Chapter 5 #3
I tried to slip free. Shifted my weight away from his chest, angling my body toward open ice, toward distance, toward the practiced, reliable safety of being alone with my own wreckage rather than letting someone else see the scope of it.
He didn’t let me go.
His arm tightened—not aggressively, not with the controlling grip of an Alpha asserting dominance, but with the quiet, certain resistance of a man who had decided he was not leaving this spot and would accept whatever consequences that decision incurred.
He pulled me against him, gently but completely, until my back pressed flush against the broad, padded expanse of his chest protector.
His scent closed around me like a room. Stone and clove and dark chocolate, layered and warm and everywhere—in my lungs, on my skin, woven into the damp strands of my hair.
His chin hovered above the crown of my head, not touching, not resting, just present.
Holding the position the way a goaltender held his crease—still, balanced, ready to absorb whatever came next.
“Octavia.”
My name in his mouth. Low. Rough. Stripped to its syllables and delivered with the weight of a man who understood that this was not a conversation he could charm his way through.
“Please.”
I closed my eyes. Willed the walls back up. Demanded that the fortress reassemble itself, that the drawbridge raise, that the moat fill, that every defensive mechanism I’d constructed over five years of learning to survive without him snap back into place and do their goddamn job.
He doesn’t deserve to know. No one does.
Not when they’re just going to disappear.
Not when the pattern is this established, this reliable, this brutally consistent—people arrive, people access your vulnerability, people leave, and the only variable that changes is the specific shape of the wound they carve on their way out the door.
“I know I don’t deserve your openness.” His voice was a murmur against the top of my head, the vibration traveling through my skull and into the hollowed-out space behind my sternum. “I lost that fucking chance. I know. And I’ll own up to that until the day I die.”
A beat. The ice hummed beneath our blades. The fluorescents buzzed their indifferent hymn.
“But fuck, Octavia.” His arm shifted against my waist, not tighter—somehow softer.
As if the profanity had loosened something in him, cracked a seal he’d been holding.
“I can’t fucking breathe knowing you’re hurting.
You don’t need to tell me shit. I’m not asking for the whole story.
I’m not asking you to trust me—I haven’t earned that and I know it. I just…”
His exhale was warm against my hair.
“I just need to know you’re okay. Or will be. Or—is there anything I can do?”
I bit my bottom lip. Tasted salt. Tasted the residue of tears that had tracked from my eyes to the corners of my mouth and dried there in thin, crystalline trails that the cold air had preserved like evidence.
And then I pulled out of his hold.
Not violently. Not with the sharp, defensive jerk of a woman fleeing contact.
With the slow, deliberate withdrawal of someone who needed to face the person behind her in order to say what she was about to say, because the words wouldn’t survive being delivered to empty air.
They required a witness. They demanded to be seen leaving her mouth, so that once they were out, they couldn’t be taken back or softened or denied.
I turned. Faced him.
His green eyes locked onto mine. No smirk. No charm. No performative ease. Just the raw, undefended expression of an Alpha standing on the ice in full goalie gear at five in the morning with tear streaks on the pads of his fingers and an Omega in front of him who was about to detonate.
“My partner isn’t going to show up.”
The words were steady. Measured. A controlled demolition, each sentence wired to the next.
“He hasn’t shown up for a single rehearsal in four weeks. His phone goes to voicemail. His dorm smells like the diving team. My audition is in two hours, and I have no fucking partner.”
Luka said nothing. His jaw tightened. His eyes held mine with the unblinking intensity of a man actively restraining himself from reacting so that I could finish.
I took a breath. It shook.
“I’m realizing I have no one in my corner.
And it’s—” My voice cracked. Hairline fracture.
I pressed through it. “It’s rather daunting to confirm in your own mind that you’re about to lose the shot at the Winter Olympics.
Not because I’m not capable. Not because I can’t do the fucking elements, or hit the marks, or skate a program that would make every judge in that panel forget how to hold a pen.
But because every single person in my life has let me down. ”
The volume was climbing. I could feel it—the pressure building behind my ribs, in my throat, in the clenched muscles of my jaw, the words accelerating because the dam was cracking and there was too much water behind it and the structural integrity had been compromised for years and now—
“And the two people who haven’t are either fighting for their own dreams or fighting an illness that won’t let them give me their all anymore, so I’m alone.
I am standing in this rink at five in the fucking morning alone, trying to prove my worth in a world that doesn’t want me to succeed—because even if those judges take sympathy on me for performing without a partner, I’ll still be screwed without a pack, so why? ”
I was shouting now. The acoustics of the empty rink caught my voice and hurled it back at me from every direction—the boards, the rafters, the plexiglass, the frozen surface beneath my blades—creating an echo chamber of my own unraveling.
“Why the fuck am I enrolled at Olympia Academy? Why don’t I just walk out?
Because no matter my talent—no matter my skill, my charisma, my relentless, exhausting, bone-deep strive to be the best and win that fucking gold medal that I fucking deserved—I was set up to fail by a jealous, selfish prick who abandoned me with his entire pack and turned the world against me as if I deserved to be injured and to suffer in that hospital room alone! ”
The last word ricocheted off the rafters and dissolved into the hum of the refrigeration system.
Silence.
Luka stared at me.
His expression was—shattered was too dramatic.
Shocked was too simple. He looked like a man who had just been handed a map of a landscape he’d suspected existed but had never seen in full, and the scale of it—the sheer, sprawling, devastating topography of what I’d been carrying—had momentarily overwhelmed his ability to respond.
I didn’t realize I’d been shouting until the echo died.
Didn’t register the tears still tracking down my cheeks until the cold air chilled their paths and my skin tightened.
My chest heaved. My lungs burned. My hands were clenched into fists at my sides, nails biting into the pads of my palms hard enough to leave crescents.
I’ve been holding that in for years.
Maybe longer.
Maybe since the stretcher. Maybe since the hospital. Maybe since the day I realized that healing my body was the easy part and healing the rest of me was going to take a kind of strength that no physical therapist could prescribe and no surgeon could reconstruct.
I hadn’t forgiven anyone. Not truly. Not the federation that had abandoned me.
Not the coaches who’d moved on. Not the teammates who’d sent their stay strong texts and then stopped texting.
Not Garrison, who’d engineered my destruction and profited from my sympathy.
Not Kael, who’d vanished before the fall.
Not Luka, who’d vanished after. Not my mother, whose calls had lasted four minutes and felt like invoices.
Not myself.
For trusting any of them.
I unclenched my fists. Let out a huff—one sharp, emptied exhale that carried the last of the pressure and left me feeling hollow rather than relieved. Scraped clean rather than healed.
I turned away from him.
“I just have to accept that I’m fucked,” I said, and my voice was flat now.
Wrung out. The aftermath of a storm that had spent itself.
“I’ll go in there. I’ll perform solo. I’ll be humiliated in front of the evaluation panel for showing up to a pairs audition without a partner.
And then I’ll try again next year for the Winter Games and pretend that another twelve months of this”—I gestured at the empty rink, at the silence, at the entirety of the situation—“will somehow produce a different result.”
I was skating toward the gate when his hand caught my wrist.
Not a grab. A catch. The way a goaltender caught a puck—the hand positioning itself in the trajectory rather than chasing after it, the contact arriving with precision rather than force.
His fingers wrapped around my wrist gently, the pads settling against my pulse point, and I felt my heartbeat kick against his grip like a trapped bird.
I stopped.
Didn’t turn. Stood with my back to him, my free hand hanging at my side, my blades motionless on the ice. His scent wrapped around me from behind—stone, clove, chocolate—and his voice, when it came, was barely louder than the hum of the cooling system beneath us.
“Show me the routine.”
I turned my head. Looked at him over my shoulder—one slow, guarded, measuring glance from storm-gray eyes that had cried themselves dry and weren’t sure they had the reserves to trust the thing being offered.
We stared at each other.
The fluorescent lights hummed. The ice gleamed. His green eyes held mine with the steady, patient intensity of a man who had positioned himself exactly where he needed to be and was prepared to wait for as long as the play took to develop.
“You can’t help me,” I whispered.
“I didn’t ask that.” His thumb shifted against my wrist. A small motion—a micro-adjustment, a recalibration of pressure. The goaltender’s instinct: read the trajectory, adjust the angle, hold the position. “I simply asked you to show me the routine.”
I faced forward again. Stared at the ice stretching out before me—blank, scarred, waiting. The surface I’d bled on and fallen on and rebuilt myself on, one edge at a time, for two decades.
He wasn’t offering to fix it. Wasn’t promising a partner or a pack or a solution to the logistical catastrophe that was about to unfold in one hundred and eight minutes.
He was asking to see the work. The program.
The four-and-a-half-minute accumulation of every skill and every scar that I’d poured into a routine no one had bothered to watch.
And the truth—the quiet, grudging, inconvenient truth that I didn’t want to acknowledge but couldn’t deny—was that Luka Petrov had always paid attention.
Even when he’d been terrible at everything else—the commitment, the communication, the basic human decency of not disappearing from someone’s life without explanation—he had watched my skating with a focus and a reverence that bordered on devotional.
He’d noticed things my coaches missed. Offered adjustments that tightened my entries and smoothed my transitions.
Sat in the stands during my practice sessions with the quiet, analytical stillness of a man studying a language he intended to become fluent in.
He watched. He always watched.
If I was going to perform this audition solo, every pairs element would need to be restructured—the lifts eliminated, the throws converted to solo jump entries, the synchronized spins replaced with individual combination sequences.
It was a fundamental reimagining of a program designed for two bodies, compressed into a single skater’s capabilities.
The kind of emergency choreographic overhaul that required a second set of eyes, a critical perspective, an external intelligence willing to identify the weak points before the judges did.
And I’m running out of time to sulk about the inevitable.
I bit my bottom lip. Tasted the dried salt of my earlier tears and the faint, metallic edge of a decision being made.
“Fine.”
The word was quiet. Rough-edged. Wrapped in layers of reluctance and pragmatism and the exhausted, hard-earned understanding that pride was a luxury I couldn’t afford at five in the morning with the clock counting down and the ice waiting.
“I’ll show you.”