Epilogue Grand Prize #2
Then he hugged me. Not the brief, back-slapping, masculinity-preserving approximation that male athletes performed in public contexts where the cameras might be rolling and the audience might be interpreting.
A hug. Full. Both arms. The kind that said I-am-holding-you-because-the-moment-warrants-it and that I received with the initial, residual, two-second stiffness that my body still produced when physical affection arrived unexpectedly, followed by the slow, deliberate, conscious release of that stiffness as the man inside the captain accepted what the captain’s protocol would have deflected.
He pressed his forehead against mine. The position.
The one his body navigated to with the muscle-memory precision of a technique practiced since a cracked kitchen door and a mother’s hands and the specific, sacred, passed-down-through-witnessing tradition that had become the foundational gesture of every significant moment between us.
Forehead to forehead. Green on gray. The breathing synchronized without conscious effort—my body recognizing the pattern at the cellular level, matching his inhale, his exhale, the nervous system interpreting the contact as both comfort and completion.
“Good fucking job, Kael.” A whisper against my mouth. “I knew you could lead us to victory.”
His eyes warm. “Now we get to enjoy our wins being a complete pack.”
I agreed. He told me to hurry—twenty-five minutes, soundproofed room, be creative. I brushed him off with the dismissive hand gesture our dynamic required.
Then I paused. “Thanks for believing in me again, Luka.”
His eyes softened to the deep, rich green I’d seen through steam in Stockholm and through tears on a locker room floor. “I always got you, Kael.”
He left. I watched him go—the navy-purple hair, the goaltender’s stride, the man whose forehead knew the way to mine because a mother had taught him the route and he had carried the lesson forward like a sacred thing through years and distances and the specific, complicated, refuses-to-resolve feeling that we had finally, in a locker room and on a podium and in the forehead-to-forehead space where his breathing became mine, given permission to exist without apology.
I entered the room. Locked the door. Announced my arrival.
“Walk in.”
The voice registered approximately five seconds after it entered my ears—processing delayed not by acoustics but by the recognition-induced lag that happened when a sound from your dreams materialized in waking life.
Because I was staring at Octavia Moreau.
Sitting on the interview desk. She held a cupcake with a lit candle.
She blushed. Her eyes flicked to the locked door, then back to my face.
“If you’re going to stand there being a dummy, we’re going to have less time, and I need a release for all this champion adrenaline.”
MY jersey. The navy-and-white, number-sixteen, S?RENSEN printed across the shoulders Ironcrest game jersey that I had last seen hanging in my locker approximately two hours ago and that was now draped across a body it had not been designed for and that it was serving with a fidelity the original designer could not have anticipated.
The fabric hung from her shoulders to mid-thigh—oversized, consuming her frame with the specific, swimming-in-your-Alpha’s-clothing visual that Omega biology was wired to find devastating and that my Alpha biology was receiving with the full, unrestricted, blocker-free hormonal response of a man whose pharmaceutical leash had been removed and whose body was operating at factory specifications for the first time in two and a half years.
She was naked beneath it. I knew because she was cross-legged on the desk and the jersey’s hem had risen to a position that revealed the glistening evidence of her arousal—her Omega chemistry responding to the combination of victory and proximity and the pack-bond, my-Alpha-is-here pheromone cascade.
The scent hit my unmedicated receptors at maximum resolution—sweet, warm, deep, carrying layers the blockers had been muting for years and that I was now receiving in high definition for the first time.
Rich. Complex. Extraordinary. Each note filed, stored, added to the archive where I kept the things about her that mattered most.
She giggled. Lifted her legs onto the desk, leaned back, spread her thighs with deliberate authority.
The jersey rode higher. The real dessert presented itself.
“If you don’t come claim your Olympic dessert, I’m eating this cupcake myself and finding someone else. Twenty-five minutes. Choose wisely.”
I scrambled. The movement was less captain’s-stride and more urgent, graceless lunge—one near-collision with a rolling chair, one foot catching a cable, and a final, momentum-correcting arrival at the desk that brought my face to approximately the altitude of the dessert that was not the cupcake.
She laughed. Full. Bright. The sound echoing off the soundproofed walls—warm, delighted, fundamentally Octavia.
“Fucking yes,” I groaned, the words arriving from the base of my chest where the blockers had been suppressing every primal response for two and a half years. “I’ve been desperate for this.”
She held a cupcake. A single cupcake with a candle—the small, birthday-style variety whose flame flickered in the media room’s still air and whose presence beside an aroused Omega in a stolen hockey jersey suggested a celebration whose format the IOC had not included in its approved post-competition activities list. The tableau was absurd. Magnificent.
The most Octavia thing I had ever witnessed—the combination of deliberate seduction and baked goods, of strategic vulnerability and a candle that needed blowing out, of a woman who had won two Olympic gold medals in a single day and whose victory celebration involved stealing her Alpha’s jersey, sitting on a desk in a soundproof room, and daring him to claim the prize she’d been withholding for months with the patience of a strategist and the timing of a woman whose sense of occasion was impeccable.
But I didn’t dive in. Despite the urgency.
My hands found her face instead. Cupped her jaw—the way Luka had cupped mine on a locker room floor, the way my mother had cupped mine in a kitchen. The hold of the people who mattered, before the intimacy of action.
And I kissed her. The most passionate kiss she’d ever received from me—I knew this with absolute certainty because every previous kiss between us had been filtered through the blockers’ pharmaceutical dampening.
The sensitivity reduced to approximately thirty percent of its intended output. The neurochemical fireworks that a kiss between compatible Alpha and Omega was supposed to produce—muted, suppressed, delivered through the dirty glass of chemical intervention. Those kisses had been shadows.
Approximations.
The faded, washed-out versions of the thing that was now happening at full resolution, full color, full volume—my mouth on hers, my hands on her face, every nerve ending in my lips firing at the unrestricted, factory-standard, THIS-is-what-kissing-your-Omega-is-supposed-to-feel-like intensity that the medication had been stealing from me and that this woman’s presence had been demanding since the night her scent had first drifted through my ventilation system and rearranged the molecular structure of my composure.
She was speechless when I pulled back.
The storm-gray eyes wide. The smirk dissolved.
The Octaviana-grade confidence temporarily replaced by the specific, unguarded, you-just-exceeded-my-expectations expression that I had seen from her approximately never, because exceeding Octavia Moreau’s expectations was an achievement that most mortals didn’t attempt and that I had apparently accomplished through the devastating mechanism of kissing her without the pharmaceutical barrier that had been reducing every previous attempt to a fraction of its potential. Her lips were parted.
Her breathing had changed—faster, shallower, the respiratory pattern of a woman whose body was recalibrating its expectations based on new data and whose cardiovascular system was expressing its enthusiasm for the recalibration through elevated output.
“It feels like a wish come true,” I said, with less composure and more honesty than any sentence I’d spoken in twenty-five years, “experiencing this with you.” She grinned. “Unless someone tries to steal our glory.”
“Knot on our pucking watch.” The phrase becoming a vow. A pack declaration. Delivered against her lips with the quiet conviction of a man who had spent years protecting the wrong goal and was now permanently oriented toward the right one. “You’re permanently ours, Octavia Moreau. No take-backs.”
“She grinned again. Arms wrapping around my neck. Then she leaned in to whisper against my ear:
“Thank you for the letters.”
I stilled. She continued, her breath warm.
“One of the nurses saved forty of them. I read every single one before my solo performance. And it got me emotional enough to skate the best segment of my life and take gold.”
She stared into my eyes.
“So thank you. For pouring your heart and soul into those letters. And for deciding I was worthy of being honest to.”
My eyes softened. And the tension—the years-long, accumulated, secrets-and-suppressants-and-silence tension—left my body. What remained was lighter. Freer. The man beneath the captain, finally permitted to exist without the weight.
I pressed my lips against hers.
And felt, for the first time since the blockers had been introduced, my body respond with the full, unrestricted, designation-level arousal that the medication had been stealing. Immediate. Complete. The signal the system had been waiting for.
We were Olympic champions. In our respective passions.
On the same ice, in the same Games, wearing the same gold.
And now we could come together in this stolen twenty-five minutes and mean it—every touch, every sound, every moment of the connection that the blockers had been reducing to fractions and that the unmedicated experience was now delivering at a resolution that made every previous encounter feel like watching a sunrise through frosted glass.
This was the most liberating form of victory I could ask for. Not the gold. Not the scoreboard.
It was the freedom to be in a room with the woman I loved without the barriers—pharmaceutical, emotional, or manufactured by a man whose sabotage had been designed to ensure this room, this moment, this convergence would never exist. It existed. And we were in it.
Together.
Finally.
And though the journey had been hard—the panic attacks and the withdrawal and the letters that never arrived and the five years of silence—I realized, with the quiet, arrived-at-the-destination certainty of a man whose strategic mind had evaluated every variable and whose heart had overruled every objection:
I’d do it again.
Every fall.
Every letter.
Every nosebleed, locker room floor, public declaration, and forehead pressed against had taught me to breathe.
Every moment of the journey that had brought five people from the wreckage of a conspiracy to the summit of an Olympic podium and from the summit to a soundproofed room where two of them were about to make the kind of memories that gold medals couldn’t contain.
I’d do every second of it again.
As long as Octavia Moreau was their grand prize.
F.I.N.
Preorder the next instalment in Olympia Academy…featuring Candy and her unexpected pack.
KNOT ON OUR PUCKING SUMMER
(Releasing JUNE 2026)