of my throat.
Low and unhurried. Textured like old leather, with that distinctive, rolling cadence that lived in the space between an Irish lilt and the flat vowels of the Canadian prairies—a voice that had spent its formative years absorbing both accents and had chosen, with characteristic stubbornness, to keep neither fully and both partially.
No.
Absolutely not.
That voice does not belong here. That voice belongs to a different arena, a different timeline, a different version of my life where people who promised to stay actually meant it.
My frown deepened beneath my hand, the crease between my brows cutting hard enough to ache.
The rational sector of my brain—the sector that had kept me vertical through every dizzy spell, every vertigo episode, every moment my body attempted to convince me the floor had been replaced with a trampoline—inventoried the impossibility.
This voice’s owner had not occupied the same city as me in years.
Plural. An accumulation of silence so prolonged it had graduated from absence into permanence, from a gap in the calendar into a fact of geography.
The vertigo. The blood sugar crash. My brain is pulling inventory from deep storage, stitching together a phantom from archived sensory data and projecting it into an empty rink because apparently my subconscious has decided that today’s theme is People Who Left—
Except.
The scent.
It arrived before I reached for it—threading through the sterile, mineral-clean atmosphere of Rink Four with the quiet confidence of an uninvited guest who’d already decided he was staying.
My Omega receptors locked onto it with the automatic, involuntary precision of a system designed by evolution to identify every Alpha signature within a fifty-foot radius, and I did what I always did.
I took it apart.
The base note reached me first, settling into the lowest register of my awareness like a sustained chord on a cello.
Rain-soaked stone. Not the fleeting dampness of a passing shower on city concrete—this was elemental.
Mineral-dense. The scent of centuries of rainfall absorbed into granite, of moss-furred ruins on a coastline where the rain didn’t so much fall as reside, saturating the landscape until the earth and the sky became indistinguishable.
Grounding in a way that had nothing to do with Alpha dominance hierarchies and everything to do with permanence.
The olfactory equivalent of bedrock—a scent that communicated not I am stronger than you but I have been here longer than you realize, and I will be here after.
Above the stone: clove. Warm, amber-tinged, carrying that faint medicinal edge that distinguished real clove from its synthetic imitators.
It wove through the granite foundation like smoke through a doorway—the aromatic equivalent of a hand pressed between your shoulder blades in a crowded room.
Not possessive. Not performative. Present.
Steadily, stubbornly present. A low-burning warmth that didn’t demand attention but occupied the exact space your focus naturally drifted to when the noise fell away.
And the final layer, dark and unmistakable, threaded through both like a river through a canyon: bitter chocolate.
Not the processed, corn-syrup sweetness of a convenience store candy bar.
The real iteration. Eighty-percent cacao.
The kind that lacquered the roof of your mouth and lingered on your palate and made you question whether you were tasting indulgence or reckoning.
Deep. Unapologetic. A bitterness that existed not as the absence of sweetness but as its own fully realized flavor—one that had chosen complexity over palatability and refused to dilute itself for easier consumption.
Rain-soaked stone. Clove. Dark, bitter chocolate.
There is not another scent signature on this earth that combines those three notes in that specific architecture.
The hallucination theory disintegrated. A brain starved for glucose could fabricate sound—could pull a voice from the archive and play it through the speakers of memory with enough fidelity to fool a tired ear.
A brain could conjure a face, a phrase, the ghost of a laugh heard a thousand times in a different rink.
But it could not manufacture scent. Not with this precision.
Not with the individual notes arriving in sequence—stone, then clove, then chocolate—layered in the exact order I remembered, a three-movement olfactory composition as singular as a fingerprint and infinitely harder to replicate.
He was here.
Physically, materially, impossibly here, standing somewhere within fifteen feet of this bench while I lay on my back with my hand over my eyes and my heart doing things my cardiologist would not approve of.
Because clearly, what I have in common with Alpha men is their talent for materializing only after they’ve perfected the art of disappearing.
I gave myself three seconds. Three measured, deliberate seconds to feel the full weight of it—the recognition, the disbelief, the simmering, bone-deep aggravation of yet another Alpha who had walked out of my orbit without ceremony and was now standing in the same room as me, breathing the same recycled air, as if the years of silence between us were a minor scheduling conflict rather than a choice.
Three.
Two.
One.
I moved my hand.
I opened my eyes.
And the world rearranged itself around the man standing at the entrance to the bench area.
He was leaning against the boards—one shoulder pressed into the plexiglass with the practiced nonchalance of someone who understood that leaning was an art form when executed correctly.
Arms folded across a chest that had broadened since the last time I’d cataloged it, adding a density to his frame that went beyond the functional bulk of an athlete and into the territory of a body that had been tested and rebuilt and tested again.
He’d always been constructed like a fortress—six-two, heavy with the kind of compact, impact-absorbing muscle that goalies accumulated like armor over years of absorbing slap shots and hip checks and the full-speed collisions of forwards who forgot that the crease had a guardian—but the years had refined him.
Hardened the edges. Replaced the leanness of his early twenties with the settled, deliberate solidity of a man who’d spent time in difficult places and returned from them knowing precisely what he was prepared to defend.
His hair was different. Dramatically, strikingly different.
The near-black I remembered—dark as a rink at midnight, usually hidden beneath a helmet or a beanie or the hood of whatever oversized sweatshirt he’d claimed from a teammate’s locker—had been replaced by a rich, dimensional blend of deep navy blue and dark purple that caught the fluorescent light and fractured it into flashes of indigo and plum.
Longer on top, cropped close at the sides, falling across his forehead in a sweep that walked the razor’s edge between careless and architectural.
The kind of hair color that looked like a night sky deciding whether to commit to dusk or midnight and choosing both.
And beneath that sweep of navy-purple—fixed on me with the patient, unblinking precision of a man whose entire career was built on reading trajectories before anyone else in the arena had finished reacting—were those eyes.
Green.
Not the gentle, leaf-dappled green of something growing in soft soil.
Not the bright, crystalline green of a gemstone set under showroom lights.
This was the green of deep water moving over dark stone—shifting, luminous, lit from beneath by an internal source you couldn’t locate no matter how long you looked.
Quiet and relentless. The kind of green that watched you with the composure of someone who had already observed everything worth noting and was simply waiting for you to catch up.
A goaltender’s eyes. Built for tracking. Built for patience. Built for the specific brand of still, consuming focus that could read a shooter’s hip angle from forty feet away and translate it into a save before the puck left the blade.
Those eyes were aimed directly at me.
And his mouth—that familiar, devastating, infuriatingly specific mouth—was curved into the smirk.
Not a grin. Never a full grin with him. A quarter-rotation of the lips, precise as a blade angle, that communicated I know you didn’t expect me and I’ve been watching you longer than you think and hello, diamond simultaneously.
The softness pooling in those green irises contradicted the sharpness of the smirk, and the collision of the two—the warmth and the edge, the tenderness and the provocation, the entirely, maddeningly him duality—struck me behind the sternum with the blunt-force impact of a slapshot to an unpadded chest.
You absolute, insufferable, vanishing bastard.
You beautiful, brooding, impossible bastard.
I stared at him from my position on the bench—supine, sweating through a practice top that had been washed so many times the logo was a ghost, mascara definitely migrating south, turquoise baby hairs plastered to my temples in damp, unruly spirals—and absorbed the full, undeniable, infuriating reality of the man leaning against the boards of my rink like the last several years of radio silence had been a brief intermission rather than a betrayal.
Luka Petrov.