Chapter 81

Chapter 81

Heath and I went outside to talk, so we wouldn’t be overheard.

Right between the Skating Palace and the steel carapace of Fisht Olympic Stadium was a patch of scrubby brown grass and evergreen shrubs, surrounded by a grove of yew trees. I’d walked past many times that week, assuming it was a garden—though it seemed a bit unkempt in comparison to the rest of the manicured Olympic grounds, and I never saw anyone enter.

As we hurried toward it in the dark, hoping for a few minutes of privacy, I realized the space wasn’t a garden at all.

It was a graveyard. A few rows of headstones stood under the trees like sentries.

“Francesca and Dmitri,” I said in a hushed voice. “They’re working together.”

“ What? ” Heath exclaimed. Then, softer, “But what does that have to do with—”

“I think…” I took a deep breath of the bracing night air. “I think they might have tampered with your medication.”

Francesca Gaskell was rich, coddled—and the heiress of a pharmaceutical empire with labs and stockpiles on every continent.

“You think they swapped them out for placebos or something?” Heath said. “And that’s why they’re not working anymore?”

The night of the short dance, he’d left the bottle in our hotel room. It would have been easy enough for whoever was doing Francesca and Dmitri’s dirty work to empty the bottle and refill it with something else. We’d been so worried about the blood, the dress, the break-in. Maybe those things had only been a distraction, to keep us from noticing the real treachery.

“They wouldn’t go to so much trouble to trick us into taking sugar pills,” I said. “I think whatever’s in that bottle is—”

“A banned substance.” Heath buried his head in his hands. “Fuck.”

You can’t win, Francesca had said. If we won the gold, or made it onto any step of the podium, we’d have to submit to drug testing—and then they’d detect the substance, and we’d have our medals stripped. We could try to fight it, say we didn’t know what we were taking, accuse Francesca and Dmitri directly. But they would deny it, and given our reputations, who would believe us over them?

Heath paced back and forth, processing all this. Francesca and Evan must be done by now. The Russian team would be starting their free dance any second. We had to go back inside. We had to decide what to do.

“Are you feeling anything strange?” I asked. “Any other symptoms, or—”

“No. Just the pain in my back. You?”

I shook my head. Aside from my injured foot, I felt fine. Normal. But I’d only taken two pills, and none since last night. Whatever the stuff in that bottle was, Heath had far more in his system than I did.

“We should withdraw, right?” he said. “Even if we win, we lose. So what’s the point?”

Withdrawing was the smart move. But it meant all our hard work over the past year was for nothing. Our careers would end with a whimper instead of a bang, and we would never know whether or not we could have won. And what if I was wrong? The pills could have been placebos. Or I could’ve simply spun myself into a paranoid frenzy over nothing.

I swept my eyes over the graveyard. It reminded me so much of the family plot back home—a sliver of raw, rough nature in the midst of all this shiny newness. Sacred ground not even the global machine of the Olympic Games could bulldoze into submission. It had been there for a century already, and it would survive long after we were all bones in the dirt.

“We can’t quit. Not now.” I held out my hand. “What do you say?”

“I say…” He smiled and interlaced his fingers with mine. “I’m skating with Katarina Shaw, and there’s nothing she can’t do.”

“We’re Shaw and Rocha,” I said. “And there’s nothing we can’t do. Together.”