Chapter 3 #3
Because five years had done things to Octavia Moreau, and every single one of those things was working aggressively against my ability to maintain blood flow to my higher cognitive functions.
Those legs—long, sculpted, built by two decades of skating into weapons of muscular elegance that belonged in an anatomy textbook and a fantasy simultaneously—were stretched along the bench in training leggings that clung to every line with a devotion that bordered on worship.
The curves of her hips had settled into a slenderness that was less fragile than efficient—a body stripped to its purest functional form, all power and precision, no surplus.
And I was willing to bet—willing to bet my entire Olympic tryout, my gear bag, and every ounce of professional credibility I’d spent fifteen years accumulating—that beneath those leggings, her ass was still as firm and round as the day it had single-handedly ruined my ability to concentrate during warm-ups.
Her practice top was thin. Damp with sweat.
Clinging to the small, round breasts I remembered with a specificity that would have horrified my mother and fascinated my therapist, and the cold—the blessed, merciless, thank-you-God cold of Rink Four—had done exactly what cold did, and her nipples were pressing against that fabric with the kind of shameless visibility that made my cock strain against the cup of my goalie gear hard enough to be genuinely uncomfortable.
Calm down. Calm the fuck down. You are a professional athlete at an Olympic training facility. You are not a fourteen-year-old who just discovered the internet. Get your blood flow under control before she notices—
She glared at me.
Oh, right.
She’s furious.
Of course she’s furious. She holds grudges the way tectonic plates hold continents—permanently, structurally, with the occasional devastating earthquake to remind everyone they’re still there.
But she was looking at me. Not through me—at me.
Her eyes tracked from my face to my shoulders, down the breadth of my chest protector, across the goalie pads strapped to my legs, and back up again with the unhurried, unapologetic thoroughness of a woman conducting an inventory she had no intention of being subtle about.
Octavia Moreau had never been ashamed of looking.
Never coy, never coquettish, never performed the dainty pretense of disinterest that society told Omegas they were supposed to maintain around Alphas.
She looked when she wanted to look, and she didn’t apologize for what her eyes landed on.
Which had always made me feel like a giddy, preening, absolutely pathetic mess.
Because Moreau didn’t give her attention.
Didn’t distribute it generously or scatter it like confetti.
She rationed it like a wartime resource, allocating it only to the handful of souls she deemed worthy of occupying her line of sight—and the rest of the world could choke on the scraps.
Getting looked at by Octavia Moreau was not a glance. It was a verdict.
She rolled her eyes. A full, committed, orbital rotation that I felt in my chest like a physical impact.
“How the hell,” she said, her voice flat and sharp as a blade edge, “of all the academies on the planet, you’d choose to come to this one.”
Not a question. An accusation.
I leaned against the boards, settled my arms along the top edge of the wall, and gave her the smile.
The one I’d been told—by teammates, by coaches’ wives, by one very candid bartender in Saskatoon—softened my face from intimidating to approachable in a way that was apparently “unfair.” Eyes relaxed. Mouth curved. The full arsenal.
“The fates have decided we must reunite,” I said.
The look she gave me could have frozen the already-frozen rink a second time.
“Fuck off.”
She sat up. The motion was fluid despite the obvious exhaustion in her limbs—abdominal strength carrying her upright in one clean, controlled contraction that was pure muscle memory, pure athlete, pure her.
Her hair—those cascading waves of royal purple fading into turquoise fading into platinum ends that I’d once spent an embarrassing amount of time describing in my own head—was half escaped from its braid, damp tendrils framing her face in chaotic, beautiful disarray.
I pouted. Not strategically—it was reflexive, instinctive, the expression my face defaulted to when this particular woman told me to go away. A muscle memory of its own.
“Come on, Diamond.” I let the name sit between us. Deliberate. Weighted with five years of distance and every unsaid thing that lived inside it. “Don’t be like that.”
Her storm-gray eyes narrowed to a gauge that would have made a weaker man take a step backward. She didn’t blink.
“Last time I remembered,” she said, her voice carrying the surgical precision of a scalpel being drawn from its sheath, “you ditched your diamond in a sea of coal filled with abandonment issues.” She stood.
Rose from that bench with the controlled, lethal grace of a woman who had mastered every vertical axis her body could occupy. “So don’t try to diamond me, Petrov.”
Petrov.
She used to call me Luka. She used to whisper it. Now it’s Petrov, delivered like a citation.
Deserved. Entirely, completely, catastrophically deserved.
She was standing now, and I was in immediate, life-threatening trouble.
I bit my bottom lip hard enough to feel the pressure through the fog of pheromones and arousal and fucking regret that was currently occupying every available cubic inch of my skull, because God—God—my girl was hotter than five years ago.
Not incrementally. Not subtly. Exponentially.
The intervening years had taken the raw, electric beauty I remembered and refined it into a weapon so devastating that the Geneva Convention should have had something to say about it.
The sharp cheekbones. The golden-warm skin that caught the fluorescent light and made it look intentional.
The storm-gray eyes that held more intelligence per square centimeter than most people housed in their entire frontal lobe.
The way she carried herself—not performing confidence but being it, inhabiting it, wearing it like a second skeleton.
Fucking hell. I am doomed.
No Omega had attracted me like this since.
Not truly. There’d been others—warm bodies during rut cycles, pleasant enough encounters that served the biological function and left the emotional register entirely untouched.
Sex as maintenance. Release as logistics.
The Alpha equivalent of changing the oil: necessary, periodic, and profoundly devoid of meaning.
I could perform the mechanics of intimacy without investing a single authentic synapse, and I had, repeatedly, for five years, because the only Omega who’d ever made the mechanics feel like more than maintenance was currently standing six feet away from me looking like she wanted to feed me my own goalie stick.
Commitment like what I had with her—and failed to maintain, obviously, spectacularly, unforgivably—hasn’t existed since. Hasn’t even come close. Hasn’t knocked on the door or left a voicemail. It’s just been... absence. Shaped like her.
She stepped onto the ice.
I followed. Immediately. Automatically. The same way a compass needle follows north—not because it decides to, but because the physics of its construction leave it no alternative.
She pushed off from the boards with the effortless economy of a skater whose blades were an extension of her nervous system, and I trailed her, matching her glide with the heavier, less elegant strides of a goaltender whose skates were built for defense rather than artistry.
And I looked.
I looked at exactly what I shouldn’t have been looking at, with exactly the kind of focus that a professional athlete at an Olympic training facility should not have been directing at an Omega’s backside.
Her training leggings were black. They were fitted.
And they were doing their job with a level of commitment to detail that deserved some kind of industry award, because the view from this angle was—
She turned around.
Caught.
Red-handed. Red-faced. Red-everything.
Her mouth curved. Not a full smile—she wasn’t giving me that yet—but a smirk. A sharp, knowing, devastatingly amused little smirk that said I felt your eyes on my ass from twelve feet away, and I turned around specifically to confirm it.
“Still an ass boy, huh?”
A groan—deep, guttural, the sound of a man whose dignity had been measured, weighed, and found wanting—escaped my throat. “Let me at least feast my eyes for five fucking seconds,” I said, because apparently my mouth had decided that if my pride was going down, it might as well go down swinging.
She laughed.
The sound split the cold air of Rink Four like a crack in a frozen lake—sudden, bright, unexpectedly warm.
A real laugh. Not performed, not grudging.
The genuine, startled kind that escaped before the person laughing had a chance to decide whether they wanted to permit it.
It lasted maybe two seconds, and she killed it with a shake of her head, those turquoise-tipped tendrils swaying with the motion, but it had happened.
I’d heard it. And the sound burrowed into my chest and set up permanent residence in a chamber that had been empty for half a decade.
“I doubt my partner is going to show,” she said, the amusement fading from her voice as quickly as it had arrived, replaced by something flatter.
Resigned. I’m wondering if she’s telling me the truth or trying to get as far away from me, aka her “ex” as possible.
“So I’m going to head out. You can stare at the drywall. ”
My eyebrow arched.
“Garrison came with you to Olympia Academy?”
She came to a stop.