Chapter 34 Gold
Gold
~OCTAVIA~
“They tried to bury her. They forgot she was a seed.”
One hundred and sixty point four.
The number materialized on the scoreboard with the cold, digital, mathematically indifferent precision of a system that did not understand what it was quantifying and that delivered the data with the same neutral efficiency it would have applied to a utility bill or a weather forecast. Six digits.
A decimal point. The segment score that the judging panel had assigned to the four and a half minutes of athletic, emotional, and existential output that Luka and I had just deposited on Olympic ice, translated from artistry into arithmetic by six officials whose job was to reduce the unreducible to numbers.
One hundred and sixty point four.
Combined with our short program score from the previous day’s segment, the total climbed to two hundred and thirty-five point five five.
Two hundred and thirty-five point five five.
My jaw dropped.
Not figuratively. Not the metaphorical, oh-how-surprising variety that people invoked in casual conversation when the surprise was moderate and the jaw remained firmly in its anatomical position.
My mandible physically descended. The masseter muscles releasing their habitual clench for the first time in approximately four and a half minutes, the joint hinge opening to its maximum comfortable range, and the mouth producing the specific, wide, airway-exposing configuration of a woman whose cognitive system had just received numerical confirmation that the thing she’d spent twenty years pursuing and five years being told was impossible had just been achieved on the largest stage competitive figure skating offered.
Gold.
Gold. The word cycling through my awareness like a skater cycling through a spin—each rotation revealing a new facet, each pass adding depth and speed and centrifugal force until the word occupied not just a thought but an entire neural territory, displacing the anxiety and the anticipation and the breath-held, stomach-dropped, scoreboard-dependent suspended animation of the last ninety seconds and replacing it with a single, comprehensive, every-system-engaged reality: we won.
Luka was already losing it.
The composure—the goaltender’s controlled, read-the-play, measured-response exterior that he maintained in every public context with the disciplined, professional consistency of a man whose job required him to remain calm while objects traveled toward his face at ninety miles per hour—disintegrated.
Completely. The green eyes went wide. The mouth opened.
A sound emerged that was less language and more pure, undiluted, designation-level Alpha elation—a whoop that echoed off the kiss-and-cry area’s enclosure and reached the crowd, who responded in kind with a roar that confirmed the scoreboard’s verdict with hundreds of voices of corroboration.
He picked me up.
Off the bench. Off my feet. His arms wrapping around my waist and lifting with the explosive, goaltender’s upper-body strength that I’d relied on during every lift in the program and that was now being deployed for the considerably less choreographed but equally committed purpose of getting the woman he loved as far off the ground as physics and joy would permit.
“You won GOLD.” His voice was rough. Raw.
Cracking at its edges with the specific, trying-not-to-cry, emotion-exceeding-vocal-capacity quality that I’d heard from him exactly once before—in the corridor outside the locker room, after the qualifying match, when two Alphas had stood in their gear and breathed and said nothing because the silence carried more data than words.
Except now the silence was gone. Replaced by a man whose mouth was operating at full, unrestricted, joy-fueled output. “Gold, Diamond. You won GOLD.”
I blinked. The tears that had been accumulating behind the competition-trained, cameras-are-watching, do-not-cry-in-high-definition discipline finally breaching the containment.
One. Two. Running parallel tracks down my flushed cheeks, carrying mascara and the residual peachy-orange blush and approximately twenty years of compressed, accumulated, I-have-been-waiting-for-this-since-Montreal emotion that the scoreboard’s six digits had finally given permission to exit.
“Wait—” I managed, my voice thick, my arms still locked around his neck from the lift that had become an embrace. “WE won. Not just me. We.”
Then I squealed.
The sound was involuntary. High-pitched.
Carrying the specific, unfiltered, Octaviana-grade, every-filter-has-been-removed frequency that I produced approximately once per decade and that Candy would have recorded for blackmail purposes had she been present instead of somewhere in the stands losing her gymnast’s mind.
I hugged him. Tightly. The embrace carrying the full, compressive, I-am-squeezing-the-joy-into-your-body force of a woman whose arms were strong from twenty years of skating and whose current emotional state had converted that strength into a grip that Luka’s ribs would remember.
The arena was buzzing. The sustained, collective, hundred person hum of an audience that had just witnessed a score confirmation and was now processing the emotional aftermath through the available channels: cheering, applauding, the rhythmic, synchronized clapping that crowds generated spontaneously when the moment exceeded individual expression and required collective participation.
The sound wrapped around us like a living thing—warm, vast, carrying the specific, we-are-happy-for-you frequency that distinguished genuine audience investment from polite acknowledgment.
They ushered us back to the ice. The medals ceremony—the formal, protocol-governed, IOC-administered ritual that transformed athletic achievement into tangible, wearable, photograph-ready hardware.
The volunteers in their Olympic uniforms guiding us toward the podium that had been assembled at center ice with the efficient, practiced speed of a crew that performed this setup multiple times per competition day.
And then I saw him.
Garrison.
Standing at the far end of the medal assembly area with his partner—the replacement Omega, the woman whose technically proficient, emotionally vacant performance had earned them third place.
Bronze. The man who had been positioned as the Canadian program’s centerpiece, who had carried the dual-event registration that was supposed to demonstrate his dominance across both partnered and solo disciplines, had landed on the lowest step of the podium’s hierarchy. Third. Behind Japan. Behind us.
The disappointment on his face was visible from twenty feet—not because his expression was dramatic or uncontrolled, but because I had spent years reading this man’s microexpressions and knew the specific, subtle, jaw-tightening, nostril-flaring, my-composure-is-handling-this-but-my-ego-is-not configuration that his features produced when reality diverged from the outcome his self-image had guaranteed.
He was wearing it now. The composure intact.
The fury beneath it radiating through the cracks like heat through a furnace door’s seams.
He leaned toward me as the medalists assembled in their designated positions.
Close enough that his scent reached my receptors—bitter, sharp, carrying the acrid, cortisol-laced top notes that stress and anger produced in an Alpha’s chemistry and that my Omega nose cataloged with the detached, forensic precision of a woman identifying evidence rather than processing attraction.
His scent had never triggered compatibility in my receptors.
Not in the years we’d been paired. Not now.
The biology confirming what the history had demonstrated: this man was never my Alpha.
He was my saboteur wearing a partner’s jersey.
He huffed under his breath. The sound low, aimed, designed for proximity consumption only.
“Must be a nice day to enjoy the fluke,” he said, and his voice carried the specific, dismissive, reframe-the-loss-as-the-opponent’s-luck register that narcissists deployed when the alternative—acknowledging the opponent’s superiority—was psychologically intolerable.
“But I guess it raises your appeal for the moment.” A pause.
Calculated. “You don’t need to stick around with that fake pack of yours.
Come back to where you actually belong.”
Where I actually belong.
The words sat in my awareness like a blade laid on a table—sharp, deliberate, placed there for examination rather than concealment.
Where I belong. As if belonging were a location he could designate.
As if the isolation he’d engineered and the letters he’d intercepted and the career he’d sabotaged were evidence of a home rather than a prison, and the invitation to return was generosity rather than recapture.
I held my tongue. The game plan demanded it.
The strategy called for ignorance as armor, for the appearance of a woman who didn’t know the full scope of his betrayal and who could be approached as a potential asset rather than warned away as a known enemy.
The tongue-holding was deliberate. Strategic.
The specific, disciplined, I-am-choosing-not-to-respond restraint of a competitor playing a longer game than the one being offered.
Luka had no such restraint.
He chuckled. The sound was warm, carrying zero warmth—the specific, dangerous, I-am-amused-by-your-delusion frequency that he deployed when a man’s arrogance had exceeded his intelligence by a margin that the goaltender found entertaining rather than threatening.