Epilogue Grand Prize
~KAEL~
“The gold is what you win. The love is what you keep.”
The locker room was anarchy.
The specific, magnificent, volume-has-no-ceiling variety of anarchy that only occurred when a group of men whose profession involved absorbing collisions at thirty miles per hour received confirmation that the collisions had been worth it.
Eighteen hockey players in various stages of undress—some still in full gear, some stripped to their compression layers, one enterprising defenseman wearing nothing but his gold medal and a grin that suggested his relationship with modesty had been permanently severed—occupying the locker room at a decibel level that the soundproofing was failing to contain.
“WE’RE FUCKING GETTING LIT! OLYMPIC GOLD MEDALISTS!”
Gold medals hung from every neck in the room.
The hardware catching the overhead fluorescents and scattering light in fragments that peppered the walls and the ceiling and the faces of men wearing them—each reflection carrying the tangible, weight-against-the-collarbone confirmation that the thing they’d sacrificed years for was real and hanging from their bodies.
The medal’s design was elegant—the Winter Games emblem on the obverse, the laurel wreath on the reverse, the ribbon in the national colors draped across necks that had been absorbing hockey impacts for decades and were now bearing the weight of a different kind of achievement entirely.
I’d held mine in my palm after the ceremony and studied it with the specific, analytical, memorize-every-detail focus that I brought to game film—the texture, the heft, the way the gold caught the light and returned it as warmth rather than glare. It was real.
The medal was real. The win was real.
The medal sat against my chest with the dense, satisfying heft of an object whose material composition included actual gold and whose symbolic composition included everything the metal could not contain: the qualifying match we’d nearly lost, the five defectors, the goaltender who’d betrayed us, the panic attack on the locker room floor, the kiss that had preceded the deal, and the deal itself.
The declaration was collective. Produced by approximately seven mouths simultaneously.
The hoots followed. The chest-bumping. The spray of water bottles being aimed at each other with the precision of men whose hand-eye coordination had been honed to Olympic standard and was now being deployed for the purpose of soaking their teammates.
The pride was unmatched. The specific, full-body, designation-level, Alpha-who-has-led-his-pack-to-the-summit satisfaction that my biology produced when the objective had been achieved and the unit had survived the pursuit intact.
Every handshake, every back-slap, every whooping, profanity-laced congratulation that my teammates delivered was received by a nervous system running at maximum positive output and operating, for the first time in months, without pharmaceutical interference.
The blockers were gone. Fully discontinued.
The taper completed two weeks before the Games.
My system was running at factory settings—testosterone at full volume, pheromone output at competition peak, and the specific, growing, adrenaline-fueled urge that had been building since the final buzzer making its presence known with the biological imperative of an Alpha whose reproductive system had been chemically imprisoned and was now experiencing victory’s hormonal cascade without a buffer.
The urge to fuck anything that moved was trying to complicate this grand moment.
The distinction between sour and complicate mattered—the urge was evidence the system was working, that the withdrawal had been survived, that the body Octavia had told me to reclaim was reclaiming itself with overcorrecting enthusiasm.
Maddox and Renzo materialized at my shoulders.
The enforcer’s broad hand landing on my right with the heavy, grounding, I-am-your-foundation-and-I-am-not-going-anywhere weight that characterized every physical interaction with the man whose role in the pack had been, from the beginning, structural rather than theatrical.
Renzo’s lean grip finding my left with the lighter, energized, I-am-here-and-I-am-celebrating pressure that the forward brought to every moment and that his clean-zesty-mint scent—bright with peppermint, sparking with bergamot—was amplifying at victory concentrations that my unmedicated nose was receiving in vivid, HD-quality detail.
“Thirty minutes to do whatever,” Renzo said, his green hair still damp, his dark eyes bright. “Then the live interview. Full pack.”
Maddox leaned in, his cedar-and-embers voice for pack ears only. “Our Diamond just took gold in the singles division.”
Atta girl. I wished I could have been there. Wished I’d kissed her senseless the way Luka had after the pairs segment. I was one hundred percent jealous—not of Luka specifically but of the circumstance. Jealous that the I love you I’d been building toward had been delivered by someone else first.
But with the gold medal hanging from my neck and Garrison’s disqualification entered into the official record and the pack’s legal certification filed with the government, the landscape had changed completely.
The obstacles had been removed—systematically, one by one, like boards being pulled from a window that had been boarded shut for five years.
The saboteur was disqualified. The mole was expelled.
The secrets were disclosed. The blockers were discontinued.
The pack was legalized. And the specific, detailed, already-forming plan assembling itself in the strategic sector of my brain was focused on the immediate future with a clarity that the months of pharmaceutical fog had denied me.
Whether the pack chose to remain at Olympia as training alumni for the summer Games preparation cycle or took the extended break that medalists were entitled to, the time would be spent together.
As a completed unit. Without the training schedules and competition deadlines and the six-week, locked-in discipline that the strategy had demanded.
Without unexpected heats managed by pharmaceutical compromise.
Without Garrison’s shadow operations or the secrets or the exhausting, holding-the-mask-in-place energy that had characterized every interaction since the night Octavia’s scent had first drifted through my ventilation system.
Just time. Real time. To soak up the victories and one another.
I knew Maddox and Renzo wanted that time.
Had seen the restraint they’d been exercising throughout the campaign—the deliberate, conscious, we-are-giving-Kael-and-Luka-space-to-work-through-their-history decision that had kept the newer pack members at a measured distance while the older, more complicated, more trauma-laden dynamics between the original three resolved themselves.
Maddox had been the quiet one. The enforcer whose caretaking operated through action—the Advil delivered without being asked, the headaches noticed before they were mentioned, the steady, cedar-scented presence that held the door open for conversations he didn’t participate in but supported by remaining in the room.
Renzo had been the bright one. The man whose green hair and irreverent humor and genuine, uncalculated warmth had been the first evidence that new connections could exist alongside old ones without competing for the same emotional real estate.
Both of them had earned their place in the pack not through designation chemistry alone but through the demonstrated, daily, show-up-and-do-the-work loyalty that no pheromone could manufacture and that no amount of Alpha posturing could replicate.
And Octavia. The dominant Omega who had orchestrated the game plan and executed the strategy and won two gold medals in a single Olympic cycle while simultaneously managing four Alphas whose combined emotional damage could have staffed a therapy practice.
The woman who controlled rooms without raising her voice.
Who had taken my face in her hands in a bathtub and told me to stop the medication that was killing me slowly and had been right.
Who had read my chicken-scratch letters—forty of them, apparently, saved by a nurse whose kindness had survived the institutional machinery designed to suppress it—and had converted the emotions they produced into the performance of her life.
I could fuck her now. Really fuck her. Without the pharmaceutical barrier between my desire and my body’s capacity to execute it.
Watch her take charge the way she took charge of everything—with the commanding, overpowering, I-will-tell-you-where-your-hands-go authority that proved, conclusively and permanently, that Kael S?rensen was a bottom when the woman on top was Octavia Moreau.
Deep down, I didn’t just know I’d love it.
I was counting the minutes until it happened.
Luka appeared in the doorway. “Captain. Coach is calling you for a private interview.”
I nodded, told Maddox and Renzo I’d meet them for the public interview in thirty, and followed Luka through the corridor—his rain-soaked-stone scent in the narrow space between us, the clove sharpened by exertion, the dark chocolate carrying post-victory warmth.
We reached the media room door. Soundproofed. I reached for the handle.
Luka’s hand found my shoulder. “Only you, Captain. You’re the shining star.”
I huffed. “Team effort.”
He chuckled. “Yeah. But I’ll let you enjoy the glory just this once.”