Chapter 30 Sweet Revenge
Sweet Revenge
~OCTAVIA~
“Revenge isn’t a dish best served cold. It’s a program best skated to perfection.”
I’d been staring at the screen for eleven minutes.
The academy’s internal database—the comprehensive, federation-linked, updated-in-real-time competitor registry that Olympia provided to its enrolled athletes as a scouting resource—was displayed across my laptop in a grid of headshots, team affiliations, and event registrations that I’d been navigating with the specific, methodical, leave-no-cell-unexamined thoroughness of a woman conducting reconnaissance rather than casual browsing.
The Canadian team’s roster filled the screen.
Both divisions. Figure skating on the left panel.
Hockey on the right. The headshots arranged in alphabetical order by surname, each one accompanied by the athlete’s designation, event registration, and pack affiliation data that the IOC required for all competing members of national programs. I’d started with the figure skating division, because the figure skating division was where the name I was looking for would appear first, and because some part of me—the strategic, tactical, need-to-see-the-evidence-with-my-own-eyes part—required visual confirmation before the planning could begin.
And there he was.
HALE, Garrison T. — Alpha. Figure Skating: Pairs (Partnered) / Singles (Solo). Pack: Hale Pack. Representing: Canada.
His headshot stared back from the registry with the practiced, camera-ready, media-trained expression of a man whose public persona had been polished to a mirror finish that revealed nothing beneath it.
The jaw. The eyes—dark, warm in the photograph, carrying the specific, manufactured approachability that sociopaths and politicians shared in equal measure.
The hair styled with the casual, expensive, I-woke-up-like-this-except-it-costs-three-hundred-dollars precision that the federation circuit’s top performers maintained because the sport valued aesthetics and the aesthetics started at the scalp.
There you are.
Representing CANADA. Both partnered pairs and solo.
Which means he’s not just on their figure skating roster—he’s their CENTERPIECE.
Their dual-event competitor. The man they’re positioning as the face of their program’s Winter Games campaign, which means the Canadian federation didn’t just accept a transfer.
They invested. They built around him. They gave him the platform he lost when the US federation informally blacklisted him, and he repaid them by bringing his entire pack.
I scrolled right. The hockey panel.
And the rest of them materialized on the screen with the systematic, one-after-another precision of dominoes falling in a line I’d already predicted would topple.
Three names. Three headshots. Three Alpha designations.
The members of the Hale Pack who had occupied the periphery of my destruction five years ago—the men who had stood in the coaching zone while I was loaded onto a stretcher, who had participated in the abandonment that followed, who had been part of the machine that Garrison had operated and that had produced my isolation as its primary output.
And at the bottom of the hockey roster, added recently enough that his headshot hadn’t been formatted to match the rest: VOLKOV, Dmitri S. — Alpha. Hockey: Goaltender. Pack: Unaffiliated. Representing: Canada.
The ex-goalie. From our team. Already on their roster.
Transferred, processed, and installed in the Canadian program within DAYS of being booted from Ironcrest. The speed of the transition confirming what Luka had hypothesized in the locker room: the recruitment wasn’t opportunistic.
It was prearranged. Volkov had been operating as an embedded asset from the beginning—monitoring Kael, cataloging health data, creating internal division—and his “transfer” to Canada wasn’t a departure.
It was a RETURN. A completed mission. The operative coming home after the assignment was blown.
I sighed.
Leaned back against the couch. The notepad on my lap was covered in my handwriting—the tight, angular, competition-program-notation script that I’d developed over years of annotating choreography and that was now being deployed for strategic planning purposes that my penmanship instructor had certainly never anticipated.
“Well,” I said, addressing the room at large, “isn’t this iconic.”
Four Alphas occupied the dorm room around me in various configurations of post-victory decompression.
Luka on the couch to my left, his long legs extended, his navy-purple hair still damp from the post-game shower, his rain-soaked-stone scent mellowed to its resting register.
Kael standing against the wall to my right with his arms crossed, the frosted-pine signature carrying the residual, sharpened edge of a man whose system was still processing the afternoon’s events.
Maddox in Candy’s vacated armchair, the cedar-and-embers presence grounding the room’s scent landscape with the dense, stabilizing warmth that characterized everything the enforcer contributed to a space.
And Renzo perched on the desk beside my laptop, his green hair catching the screen’s glow, his mint-citrus-tea signature threading through the heavier Alpha aromas like a bright stitch through dark fabric.
“What did you lot do to piss off the previous goalie?” I asked, rotating the laptop so the registry faced the room.
“Does he have Mommy issues? Did his father drop him? Hell—does he have parents? Because the speed at which he defected suggests a man whose loyalty was formed on a foundation of absolutely nothing.”
Luka smirked. The expression carrying the specific, dark, I-punched-that-man-in-the-face-approximately-four-hours-ago energy that I would be requiring a full debrief on at a later date.
Renzo sighed. The exhale was long, carrying the specific, I-have-spent-too-much-energy-on-this-person-today weight of a man whose patience had been tested by events I was still piecing together from context clues and scent residue.
“Who knows what his deal was,” Renzo said, “but the fucker went digging into Luka and Kael’s past and was actively trying to turn the team against our captain.
Mid-game. During a qualifying match. While simultaneously throwing the match from the crease by deliberately underperforming.
” His dark eyes carried the specific, still-processing, the-audacity-hasn’t-fully-registered quality of a man whose strategic mind was still computing the scope of the betrayal.
“Orchestrated sabotage from a position of trust. Sound familiar?”
It does. It sounds exactly like the blueprint Garrison used on me. The embedded operative. The systematic undermining from within. The exploitation of access and trust to produce destruction that looks, from the outside, like bad luck rather than bad intention.
“Did you get rid of them?”
Maddox nodded. The motion carrying the definitive, the-matter-is-resolved weight of an enforcer confirming the elimination of a threat.
“Booted. All five defectors. Coach told them their access credentials would be deactivated by end of day and that any attempt to access Ironcrest facilities or training materials would be treated as a security violation.”
I smirked. “Good.”
Luka shifted on the couch. The movement bringing him closer—his thigh settling against mine, the warm, solid, hockey-built proximity radiating through the fabric of both our athletic pants and into the nerve endings of my leg, which cataloged the contact with the specific, Omega-receptor, compatible-Alpha-in-range enthusiasm that my biology produced in response to Luka Petrov’s physical presence regardless of the context or my conscious mind’s opinion on the matter.
“What’s the plan, Diamond?”
His voice was low. Intimate. Carrying the warm, specific, I-know-you-have-one confidence of a man who had learned, through years of proximity and months of recent reacquaintance, that Octavia Moreau did not enter a room—or a situation, or a competition, or a conversation with four Alphas about a conspiracy spanning years and countries—without a strategy already assembled and annotated in the handwriting on her lap.
I blushed.
Slightly. The warmth climbing my neck at the closeness, at the Diamond, at the implication embedded in the nickname that I was precious and difficult to break and that the man beside me had spent half a decade searching for a replacement and found the category empty.
“Why do you think I have a plan?”
He smirked. “I know my Diamond always has a plan. Which is why we came straight here.” He leaned back into the couch with the casual, full-body settling of a man who had delegated the strategic planning to the most qualified person in the room and was preparing to receive the briefing.
“There’s no way Kael’s thinking of one.”
Kael grumbled from the wall. “I’m your fucking captain, remember.”
Luka waved a hand. The gesture dismissive, unhurried, carrying the specific, yes-on-the-ice-but-not-in-this-conversation energy that he deployed when acknowledging Kael’s authority while simultaneously circumscribing its jurisdiction.
“Yeah.” The word drawn out. Accompanied by the brushing-away motion of a man clearing a surface of irrelevant objects.
“But outside of hockey, you’re clueless.
So we’re safer letting our Omega handle things. ”
Our Omega.
The phrase landed in my chest with a warmth that had nothing to do with the room’s temperature and everything to do with the possessive pronoun and the casual, assumed, this-is-settled authority with which Luka deployed it.
Not the Omega. Not an Omega. Our. The word that said you belong with us without requiring a verb or an explanation or the bureaucratic apparatus of a registration form.