Chapter 4 #3
“If I have to use Garrison for the pack affiliation paperwork,” I continued, the sentence tasting like battery acid as it left my tongue, “then I will.”
Candy’s expression underwent a transformation so swift and so violent it should have been scored for artistic merit.
“Fuck to the no.”
She was upright now—no longer casually folded into a stretch but sitting bolt straight, her spine rigid, her shoulders squared, the cinnamon in her scent flaring hot enough that I could practically taste it on the back of my tongue.
The strawberry sweetness vanished entirely, replaced by the sharp, aggressive spice that her body produced when her protective instincts moved from standby to full deployment.
“That bastard can stay dead in your books, Octavia.” Her voice had dropped an octave.
Lower. Harder. The vocal equivalent of a door being locked from the inside.
“He got you into this. He put you on that ice with insufficient height and watched you fall and stood there with that smile on his face while your knee exploded and your blood froze into the surface. He hurt you for life. Not for a season. Not for a recovery window. For life.”
I said nothing. There was nothing to say. The facts were the facts, and Candy recited them with the prosecutorial precision of someone who had memorized the evidence and would never, under any circumstance, allow the defendant to plea-bargain his way back into relevance.
“And if you bring him back in,” she continued, her index finger raised and aimed at me like a weapon, “he will use every single thing he does for you as leverage. Every favor. Every form he signs. Every practice session he shows up to. It’ll become currency, and he’ll spend it on access—access to your time, your space, your orbit—until he’s embedded again.
That’s how men like Garrison operate. They don’t ask for the door to open.
They wedge their foot in the crack and wait. ”
She paused. Her eyes narrowed.
“I bet he misses the sex too.”
I rolled my eyes, but the rotation lacked its usual velocity. Because she wasn’t wrong.
Garrison and I had been—the charitable term was complicated.
The accurate term was a disaster with a recurring subscription.
On again, off again. Together, apart, together, apart—a cycle that any relationship counselor worth their license would have identified as a crimson flag the size of a hockey rink.
The kind of pattern that looked like passion from the outside and felt like whiplash from within.
But blame us? Honestly? The adrenaline that surged through competitive figure skating was a drug the pharmaceutical industry couldn’t patent.
The rush of a clean program—the endorphin cascade that flooded your system after four and a half minutes of sustained peak performance—left your body vibrating at a frequency that demanded release.
And figure skating, with its built-in choreography of passion and desire, the lifts that pressed your bodies together, the throws that required absolute physical trust, the death spirals where your partner’s grip was the only thing between you and the unforgiving surface below—the sport was an extended, publicly funded exercise in foreplay disguised as athletic competition.
Going backstage after a program and not fucking required a level of restraint that bordered on monastic.
Particularly when you didn’t have a pack to channel that energy toward—no bonded Alphas waiting in the wings to help metabolize the hormonal surge, no safe, established dynamic to absorb the excess.
Just you and your skating partner and the crackling, inconvenient electricity of two bodies that had just spent four minutes pretending to be in love for an audience of thousands.
Can you blame us? Probably. Should you? Absolutely. Did it make sense at the time? Every single time.
But one thing I was positive about: Garrison missed this arrangement far more than I did.
Because after me, he hadn’t been able to score.
Not partners, not hookups, not even the pity-fueled, post-competition encounters that most athletes could secure with minimal effort and a clean jersey.
The man had gone from reliable access to absolute drought, and the irony—the delicious, vindicating irony—was that it had forced him to confront a truth he’d spent our entire partnership avoiding: he wasn’t remarkable.
He’d gotten lucky with me. And luck, unlike talent, didn’t come back for a second season.
Never again.
“Anyways.” Candy’s tone softened, the protective fire banking to embers.
She reached for a water bottle, took a sip, and regarded me with the gentler version of her gaze—the one that held concern rather than combustion.
“You might as well pray to the figure skating gods at this point. Light a candle. Sacrifice a sequin. Do whatever ritual your superstitious ass needs to do, and let’s hope you can find a viable partner for the auditions. ”
She paused, letting the weight of the word hope fill the space between us. Neither of us commented on how thin it sounded.
“They’re tomorrow morning,” she reminded me, her voice carrying the firm, no-nonsense cadence she used when she shifted from best friend to unofficial life coach—a transition she performed approximately seventeen times per day.
“You need to sleep. Actual, horizontal, REM-cycle sleep. Not the thing where you lie in bed and stare at the ceiling for four hours and then tell me you rested.”
I capped the protein shake and set it on her nightstand.
“I’ll be up at four,” I said. “If I can get to the rink by four-thirty, that gives me two hours of last-minute routine drilling before the evaluation panel convenes at seven. Enough time to run the full program twice, polish the combination spin entries, and warm up the triple Lutz landing that’s been inconsistent on my right knee. ”
A beat. I swallowed.
“And hopefully Angelo will show the fuck up.”
Candy gave me The Look.
It was a specific expression—one she’d developed over a decade of friendship and refined into a weapon of surgical emotional precision.
One eyebrow raised. Lips pressed into a flat line that was neither a smile nor a frown but a judgment.
Eyes communicating, in high-definition clarity, the sentence: Girl, you know and I know and the Lord above knows that man is not coming.
“I know,” I said before she could vocalize it.
“I know. I know. But I have to operate under the assumption that he will, because the alternative is accepting that I’m walking into an Olympic qualifying evaluation without a pairs partner, and if I let myself sit with that reality for longer than thirty seconds, I will have a panic attack on your floor. ”
Candy studied me. Held my gaze for a long, searching moment, her hazel eyes reading mine with the fluency of someone who’d spent ten years learning the language of my silences.
“I’ll pray for your sexy ass,” she said finally.
A fraction of the tension in my shoulders released. Not all of it. Never all of it. But enough.
She grinned—slowly, deliberately, with the specific mischief that preceded statements I was guaranteed to regret hearing.
“Which, speaking of—this is the ass that Luka has an obsession with, right?”
I groaned. Dropped my face into my hands. Considered, briefly, the viability of dissolving into the mattress and reconstituting in a dimension where my best friend didn’t have a photographic memory for every embarrassing confession I’d ever made under the influence of tequila.
“Don’t remind me.” My voice was muffled by my palms. “The puppy-dog expression he was wearing when I walked away from him in the rink—you would have felt sorry for his ass, Candy. The man looked like a golden retriever watching his owner drive away. And the fact that I walked backwards off the ice so he couldn’t get a parting glimpse?
” I shook my head, still buried in my hands.
“You would have thought I’d confiscated his favorite toy. ”
Candy’s laugh rang through the small room—bright, warm, rich with the kind of genuine delight that was impossible to fake and infectious to resist. Her scent spiked with it—a burst of strawberry sweetness that overpowered the lingering cinnamon spice and filled the air with the olfactory equivalent of sunshine.
“Girl.” She wiped her eyes, still grinning.
“The one thing you are absolutely undefeated at is making your men walk like dogs. They crave you. They catch one whiff, get one look, spend five minutes in your orbit, and suddenly they’re trailing behind you with their tongues out and their tails wagging, ready to beg for whatever scraps of attention you’re willing to drop.
” She shook her head, admiration and amusement tangled in her expression.
“It’s a gift. A terrifying, magnificent gift. ”
I pulled my face from my hands, stood from the bed, and slung my bag over my shoulder. The strap settled into the groove it had worn into the muscle of my left trapezius—a permanent indentation from years of carrying equipment, a physical souvenir of a life spent in transit between rinks.
“Goodnight,” I said, heading for the door. “And don’t stay in the splits forever. Your hip flexors are going to file a restraining order.”
Candy was already folding back down toward the floor, her body transitioning into a pancake stretch with the boneless fluidity of a woman whose skeleton had been replaced with a series of well-oiled hinges.
“It’s flexibility,” she called after me, her voice carrying through the door as I pulled it open.
“But good luck tomorrow. Breathe and slay!”
The hallway of the Omega dormitory wing swallowed me in its familiar cocktail of overlapping scents—jasmine from the room two doors down, the clean cotton and lemongrass of a laundry cycle drifting from the communal machines, the faint, sweet musk of half a dozen Omegas winding down for the evening behind closed doors.
I navigated the corridor on autopilot, my body carrying me toward my own room while my mind ran the numbers it had been avoiding all day.
Audition in nine hours. Partner status: uncertain bordering on nonexistent.
Pack affiliation: none. Olympic qualifying timeline: a window so narrow it made a needle’s eye look like a cathedral entrance.
Physical readiness: compromised by a knee that functioned on a sliding scale of cooperation.
Emotional readiness: a question I refused to answer honestly because the honest answer would require a therapist and a sedative.
I reached my door, pressed my keycard to the reader, and stepped inside.
The room was small, sparse, and mine. A twin bed with sheets I’d brought from home.
A desk stacked with training schedules and the dog-eared paperback of a hockey romance I’d been reading before bed—the irony of which was not lost on me.
A window that overlooked the east quad, where the outdoor rink sat under stadium lights that wouldn’t be switched on for another two months.
I dropped my bag, kicked off my shoes, and sat on the edge of the mattress.
Breathe and slay.
Candy’s words echoed in the small room, mingling with the hum of the heating unit and the faint, distant scrape of a Zamboni running its final pass on a rink somewhere on the far side of campus.
Two words. Simple, ridiculous, entirely Candy—and somehow, despite every rational assessment of my situation suggesting that tomorrow morning was going to be a disaster of unprecedented proportions, they settled into my chest like a small, stubborn flame.
Breathe.
I could do that. I’d been doing that—breathing through pain, through panic, through the suffocating weight of a world that kept handing me reasons to stop and a body that kept refusing the invitation.
Slay.
That was the harder part. The part that required more than survival—that demanded performance, excellence, the ruthless, glittering precision of an athlete who stepped onto the ice and became untouchable.
I’d been that woman once. Before the fall, before the stretcher, before the blood on the ice and the smile on his face and the months of darkness that followed.
I could be her again.
I have to be her again.
I pulled the covers back, slid into bed, and stared at the ceiling. The same way I’d stared at a thousand ceilings in a thousand rinks and hospitals and hotel rooms—searching the blankness for a sign, a script, a guarantee that the morning would deliver the miracle I needed.
The ceiling offered nothing. It never did.
But I closed my eyes anyway.
Four a.m. would arrive whether I was ready or not.
And when it did, I would lace up. Step onto the ice. And do the only thing I’d ever known how to do when the world decided to test whether I’d break.
Breathe and slay on the ice.