Chapter 25 #3
“That I must have been a spare. Replaceable. Disposable. Because why else was I discarded so easily?” The words were falling now—not rushing, not erupting, but falling, the way rain fell when the cloud had been holding it for too long and the weight exceeded the capacity and gravity did the rest. “This wasn’t an error I made.
The throw wasn’t my mistake. The landing wasn’t my failure.
Yet I was being penalized as if I’d caused this catastrophe in my own life.
As if the blood on the ice was evidence of my incompetence rather than someone else’s cruelty. ”
I drew a breath. Released it into the steam.
“Then I had to come back. Had to return to the circuit and act like I wasn’t still bleeding internally.
That I wasn’t abandoned. That I wasn’t set up.
Couldn’t tell my coach the truth because he was now supporting the very Alpha who’d destroyed me—coaching Garrison’s new pair with the same enthusiasm he’d once brought to coaching mine, as if the transition from my broken body to Garrison’s new partner was a promotion rather than a cover-up. ”
“So where was I supposed to turn?”
The question wasn’t rhetorical. It was the question.
The one that had lived at the center of every decision I’d made in the two years since the recovery—the decision to take a break, to step away from the circuit, to attempt the incomprehensible, soul-crushing, identity-erasing experiment of living a normal life.
“I tried to walk away from it. Took a break. Told myself I’d be fine doing something normal—working in a coffee shop, taking classes, being a twenty-something who didn’t measure her worth in technical scores and rotational velocity.
” I huffed. The sound carried the self-aware, darkly amused recognition of a woman who had known, even during the attempt, that it was doomed.
“But fuck. How do we do that? How do we pretend the ice doesn’t exist when we grew up on it?
When our summers were spent in rinks and our winters on outdoor surfaces and our entire childhoods were structured around the sound of blades and the feel of cold air and the specific, irreplaceable sensation of a body doing the thing it was built to do at the speed it was built to do it? ”
“We grew up in this lifestyle,” I said, and the we was deliberate—encompassing not just me but him, the boy who’d been on hockey skates at four and on competitive rosters by twelve and who understood, at the molecular level, that the ice wasn’t a hobby or a career but an identity, and that asking someone to leave it was asking them to leave themselves.
“And suddenly I’m supposed to go do something normal?
Make lattes? Stock shelves? Exist in a world without edges and blades and the feeling of a crowd holding its breath while you hold a spiral for six seconds on a single edge? It’s madness.”
I closed my eyes.
The darkness behind my lids was warm. Steam-softened.
Carrying the residual, sense-memory glow of the moments that had brought me here—the audition, the three tens, the throw that landed clean, the heat that had been managed by Alphas who showed up, the rink outside that still held the echo of my edges and the memory of the ice giving way beneath me and the arms that had pulled me out before the cold could claim me.
“I knew I’d come back.” My voice steadied.
Found its footing on the bedrock beneath the grief.
“That I could revive the dream. That I would get into the Olympics—with Garrison or without. Everyone told me to accept the loss. Move on. Find a new path. As if paths were interchangeable. As if the one you’d spent twenty years building could be replaced by a detour sign and a shrug. ”
I opened my eyes.
He was watching me.
One hundred percent focused. The pale gray eyes locked on my face with the concentrated, unblinking, absolute-commitment intensity that I’d seen him bring to the most critical moments of his competitive career—the face-offs that decided games, the penalty kills that decided series, the strategic assessments that decided seasons.
Except this wasn’t a game. Wasn’t a play.
This was the woman he’d claimed through a proxy telling him the story of the years they’d missed, and he was receiving it with the full, undivided, holding-nothing-back attention of a man who understood that listening was the only thing he could offer that had value in this moment.
“So yeah.” I met his gaze. Held it. Let the storm-gray of my eyes deliver the rest of the paragraph that my voice was compressing into summary.
“I’m angry. I’m angry at the circumstances.
Angry that I allowed myself to be positioned for failure.
Angry that a man I trusted studied my mechanics and my personality and my relationships and weaponized every piece of intelligence against me with the precision of a general executing a campaign. ”
“And I want revenge.”
The word sat in the steam like a blade laid on a table—sharp, intentional, placed there for examination rather than concealment.
“I want him to see me in the spotlight. Want him to watch me compete at the level he tried to prevent me from reaching, and know—with every cell of his miserable, calculating, sabotaging body—that he failed. That the woman he dropped is standing. That the career he destroyed is thriving. I want him close enough to see it and far enough that he can’t touch it.
To lose the access. To grovel for it.” My jaw tightened.
“And no matter what he does, I get the power to tell him no. To prevent him from ever having access to me or my talents again.”
I took a breath. Let it settle.
“I want to prove I can enjoy figure skating again. Get lost in the music and the talent and just thrive. Feel that magnetizing sensation of freedom on the ice instead of allowing the past and the trauma to dictate how I move and what I feel and who I let close enough to throw me.”
The bathroom was quiet. The faucet dripping. The steam drifting. The warm water holding me in its ambient, silent embrace while the words I’d released settled into the space between us like sediment finding the bottom of a riverbed.
“Thanks to you sending Maddox, I was allowed to win. Allowed to remain in the competition.” I paused.
Let the acknowledgment carry its full weight.
“Thanks to you blindly deciding to get involved—even if you probably didn’t want to.
Even if the reasons were strategic and the method was a proxy and the timing was chaos.
You did it. And without that intervention, the Montreal brunette would have my qualifying position and I’d be packing my bags. ”
I stared into his eyes.
The pale gray, holding my gray. Two shades of the same color looking at each other across the steam and the marble and the five years of engineered separation that a single man’s cruelty had produced.
“Thank you, Kael.”
He blushed.
Kael. S?rensen. Blushed.
The color arrived at the base of his ears—a faint, warm, absolutely unprecedented pink that climbed from beneath the platinum hair and spread toward his cheekbones with the slow, reluctant progression of a phenomenon that his physiology was producing against his explicit instructions.
The blush on a man whose resting complexion typically suggested he’d been assembled in a freezer was approximately as subtle as a signal flare in a dark room, and the expression accompanying it—the slight, embarrassed, I-did-not-authorize-this-reaction tightening of his jaw—confirmed that the blood redistribution was involuntary and deeply unwelcome.
He grumbled.
“You’re gonna make my nose bleed again.”
I smirked. The expression arriving with the irrepressible, default-Octavia energy that no amount of emotional excavation could fully suppress.
“So you are a pervert.”
He huffed. “I am not a pervert.” The denial was vehement, clipped, delivered with the defensive urgency of a man who recognized that the prosecution’s case was strengthening with each physiological exhibit he involuntarily produced. “It’s the damn blockers—”
He stopped.
The word blockers hanging in the steam-thick air of the bathroom like a grenade whose pin had been pulled by accident.
His mouth closed. His jaw locked. The pale gray eyes widening by a fraction that would have been invisible to anyone who hadn’t spent months studying the microexpression vocabulary of this face at close range—the specific, I-just-said-something-I-didn’t-intend-to-say dilation that preceded the full, system-wide lockdown of a man whose internal security protocol had just detected a breach.
Blockers.
I frowned.
The banter dissolved. The smirk receding as the word lodged itself in my awareness with the sharp, snagging, that-doesn’t-fit quality of a puzzle piece that had been handed to me without the context needed to place it.
Blockers. Pharmaceutical. Suppressive. The category of medication that athletes took when a biological function exceeded the manageable threshold and required chemical intervention to permit competitive performance.
Heat suppressants were blockers. Anti-anxiety medications were blockers. And rut blockers—
Rut blockers.
“Blockers?” My voice dropped the teasing register entirely. Replaced it with the direct, no-deflection, I’m-asking-and-you’re-answering tone that I deployed when the subject matter had transitioned from banter to consequence. “Why are you taking blockers?”
He frowned. Looked away. The head turning toward the far wall with the deliberate, disengaging rotation of a man physically removing his eyes from the conversation because maintaining contact would make the evasion he was attempting impossible.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Seven words. Flat. Final. Delivered with the end-of-discussion authority that captained hockey teams and terminated press conferences, and that, in most contexts, with most people, functioned as an impenetrable boundary that the population of earth had collectively learned not to cross.
I was not most people.
My arm hooked around his neck.
The movement was fast. Wet. The specific, grappling-adjacent, I-am-a-five-foot-six-Omega-and-physics-is-my-weapon maneuver that involved leveraging my position in the tub—elevated, behind him, with the advantage of his seated posture placing his neck within reach of my arms—to loop my forearm around the front of his throat in a hold that was less chokehold and more you-are-not-leaving-this-conversation.
Water splashed over the tub’s edge. His sweats absorbed the overflow.
The position was ridiculous—a naked, post-heat Omega restraining a six-foot-four hockey captain from a bathtub—and I did not care.
He choked. Not from the pressure—the hold was firm but carefully calibrated to restrict his rotational freedom without actually threatening his airway—but from the audacity.
The sheer, unhinged, Octaviana-grade boldness of a woman who had heard a man say I don’t want to talk about it and had responded by putting him in a headlock.
“S?rensen.” My mouth was close to his ear. My voice carried the low, measured, I-am-not-playing frequency that men who knew me well recognized as the final warning before consequences became physical. “I think you’re forgetting I can kick your ass. Naked or not.”
He groaned. The sound vibrating against my forearm where it pressed to his throat.
“You realize,” he managed, his voice strained by the hold and the indignation and the deeply specific frustration of a professional athlete being physically restrained by a woman who weighed approximately a hundred pounds less than him and whose leverage advantage he was refusing to override because doing so would require applying force to an Omega his body had classified as protect and his designation wouldn’t permit, “that you’re a tiny figure skater trying to take on a hockey player? ”
“Sure,” I conceded. “Valid facts. But I have a really high-pitched scream.” I tightened the hold by approximately one percent. “And I can easily get three disoriented, sleepy Alphas in here in three seconds flat and make you look like a villain. So why the fuck are you taking blockers?”
He groaned again. Louder. The sound carrying the compressed, maxed-out exasperation of a man who had been outmaneuvered by a combination of leverage, logic, and the implicit threat of a scream that would summon reinforcements he would then need to explain his way out of—a scenario whose public-relations implications were significantly worse than disclosure.
“Can you not try to make me look like a rapist?”
The words were bitten. Raw.
Carrying a weight that exceeded the sentence’s surface-level frustration by approximately ten thousand pounds, and that landed in the steam-filled bathroom with the specific, devastating thud of a word that had been chosen not for its rhetorical value but for its personal relevance.
“Why the fuck do you think I’m taking these rut blockers to begin with? ”
The sentence hit me like a blade catching the ice at the wrong angle.
My arm loosened.
The hold relaxing from restraint to rest—the forearm remaining against his throat but the pressure dissolving, the grip transitioning from confrontational to something closer to an anchor as the words he’d just said reorganized themselves in my awareness and their meaning assembled into a shape I hadn’t expected.
Why do you think I’m taking these rut blockers to begin with?
Rut blockers. The pharmaceutical intervention designed to suppress the Alpha reproductive cycle. Prescribed to Alphas whose rut episodes exceed manageable parameters. Whose biology, unchecked, produces behavioral and physiological responses that compromise their control and—
Their control.
Their control over what they do to an Omega.
Can you not try to make me look like a rapist.
Why the fuck do you think I’m taking—
I leaned over the edge of the tub. Slowly.
My wet hair falling across my shoulder, the strands dripping onto his chest, my face appearing in his peripheral vision at the angle required to see the side of his face—the jaw locked, the eyes fixed on the far wall, the expression carrying the rigid, contained, I-just-said-more-than-I-meant-to composure of a man whose disclosure had outpaced his defenses and who was now sitting in the aftermath waiting for the reaction he feared.
“Wait…”
The word was quiet. Careful. The vocal equivalent of a hand reaching for a surface to test whether it was stable before putting weight on it.
“What?”