Chapter 29
Game Plan
~OCTAVIA~
“The gold medal isn’t the finish line. It’s the starting gun for everything that comes after.”
“USA GOT INTO THE WINTER OLYMPICS!”
Candy’s scream hit the dorm room at a frequency that sent the coffee mug on my desk vibrating toward the edge in a slow, terror-motivated migration.
She was standing three feet from the television—the modest, wall-mounted screen that the dormitory administration had provided and that Candy had immediately commandeered as her personal news, competition replay, and reality-show-binge apparatus—with both hands pressed to the sides of her face in the classic, universally recognized posture of a woman experiencing an emotional event that her body could not contain without the structural support of her own palms.
Her wild strawberry, fresh-cut grass, and warm cinnamon scent had spiked to celebration levels—the bright, sweet, top-note dominant profile that her Omega pheromones produced when happiness exceeded a specific threshold and began broadcasting itself at a volume that adjacent rooms could probably detect.
Her ginger hair was in its post-training bun—messy, secured by two elastic bands and a prayer—and she was still wearing her Prague Gymnastics Academy hoodie, which had become, in the weeks since our arrival at Olympia, less a garment and more a second skin that she removed only for competition and sleep.
I paused.
My attention had been occupied by the stack of documents spread across the desk in front of me—the official training schedule that Olympia Academy’s figure skating division had released that morning with the institutional efficiency of a machine that produced paperwork the way a Zamboni produced smooth ice: relentlessly, on schedule, and in quantities that exceeded any individual’s capacity to process without pharmaceutical assistance.
The schedule was dense. Color-coded. Organized by discipline, tier, and session type with the meticulous, slightly aggressive specificity of a program that viewed free time as a resource to be eliminated rather than a condition to be preserved.
My name appeared in fourteen separate blocks across the weekly grid: solo practice sessions in Rink Four on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings from six to eight-thirty.
Pairs training with—the schedule listed Petrov, L.
as my designated partner, which meant the registration had been formalized and the bureaucratic fiction we’d constructed at the audition was now institutional fact—in Rink Two on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday afternoons from one to four.
Conditioning blocks. Choreography workshops.
Technical review sessions with video playback.
And the notation that had caught my attention before Candy’s screaming interrupted my reading:
Assigned Coach: Ms. A. Foxwood (Figure Skating, Omega Division)
A new coach. Assigned specifically to me—or rather, assigned specifically to the Omega competitors in the figure skating program, of which I was apparently the most prominent recipient of her attention, given that my name occupied the majority of her session grid.
Ms. Foxwood. The name was unfamiliar—no federation history I could recall, no competition circuit recognition, no hallway encounter since my arrival at Olympia that had produced an introduction.
She was apparently a recent addition to the coaching staff, recruited for the Winter Games preparation cycle, and she would be partnering with Coach Mercer from the hockey program.
Partnering with Coach Mercer.
The collaborative coaching structure was a significant operational detail.
If the figure skating and hockey coaching staff were coordinating training activities, it meant shared scheduling, shared ice time, and the institutional acknowledgment that my dual-discipline arrangement with Luka—figure skating pairs by day, hockey goaltending by evening—required logistical coordination between the programs rather than the separate, independent, pretend-the-other-discipline-doesn’t-exist approach that most Olympic training facilities employed.
The collaboration would make my life substantially easier.
Shared sessions meant fewer scheduling conflicts.
Coordinated ice time meant Luka could transition between disciplines without the chaotic, ad-hoc, sprint-from-one-rink-to-another scramble that had characterized our arrangement since the audition.
This might actually work.
I looked at the television.
The academy’s internal broadcast was running the qualifying match recap—the highlight package assembled from the Ironcrest team’s second-half performance, which had apparently been dramatic enough to warrant the kind of extended, multiple-replay, analysis-heavy coverage that the academy news channel normally reserved for championship events rather than preliminary qualifiers.
“You realize,” I said, not looking away from the screen, “USA was going to get in regardless. The qualifying pathway was structured to advance both finalists, so the match was for seeding position, not survival.”
Candy laughed. The sound bright, dismissive, carrying the specific, I-know-the-regulations-and-I-don’t-care energy of a woman whose emotional investment in the outcome was not contingent on its competitive necessity. “Yes, but LOOK.” She jabbed a finger at the screen. “Your boyfriends are on air!”
I rolled my eyes. The gesture was comprehensive, full-orbital, and accompanied by the specific, exhausted sigh of a woman who had been correcting this particular mischaracterization with decreasing energy and increasing futility for the past week.
“They are not my boyfriends.”
Candy’s grin was incandescent. “Okay. Your new ‘fake’ pack, or whatever you keep insisting this arrangement is about.” She made air quotes around fake with the theatrical emphasis of a woman who had observed the evidence—the hickeys, the heat, the four Alphas whose combined scent had been lingering in the dormitory corridor for days and generating speculation among the Omega wing’s residents that ranged from impressed to jealous to clinically curious—and had concluded that the adjective fake was doing a heroic amount of load-bearing in a sentence that the facts did not support.
I turned to the screen.
And she was right. They were on it.
The footage was from the post-match ice—the Ironcrest roster celebrating what the broadcast graphics identified as a come-from-behind victory that had overturned a three-goal first-half deficit to secure the top qualifying seed for the USA’s Winter Games hockey program.
The chyron running beneath the footage declared it a historic result—the first time an Olympia Academy team had qualified in the top position, a distinction that the broadcast was treating with the gravity of a national achievement and that the commentators were analyzing with the breathless, superlative-heavy enthusiasm of men whose job required them to transform athletic accomplishment into narrative spectacle.
But my eyes weren’t on the scoreline or the graphics or the commentators’ analysis.
They were on the two figures the camera had chosen to frame in its closing shot—centered, intimate, the lens drawing a boundary around the two of them that excluded the celebrating teammates and created, within the broadcast frame, a portrait.
Kael and Luka.
Side by side. Still in full gear. Kael’s platinum-blonde hair dark with sweat, his expression carrying the specific, composed, I-just-won-something-and-I’m-not-going-to-smile-about-it neutrality that he deployed in every public context—the frosted-pine exterior locked into place, the captain’s mask reassembled after whatever had occurred during the match that had required its temporary removal.
He was rolling his eyes at something the camera hadn’t captured—the characteristic, full-orbital rotation that I recognized as his primary communication mechanism for situations he found beneath his engagement.
And Luka. Beside him. Smirking. The real one—the quarter-turn, eyes-included, I-know-something-the-camera-doesn’t expression that I’d seen him deploy at the bar, on the dance floor, in the doorway of a rink at dawn.
He was in full goalie gear—the pads and chest protector and the blocker still strapped to his hand, the equipment marking him as the man who had been between the pipes for the second half.
The starting goaltender for the qualifying match that had just secured Ironcrest’s top seed.
He actually did it. He stepped into the crease mid-game, after whatever happened with the other goaltender, and played the second half at starting-caliber level while simultaneously maintaining his position as my figure skating partner.
The dual-discipline arrangement that everyone called reckless is now backed by a qualifying victory and three perfect tens.
They shared a look.
On camera. In the broadcast frame. The kind of eye contact that carried more data than the commentators’ analysis and that the camera operator had instinctively held on because the visual was magnetic—two men whose body language communicated a frequency that the audience could feel even through a screen, the charged, loaded, the-thing-between-us-is-visible-from-space energy that their proximity consistently produced and that approximately zero of their efforts at concealment had successfully diminished.
Candy whistled.
Low. Appreciative. The specific, impressed-and-slightly-awed vocalization that she produced when encountering evidence of chemistry that exceeded her already generous threshold for what she considered notable.
“Damn. Those two have intense energy. Like you and Luka, except…different. Slower. More combative. Like two people who’ve been circling each other for years and just… haven’t landed yet.”
You have no idea how accurate that description is.