Chapter 6
Die On This Hill
~LUKA~
“The net taught me to stand still while the world comes at me. She taught me that some things are worth leaving the crease for.”
The final build of “Die on This Hill” by Sienne Spiro hit like a controlled detonation.
The track had started quiet—a sparse, aching piano line threaded through a vocal that carried the bruised intimacy of someone confessing in an empty cathedral.
For the first two minutes, the arrangement stayed stripped: just voice, keys, and the vast, breathing silence between the notes.
But now, at the three-minute-forty mark, the production detonated outward.
Strings surging in from beneath the piano like a tide swallowing a shoreline.
Drums—not percussive, but atmospheric, a heartbeat amplified to stadium scale.
And Sienne’s voice climbing, climbing, climbing into that devastating final register where the melody stopped being a song and became a declaration:
I'll take my pride, stand here for you. Know I'm not blind, just seeing it through. You take my life just for the thrill. Well, I'll take tonight and die on this hill. I always, always, I always will.
And Octavia was destroying the ice.
I stood at the boards with my forearms braced on the ledge, my goalie gloves discarded beside me, and I watched.
The way I’d been watching for days now—secretly, compulsively, rearranging my entire training schedule around her practice blocks so that I could position myself in adjacent rinks or darkened corridors or the upper observation gallery of Rink Three where the lighting was dim enough to conceal a six-foot-two goaltender in black athletic wear.
Every session she’d held since our encounter in Rink Four, I’d been in the periphery.
Tracking. Cataloging. Memorizing her program the way I memorized a shooter’s tendencies—with obsessive, methodical, borderline clinical precision.
She was right about one thing, and she’d been right about it since the day we met.
I’m obsessive when it comes to her.
And it wasn’t a trait I needed to hide. Wasn’t one I intended to suppress or apologize for or repackage as a more socially acceptable level of interest. The obsession was structural.
Load-bearing. It was the foundation that every other instinct built on top of—the tracking, the protectiveness, the near-pathological need to know where she was, how she was moving, whether the program was serving her or whether she was serving the program at the expense of her body.
A goaltender observed. That was the job.
You watched the shooter, read the angle, anticipated the trajectory.
The only difference between my professional focus and my fixation on Octavia Moreau was that pucks didn’t make my chest ache when they changed direction.
The final build crested.
Octavia launched into a triple Lutz—back outside edge, toe pick strike, the vault carrying her upward with an explosive power that belied the elegance of her entry.
Three rotations. Arms pulled flush against her torso, body a spinning axis of centripetal precision, and the landing—clean.
Almost clean. The free leg extended on the exit with textbook form, her skating knee absorbing the impact with a deep, flexible bend that spoke to years of jump-landing conditioning.
But I caught the micro-hesitation. The fractional stiffness in her right ankle on the touchdown that lasted maybe a quarter-second—invisible to a spectator, invisible to most coaches, but not invisible to a man who’d spent half a decade memorizing the mechanical vocabulary of her body.
Right leg. That’s the reconstructed knee. She’s compensating on landings—loading the left a fraction of a degree more than the right, which is pulling her axis off-center by approximately two inches on every descent. Over a four-and-a-half-minute program, those two inches compound.
She transitioned into the footwork sequence.
Mohawks, Choctaws, twizzles—the rapid-fire, edge-to-edge transitions that judges scored under the step sequence component and that required the kind of lower-body independence that made non-skaters’ brains short-circuit.
Her feet were doing one thing while her arms told a different story while her torso held a third narrative, and all three converged into a single, flowing expression of the music’s climbing intensity.
The twizzles were sharp: four rotations on a forward inside edge, traveling down the ice with the controlled velocity of a drill bit, her upper body whipping through each turn while her skating foot maintained its line with surgical discipline.
But the spins.
The spins are the problem.
She entered the combination spin—sit spin, transitioning to a camel, rising into a layback—and I clocked the issue immediately.
The sit position was strong: deep knee bend, free leg extended parallel to the ice, back straight, center of rotation stable.
Textbook. But the transition from sit to camel exposed it.
The moment she extended her free leg behind her and shifted her weight distribution to accommodate the horizontal position, the rotation decelerated.
Not dramatically. Not enough to draw a casual observer’s attention.
But the revolutions per second dropped from approximately four point two to three point six, and the traveling—the lateral drift of her spinning center across the ice—increased from negligible to roughly eight inches by the time she rose into the layback.
Eight inches of travel in a competition spin was the difference between a Level Four and a Level Three.
At Olympia Academy, where the evaluation panel was staffed by former Olympic judges whose scoring philosophy started at perfection and deducted from there, eight inches might as well have been eight feet.
She’s guarding the right knee during rotational load.
The camel transition requires her to shift weight onto the skating leg while the free leg extends, and if the skating leg is the injured one—or if the fear of the injured leg gives out is overriding her technique—the body compensates by reducing rotational velocity to lower the impact forces.
Slower spin equals more travel equals deduction.
I filed it. Added it to the growing catalog of observations I’d been assembling across days of covert surveillance that I was choosing to categorize as “supportive concern” rather than the more accurate “maniacal fixation.”
The song’s climax hit its zenith—Sienne’s voice detonating into that raw, full-throated final chorus, the strings wailing, the drums pounding—and Octavia launched her closing element.
A step sequence building into her signature spiral: a sustained back outside edge with her free leg extended to a full hundred-and-eighty-degree split above her head, her torso arched backward, one arm trailing behind her like a wing while the other reached forward into the space the music was carving.
The position was held for six agonizing seconds while her blade traced a long, sweeping arc across the rink, the edge so deep and so clean it sang.
The music cut.
She hit her final pose—one arm extended skyward, chin lifted, weight settled into a deep lunge on her left leg, her right extended behind her at full stretch.
The posture was triumphant and defiant and exhausted and gorgeous, and she held it for three beats after the silence fell, chest heaving, sweat gleaming on the golden skin of her collarbone, those storm-gray eyes fixed on a point somewhere above the rafters as if daring the ceiling to challenge her.
The rink was silent.
I didn’t clap. Didn’t move. Stood at the boards and let the silence do the work that applause would have cheapened, because what I’d just witnessed didn’t need validation.
It needed analysis. And respect. And a level of critical attention that matched the level of craft she’d poured into every second of that program.
I allowed myself, in the stillness that followed, to step out of the analyst’s framework and into hers.
The pent-up anger that had detonated from her fifteen minutes ago on this ice—the volcanic, years-in-the-making eruption that had left her shouting in my face with tears tracking down her cheeks and her fists clenched and every wall she’d built crumbling simultaneously—that fury was in the program.
Embedded in every element. The attack on her jump entries wasn’t technical precision; it was violence channeled through choreography.
The aggression in her footwork wasn’t musicality; it was a woman screaming through her blades because her voice alone hadn’t been loud enough to make the world hear her.
The frustration. The bone-deep, chronic, low-grade frustration of someone who possessed extraordinary ability and was systematically denied the infrastructure to deploy it. No partner. No pack. No support system that wasn’t either compromised by its own battles or absent by choice.
And the loneliness.
The loneliness I helped create.
That realization had been sitting on my chest since her breakdown like a block of granite I couldn’t shift.
I hadn’t known. That was the worst part—the part that made the guilt stop being theoretical and become anatomical, a physical sensation in my sternum that ached when I breathed.
I hadn’t known she was alone. Hadn’t had a clue that Garrison’s betrayal extended beyond the throw—that the man hadn’t just sabotaged her body but had dismantled her entire support structure, abandoning her with the pack that should have been her foundation during recovery.
He’d isolated her. Surgically. Removed the people, the resources, the communal safety net that an injured Omega needed the way a body needed blood, and then walked away with his reputation intact and his smile hidden behind a camera-ready expression of manufactured concern.
It felt like a setup.