Chapter 4 #2
Platinum-blonde hair with silver-white streaks cropped close at the sides and left longer on top, those distinctive silver-white streaks spiking through the crown like frost on a windowpane.
The sharp jaw that looked like it had been engineered by someone who held a personal grudge against softness.
Pale gray eyes staring directly into the camera with the unblinking, bone-level composure of a man who had never once in his life been startled by his own reflection.
He looked like winter had decided to take human form and then been mildly inconvenienced by the requirement to wear a hockey jersey.
“Wait a damn minute.” I snatched the phone from Candy’s hand, ignoring her indignant yelp, and brought the screen closer to my face as if reducing the distance might somehow alter the reality being presented. “Is that him?”
My pulse had relocated to my throat. The scent memory hit me before the visual had finished processing—phantom, unbidden, but vivid: frosted pine and cold steel and the deep, warming finish of aged whiskey.
A scent I hadn’t physically encountered in five years but that my Omega receptors had apparently preserved in high-definition archival storage, ready to deploy at the slightest provocation.
Bastard still looks like that. The audacity.
Candy nodded, pulling herself out of the splits with a fluid motion that transitioned seamlessly into a cross-legged seat—because her body apparently treated structural impossibilities as suggestions.
“I knew I recognized him. Everyone on campus is talking about him and his pack. The Ironcrest line.” She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, freckled face alight with the conspiratorial energy of a woman delivering intelligence briefing.
“Apparently, they’re being positioned as the frontrunners for the Winter Games roster.
The coaching staff is treating them like the chosen set—first pick for ice time, private strategy sessions, the whole preferential treatment package. ”
I scrolled. More photos loaded beneath the first—additional roster features, action shots from what appeared to be an intrasquad scrimmage.
Kael at center ice, stick in hand, his posture carrying the effortless authority of a captain who’d never needed to raise his voice because his presence did the volume control for him.
Beside him, other jerseys. Other faces I didn’t recognize.
“But they haven’t filled the full team yet,” Candy continued, plucking a stray thread from the knee of her leotard.
“Waiting for more recruits to arrive from international programs, apparently. Transfers, scouted players, the whole pipeline. Olympia Academy isn’t playing games when it comes to assembling the right roster—” She paused for emphasis, letting the next words land with intention.
“Because nobody thought Kael S?rensen would return to the ice.”
I looked up from the phone. “Why wouldn’t he?”
The question left my mouth and I heard it—heard the genuine confusion in my own voice, the bewilderment of a woman who had once known this man’s body as intimately as her own and yet had somehow missed entire chapters of his story. And the realization landed with a dull, familiar ache.
I don’t know the lore.
I’d fucked him. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner—and occasionally as a midnight snack when the heat suppressants wore thin and his scent drifted under my door like an invitation I was physiologically incapable of declining.
We’d gone from strangers to fuck buddies to something that almost resembled a friendship—late-night conversations that stretched past the boundaries of pillow talk, shared meals that lasted longer than the sex preceding them, a gradual, unspoken accumulation of intimacy that neither of us had been brave enough to name.
And then we’d gone back to strangers. Swiftly. Completely. With the kind of clean, surgical severance that only happened when both parties agreed—silently, mutually—to pretend the connection had never existed.
The trajectory of young adult love. Fuck buddies. Friends. Strangers. In that order, in record time, with no intermission and no refund policy.
It was nothing like the stories. Nothing like the cozy romances I read with embarrassing frequency—the small-town second-chance narratives where the Alpha showed up with a groveling apology and a grand gesture and the Omega forgave him because the prose told her to.
Real life, especially for Omegas, operated on a different script.
One where the grand gesture never materialized, the apology arrived as a social media like three months too late, and the only second chance you got was the chance to learn the same lesson with a different Alpha who’d eventually disappoint you in the same fundamental ways.
Hell to the no.
Candy shrugged, settling deeper into her cross-legged position.
The cinnamon base note of her scent sharpened slightly—the way it did when she was concentrating, parsing information, assembling a narrative from fragments.
“I don’t know all the details. Don’t quote me on any of this—it’s campus gossip filtered through three layers of athletic department hearsay.
But apparently there was a family situation.
Financial. His family went bankrupt, or close to it, and then his father threatened to cut him off entirely.
” She ticked the points off on her fingers.
“Drama central, basically. The kind of behind-the-scenes disaster that doesn’t make the sports page but absolutely decimates the person living through it. ”
I said nothing. Processed. Let the information settle into the spaces where knowledge should have existed and didn’t.
“But if he’s back,” Candy added, her tone brightening strategically, “that could be a good sign. For the program. For the Games. For—”
“Not for me.”
I handed her phone back with the deliberate finality of a woman returning a document she had no intention of signing.
“I’ll avoid him. Completely. Every corridor, every rink, every dining hall and common area and accidental line of sight.
I will engineer my entire existence at this academy around never occupying the same room as Kael Soren. ”
Candy groaned. The sound was theatrical, agonized, and delivered with the full-body commitment of an athlete whose dramatic range extended well beyond the gymnastics floor.
“But the sex was amazing, wasn’t it?”
“Candy.”
“Plus—” She held up a finger, her expression shifting from scandalized cheerleader to strategic advisor with the speed of someone who’d been preparing this argument in advance. “You need a pack, Octavia.”
The sentence landed in the room like a brick through a window. Not because it was unexpected, but because it was true, and true things had a particular weight when spoken aloud that they didn’t carry in the privacy of your own denial.
“How are you going to participate in the Olympics without pack exclusivity?” Candy pressed, her voice dropping the playful edge in favor of something more earnest. More worried.
“The International Olympic Federation requires it for Omega competitors in contact-adjacent sports. It’s not a recommendation—it’s a mandate.
Pack affiliation verified through the designation registry, scent-bonding documentation on file, the whole bureaucratic nightmare.
You can’t just walk into the Opening Ceremony as an unaffiliated Omega and expect the committee to wave you through. ”
I know.
Believe me, I know.
The pack requirement was the invisible wall I’d been pretending didn’t exist since the day I’d signed my enrollment papers.
The IOF had instituted the mandate three years ago—ostensibly for the “safety and physiological stability” of Omega athletes competing at the elite level, a phrasing that sounded progressive on paper and tasted like paternalism in practice.
The official reasoning cited the hormonal volatility of unbonded Omegas under extreme competitive stress, the risk of unsuppressed heats disrupting event schedules, and the nebulous, catch-all concern of “designation-related welfare.”
The real reasoning, according to every Omega athlete I’d ever spoken to, was simpler and uglier: the federation didn’t trust us to manage our own biology without Alpha supervision, and the pack requirement was a leash dressed in policy language.
But leash or not, it was law. No pack, no participation. No participation, no medal. No medal, no dream.
I arched an eyebrow at Candy. “Look who’s talking.”
She grinned—that bright, incorrigible, freckle-scrunching grin that had been getting her out of consequences and into trouble in equal measure since we were fourteen.
“Hey.” She spread her hands, palms up, the picture of calculated innocence.
“I’m aiming for the summer Olympics. Which is six months away, mind you.
Six months is an eternity in pack-bonding timelines.
I’ve got runway. I’ve got breathing room.
” Her grin sharpened. “You, on the other hand, have—what? A few weeks before the winter opening ceremony?”
She let the math hang in the air.
“C’mon, girl.” Candy leaned back on her palms, her tone balancing perfectly on the wire between supportive and merciless.
“I always encourage the delulu. You know I do. I am the president of the delulu fan club. I have the membership card and the tote bag. But you are reaching heights that even I can’t follow.
This isn’t delulu—this is stratospheric denial with a view. ”
I sighed. The sound came from somewhere beneath my ribs—a deep, surrendering exhale that carried the weight of every logistical impossibility I’d been stacking into a tower of willful ignorance for weeks.
“I’ll figure it out.”
The words sounded less convincing out loud than they had in my head, which was saying a lot, because they hadn’t been particularly convincing there either.