Chapter 3
The Ghost Who Came Back
~LUKA~
“She was the one thing I couldn’t block, and I’ve spent my whole life guarding the net.”
Ithought I was hallucinating.
In my defense, I’d been awake since four-thirty, had consumed roughly a liter and a half of black coffee with the enthusiasm of a man trying to restart a dead engine, and had spent the last twenty minutes running pre-practice lateral slides in the corridor outside Rink One while the hockey staff finished resurfacing the ice.
My body was primed. My brain was caffeinated into a state of aggressive hyperawareness.
And when you combined those two conditions with five years of absence, the human olfactory system was more than capable of producing a phantom.
At least, that’s what I told myself when her scent hit me in the hallway.
It arrived without preamble—no build, no gradient, no polite introduction.
One second I was inhaling the institutional cocktail of rubber matting, industrial disinfectant, and the faint iron tang of cold piping that characterized every corridor at Olympia Academy.
The next second, my entire nervous system detonated.
The scent rolled through me like a tide change.
Warm where the hallway was cold. Vivid where everything else was muted.
Layered with a complexity that synthetic fragrances and lesser biology couldn’t replicate—the kind of scent that didn’t just register in your sinuses but colonized your blood, your gut, the primal, lizard-brain sector of your hypothalamus that predated language and operated exclusively in the currency of want.
No.
That’s not possible.
She’s not here. There is no version of reality in which she is here, in this building, in this academy, breathing the same recycled air—
But my body didn’t care about logic. My body had spent five years cataloging the absence of this specific scent the way an amputee catalogs a phantom limb—always reaching, always aware of the space where it used to exist—and now that it was here, flooding the corridor with a potency that suggested proximity rather than memory, every Alpha receptor I possessed fired simultaneously.
My cock twitched.
My heart rate spiked.
And my brain, that supposedly rational, strategically calibrated instrument that had gotten me through fifteen years of competitive goaltending without a single on-ice panic attack, threw its hands up and surrendered the controls to whatever ancient, designation-wired instinct had just been jolted awake from half a decade of dormancy.
Octavia.
I’d arrived at Olympia Academy seventy-two hours ago.
The transfer had been finalized in December—a clean break from the wreckage of a playoff season in Vancouver that I had no interest in reliving and even less interest in discussing.
Failed save percentages. A coaching staff that had treated the goalie position like an interchangeable part rather than a philosophy.
A locker room fractured along pack lines that ran so deep you could’ve mapped them geologically.
I’d walked away from that roster with my gear bag, my dignity, and a reputation that read talented but unproven under pressure—the kind of label that stuck to a goalie the way blood stuck to ice.
Olympia was supposed to be the redemption arc.
The Winter Games tryouts began in six weeks.
The academy’s hockey program, anchored by the Ironcrest line, was considered the strongest Olympic pipeline in the northern hemisphere.
If I could earn a roster spot here—prove that my reflexes, my positioning, my ability to read a shooter’s intentions from the angle of their hips and the torque of their wrists was worth the investment—then the failed season in Vancouver became a footnote rather than an epitaph.
That was the plan. Arrive early. Train obsessively. Earn the starting crease through undeniable, measurable performance. Keep my head down and my focus locked on the net.
Nowhere in that plan was the phrase run into the Omega who rewired your brain chemistry five years ago and whom you abandoned without explanation like a coward.
And yet.
Fate, you vindictive bitch.
Was I surprised she’d gotten enrolled at Olympia? Not in the slightest.
Octavia Moreau was a prodigy in the truest, least hyperbolic sense of the word.
Not the manufactured kind—not the product of a wealthy federation funneling resources into a photogenic face for sponsorship purposes.
The real, raw, undeniable kind. The kind that made judges forget their scoring rubrics and watch with their mouths open.
The kind that made other skaters stop mid-warm-up to stare, not out of jealousy but out of the sheer, involuntary compulsion to witness a body doing things on ice that shouldn’t have been physically possible.
She belonged at the Olympics. Not as a contender.
As a winner. That had been evident to anyone who’d ever shared a rink with her, and it had been evident to me from the first moment I’d seen her—nineteen years old, platinum-tipped hair flying, launching a triple Axel with the casual violence of a woman who’d decided that gravity was a suggestion she wasn’t interested in following.
Then the incident happened.
I couldn’t call it an accident. Wouldn’t.
The word tasted wrong—metallic and dishonest, like sucking on a coin.
What Garrison Hale had done on that ice wasn’t an accident.
Accidents were missed edges and blown landings and the routine, recoverable failures that every competitive athlete accumulated like bruises.
What he’d done was architecture. Deliberate.
Calculated. The controlled demolition of a woman’s body and career executed under stadium lights while twelve thousand people watched and a panel of judges sat with their pens frozen mid-stroke.
It had taken me months to watch the footage.
Months.
The clip had circulated everywhere—social media, sports networks, the grim, parasitic corner of the internet that repackaged other people’s trauma as content.
Shocking Pairs Skating Injury at Nationals.
Olympic Hopeful’s Career-Ending Fall. Watch: The Throw That Changed Everything.
Millions of views. Thousands of comments.
An entire news cycle devoted to dissecting the biomechanics of a throw quadruple Salchow that every expert agreed had been launched too low, while the man responsible stood at center ice absorbing sympathy he hadn’t earned.
I’d avoided it for four months. Dodged every link, muted every thread, physically left a room when a teammate had pulled it up on his phone during a road trip.
Not because I was squeamish. Because I knew—with the bone-deep, irrational certainty of someone who’d once held this woman against his chest and felt her heartbeat synchronize with his—that watching it would break something in me that I wouldn’t be able to set back into place.
I’d watched it eventually. Alone. In a hotel room in Winnipeg at two in the morning, with the volume low and my jaw clenched so tight my molars ached for days afterward.
Thirty-seven seconds of footage. That’s all it took.
The launch. The insufficient height. The rotation that fell a quarter-turn short.
The landing—God, the landing—the wet, percussive sound of a knee giving way that the arena microphones had captured with nauseating clarity.
Her body hitting the ice. The slide. The silence. The gasp.
And Garrison. Standing exactly where he’d released her. Shoulders loose. Hands at his sides. And for one frame—one single, damning frame that the broadcast cameras had caught and the commentators had missed—the corner of his mouth had curved.
I’d put my fist through the hotel room wall.
The damage deposit had been significant.
I had so much I should have said. So much I should have done. A phone call. A flight. A presence at her bedside during those weeks when the medical reports painted the kind of picture that made you want to hold someone and not let go until the world agreed to be less cruel.
And I’d done nothing.
Nothing.
Went ghost. Vanished. Evaporated out of her life with the spineless, gutless efficiency of a man who told himself he was giving her space when what he was actually doing was running from the guilt of not being there in the first place.
I’d seen the news, and instead of getting on a plane, I’d gotten on a barstool.
Instead of calling, I’d convinced myself that reaching out would be intrusive, unwelcome, that she had people around her who mattered more than the Alpha who’d been in her life for a handful of months before disappearing like a magic trick nobody asked for.
The truth—the ugly, unvarnished, three-a.m. truth that sat on my chest like a cinder block whenever I was too tired to lie to myself—was simpler and worse.
I’d been afraid. Afraid that reaching out would mean confronting what I’d already lost. Afraid that hearing her voice would shatter the careful, functional numbness I’d built around the part of me that belonged to her.
Afraid that she’d answer, and I’d have to explain why I’d left, and the explanation would sound exactly as pathetic out loud as it did in my head.
You’re no different from Garrison.
The thought was a blade I’d been carrying for years, and it cut fresh every time. He’d ruined her on the ice. I’d ruined her off it. Different mechanisms, identical outcome: an Omega left alone to rebuild herself without the people who were supposed to be standing beside her.
Five years. Maybe longer? The timeline had blurred at the edges, the way painful things did when you spent enough energy not looking directly at them.
But the specifics didn’t matter. What mattered was the magnitude.
Years. Plural. An inexcusable, indefensible stretch of silence that I had no right to break and even less right to expect forgiveness for.
And yet I’d never forgotten her.