Chapter 24 #2
“No outside visitors. Family and pack members only.” The words were bitter.
Familiar. I’d rehearsed them in my own head a thousand times—the institutional language that had functioned as a wall between me and the woman I’d been trying to reach.
“Garrison said you were angry. Said you didn’t want to see anyone—especially not the Alphas who weren’t in your corner when it mattered.
” I heard the sentence from Garrison’s mouth echoing in my memory and recognized, for the first time, the surgical craftsmanship of the lie.
“Fuck—it made sense. I’d be angry too if my dreams were fumbled by someone I trusted.
So when he said you didn’t want visitors, I believed it.
And when they wouldn’t let me in, I wrote the letters… ”
I trailed off. The sentence collapsing under its own weight as the implication completed itself in the silence between us.
I wrote the letters and gave them to the man who had already ensured they’d never arrive.
“Oh, I’m going to kill that motherfucker.”
The declaration was low, measured, carrying less volume than my previous outburst but significantly more lethality—the shift from reactive anger to calculated intent, the captain’s voice replacing the lover’s.
I turned away from her. Toward the edge of the rink.
Toward the mudroom. Toward the car keys and the GPS and the systematic process of locating a man whose address I could obtain through federation records within twenty minutes and whose face I intended to rearrange within the hour.
“Wait.”
The word stopped me.
Not its volume—it was barely above a whisper.
Not its authority—Octavia’s commanding presence had been temporarily dissolved by the revelations of the last five minutes.
What stopped me was its frequency. The specific, quiet, stripped-to-the-bone register that I’d heard her use exactly twice in the years I’d known her: once when her father’s diagnosis was delivered, and once in this moment, standing on an outdoor rink in my sweats at three in the morning, asking a question that the little girl in her had been carrying for five years and that the woman she’d become had never permitted herself to voice.
I stopped. A few feet from the boards. Looked back.
Fuck.
She looked tiny.
Not physically—Octavia Moreau was five-foot-six of competition-trained, audition-dominating, three-perfect-tens-scoring athletic excellence, and she occupied space with the sovereign confidence of a woman who had decided, long ago, that the world would accommodate her rather than the reverse.
But standing there—alone on the ice, the moonlight turning her borrowed sweats silver and her damp curls dark, her arms wrapped around herself in the specific, self-holding posture of a person who had been holding herself for so long that the gesture had become involuntary—she looked small.
The way a building looked small when you understood the weight it was supporting.
The way a structure looked fragile when you realized it had been carrying the load alone.
“So…you didn’t abandon me?”
Fucking hell.
The way my shoulders sank.
Not dropped. Sank. A slow, heavy, gravity-assisted descent that had nothing to do with posture and everything to do with the raw, undisguised vulnerability in her voice detonating in the center of my chest and collapsing every load-bearing wall I’d built to keep the guilt contained.
Because Octavia never spoke like that. Never.
Not in public. Not on the ice. Not in the bickering, combative, I’ll-die-before-I-show-weakness mode that characterized every interaction the world was permitted to witness.
Her emotions were indoor things. Private.
Expressed between sheets in the dark, whispered between four walls, shared only in the enclosed, intimate spaces where the audience was limited to the person she’d decided could see her.
And here she was. On the rink. Under the moon.
Her sad, storm-gray eyes projecting a devastation so vast and so visible that it made the entire landscape around her—the rink, the trees, the star-scattered sky—feel like a stage that had been set specifically to frame this single, shattering moment of a woman discovering that the loneliness she’d been sentenced to had been a wrongful conviction.
I didn’t abandon you. I TRIED. I flew to Toronto. I wrote sixty letters. I kept your skates on the third shelf of my mudroom for five years because throwing them away would have meant accepting that the silence was permanent, and I never—not once, not for a single day in five years—accepted it.
But you didn’t know any of that.
Because the man who broke your body also broke the bridge between us, and I’m standing here realizing that every year of distance, every month of silence, every night you spent in that hospital room believing no one had your back—all of it was engineered.
Designed. Executed by a man who understood that isolating you was the only way to ensure the destruction was complete.
I was about to move. About to cross the ice and hold her and say the things that the letters had said and that she’d never heard and that the night and the moonlight and the rink that had witnessed the best of us were demanding I finally deliver in person—
Then crack.
The sound was sharp. Percussive. The specific, unmistakable, ice-is-failing report that every hockey player’s ears were calibrated to detect and that every figure skater’s body was trained to fear—the structural warning that the surface beneath you had been compromised and that the integrity you’d been trusting was an illusion maintained by temperature and tension and neither was holding.
My eyes snapped downward. Followed the fracture line.
It started at my feet and traveled outward in a spiderweb pattern—branching, propagating, the cracks racing across the surface with the rapid, unstoppable urgency of a failure cascade that, once initiated, could not be interrupted.
But they weren’t heading toward me. The ice beneath my hockey blades was thicker—I was positioned closer to the rink’s edge, where the boards provided structural support and the depth was reinforced by proximity to the ground-level cooling system.
The cracks were heading toward her.
Toward center ice.
Where the surface was thinnest. Where the moonlight had been warming the exposed area for hours.
Where an outdoor rink in a Vermont November maintained a narrow margin between frozen and failing, and where a figure skater’s blades—thinner, sharper, concentrating her weight onto a smaller contact area than my broad hockey edges—had been carving and jumping and spinning for the better part of an hour, stress-testing a surface that hadn’t been evaluated for competitive use and that the night’s temperature fluctuations had weakened along invisible fault lines that were now, with catastrophic timing, becoming visible.
I didn’t have time to curse.
Octavia gasped.
The sound was short, sharp—the involuntary, breath-seizing intake of a woman whose body had just registered the loss of the surface beneath it approximately one-tenth of a second before her brain processed the information.
The ice gave way beneath her with a sound that was less crack and more collapse—a structural surrender that dropped her through the frozen surface and into the dark, glacial water that the outdoor rink maintained in its subsurface basin.
One moment she was there. The next: a jagged, black hole in the moonlit white, and the splash that followed was violent, freezing, and sent my cardiovascular system into a response pattern that bypassed every pharmaceutical barrier in my bloodstream and delivered a single, overriding, designation-level directive to every muscle in my body: GET HER OUT.
I was there in a heartbeat.
Three strides. The explosive, lateral-burst, hockey player speed strides that my hockey training had embedded in the fast-twitch muscle fibers of my legs—not the measured, synchronized glide I’d been performing during our routine but the full, emergency, every-millisecond-counts sprint of a man whose body had decided that the woman in the water was the only thing in the universe that mattered and that the ice between them was an obstacle to be crossed rather than a surface to be respected.
I dropped to the edge of the break.
Knees on the intact ice. Arms extending over the jagged rim of the hole.
The cold radiating from the exposed water hitting my bare forearms with a temperature that registered as pain rather than sensation—the kind of cold that the nerve endings categorized as damage rather than discomfort and that my brain immediately deprioritized because the woman surfacing in the water beneath me was more important than the condition of my skin.
She emerged gasping.
Spluttering. The purple-turquoise-platinum hair plastered to her face and neck, the borrowed sweats saturated and heavy, her storm-gray eyes wide with the startled, adrenaline-bright expression of a woman who had been mid-emotional-revelation and was now experiencing involuntary immersion in water that was approximately thirty-four degrees and falling.
My arm wrapped around her.
Under her arms. Across her back. The grip absolute—the full, locking, I-am-not-letting-go hold of an Alpha whose protective instincts had just overridden every other system in his body, including the pharmaceutical ones.
I pulled. Hard. The hockey upper body—built for absorbing collisions and redirecting forces that exceeded my own body weight—hauled her from the water in a single, explosive, strength-against-gravity extraction that left her coughing and shivering on the intact ice beside the hole she’d created.