Chapter 11 Octaviana #2
Candy’s groan was operatic. A full-body, soul-deep vocalization of exasperation that conveyed, in a single sustained note, approximately fifteen years of accumulated opinion about Vivienne Moreau née Delacroix.
“Why did your father marry your mother?” The question was rhetorical.
Had been rhetorical for years. Was asked not because the answer was unknown but because the answer was so baffling that restating the question had become a ritual—a shared liturgy of incredulity that Candy and I performed whenever the subject of my mother arose, which was too often and never pleasantly.
I smirked. “It had to be the lust, because I don’t see why otherwise.”
The honest answer. Vivienne Delacroix had been twenty-three and devastatingly beautiful when Jean-Pierre Moreau had met her at a gala hosted by the French Figure Skating Federation.
He’d been thirty-one, freshly retired from his own competitive career, and newly appointed as a head coach with the kind of rising profile that attracted a specific species of attention.
The attraction had been immediate, mutual, and—according to the family mythology I’d assembled from overheard arguments and my father’s wistful, carefully edited recollections—primarily physical.
The marriage had followed within a year.
The incompatibility had taken slightly longer to surface but had done so with the enthusiasm of an invasive species colonizing a vulnerable ecosystem.
My mother was not a bad person. She was a difficult person.
A woman whose emotional range operated within a narrow band that did not comfortably accommodate her husband’s illness, her daughter’s athletic career, or any situation that required sustained empathy rather than short-term performance.
She called when it was convenient. Visited when it was visible.
And managed my father’s cancer with the emotional depth of someone managing a renovation project that had gone over budget—annoyed, inconvenienced, and perpetually looking for someone else to handle the details.
Candy shook her head with the weary resignation of a woman who had formed her opinion years ago and had seen nothing in the interim to revise it.
“See? What have you learned?” She pointed at me with the instructive energy of a life coach delivering a keynote. “Don’t go fucking everything that moves and get knocked up.”
I laughed. The sound was sharp, bright, carrying the specific frequency of a woman who had processed her family dysfunction through humor so thoroughly that the humor had become its own form of therapy.
“But thankfully,” I said, straightening in front of the mirror and adjusting the neckline of my dress with the practiced hands of someone who understood that the difference between provocative and catastrophic was approximately half an inch of fabric, “they got blessed with the overachiever me and not a party-animal addict, right?”
Candy’s eyes narrowed. The shift was instantaneous—from amused to investigative, the hazel irises sharpening with the focused, analytical precision of a woman whose bullshit detector had just received a signal.
“Please tell me you’re on birth control.”
I smirked. Met her reflection in the mirror. “Yes on birth control. No on heat suppressants.”
The gawk was magnificent.
Candy’s jaw descended with the controlled, dramatic velocity of a drawbridge being lowered, and her eyes widened to a diameter that would have been concerning in a medical context.
The strawberry-cinnamon scent spiked—a sharp, involuntary pheromone surge that her Omega biology produced in response to information it categorized as alarming.
“You want to experience that?” Her voice had ascended to a register that suggested she was recalculating every assumption she’d made about my decision-making capacity.
“You want to go through a full, unsuppressed Omega heat at an Olympic training academy populated by approximately four hundred Alphas whose pheromone control ranges from ‘moderate’ to ‘functionally nonexistent’?”
I rotated on my heel to face her directly. The smirk was still in place, but beneath it, the truth was less cavalier.
“It’s not that I want to.” I leaned against the closet door.
“Doctor forced me off. The chemical composition of the standard suppressant cocktail reacts with my current medication stack—specifically the anti-inflammatory protocol for the knee and the vestibular therapy compounds for the post-concussive residual. If I try reintroducing suppressants, the interaction produces either a full systemic allergic response or a seizure event.” I delivered this with the clinical, detached fluency of someone who had sat in a doctor’s office and heard the options presented with the cheerful pragmatism of a medical professional who didn’t have to live with the consequences.
“So I’m functionally barred from suppressant use until the medication stack changes, which won’t happen until the knee is fully post-rehabilitation and the vestibular symptoms resolve.
Which could be months. Could be the full duration of the season. ”
Candy pressed her fingertips against her temples. The gesture of a woman performing emergency cognitive restructuring.
“So you’re going to be unsuppressed. At Olympia. During competition season.”
“Yep.”
“With a pack of four Alphas whose scent compatibility with your biology you’ve already demonstrated is—and I’m quoting your own description from twenty minutes ago—” she made air quotes, “‘literally dizzying.’”
“Correct.”
“This is fine.” Her tone suggested it was the opposite of fine. “This is completely fine. What could possibly go wrong.”
“The only saving grace,” I said, and I offered this detail the way you offered a lifeboat to someone watching a ship sink, “is that I only cycle three times a year.”
Candy’s head snapped up. The motion was so abrupt it looked less like a voluntary movement and more like a marionette whose operator had yanked a string.
“How in the—” She stopped. Recalibrated. Started again. “How in the fucking lucky shit did you manage that?”
I shrugged. The gesture was serene. Angelic, even. The physical embodiment of a woman at peace with the biological hand she’d been dealt.
“I’m God’s favorite.”
“BULLSHIT!” The word detonated from Candy’s mouth with the percussive force of a starting gun.
She jabbed a finger at me. “You don’t even pray.
I have never, in the entire history of our friendship, witnessed you engage in any form of spiritual practice beyond swearing and occasionally looking at the ceiling when you’re frustrated. ”
I maintained the serene expression with the discipline of a woman who had been trained to hold a spiral edge for six seconds without wavering.
“I did pray once,” I said. “In the hospital. I told God that if I got out of that bed and back on the ice, I’d buy a Bible and start reading Genesis.”
A beat.
Candy pinched the bridge of her nose. The gesture was accompanied by a slow, pressurized exhale that suggested she was managing a revelation she wished she could un-receive.
“So that’s what that order was.”
“Hey.” I raised a defensive palm. “I am holding myself accountable. I purchased the Bible. It’s on my nightstand.
It’s been there for eleven months. I even opened it once.
” I paused. “I don’t think I’m getting far in the reading department, though.
Genesis has a lot of…” I searched for the diplomatic term. “Begetting.”
Candy rolled her eyes with the comprehensive, full-orbital commitment that our friendship had refined into an art form.
“That doesn’t stop you from reading the most smutty garbage on the market.”
“Excuse me.” I pressed a hand to my chest with the wounded dignity of a woman whose literary preferences had been impugned.
“It is not garbage. It is sophisticated adult fiction with complex character dynamics and emotionally resonant relationship arcs that happen to include”—I waved my hand—“explicit intimacy.”
“You read a book last month where the main character had sex on a Zamboni.”
“It was a very well-written Zamboni scene. The author understood the mechanical challenges.”
Candy closed her eyes. Opened them. The expression on her face suggested she was re-evaluating every life choice that had led her to this specific conversational coordinate.
“Listen,” I said, and the word carried the instructive, unapologetic energy of a woman about to defend her lifestyle with the conviction of a closing argument.
“Taunt me with a good ten-thousand-word scene showing me all the positions I get to try, or a cozy game like Poketopia with the volume off and fake rain playing on my laptop, and I am set for a weekend indoors. Those are the two modes. Romance novel filth or simulated countryside with ambient weather. There is no in-between, and I refuse to apologize for either.”
Candy shook her head with the fond, exhausted resignation of a woman who had accepted her best friend’s eccentricities long ago and had simply learned to navigate around them like furniture.
“Lord help the pack that keeps you.”
The sentence landed differently than she’d intended.
The word pack sat in the air between us with a weight it hadn’t carried twenty-four hours ago—before Maddox Hale had walked into an arena and claimed me, before Luka had volunteered as a fourth member, before the word had transitioned from abstract future concept to immediate, logistical, registration-deadline reality.
Candy felt it too. I could see the adjustment in her expression—the slight widening of her eyes, the flicker of recognition that her joke had accidentally brushed against a live wire.
She leaned into it anyway, because Candy Hollister Holmes did not retreat from live wires. She grabbed them with both hands and made them her accessory.