The Favorites: A Novel(116)

Happiness couldn’t be won. It couldn’t be hung around our necks while a crowd of thousands cheered. It wasn’t a prize, something we had to suffer and toil to earn. If we wanted happiness, we had to create it ourselves. Not in one shining moment on a medal stand, but every single day, over and over again.

I could have told Francesca all that, but it wouldn’t have mattered. She’d have to learn for herself, like I did.

So instead, I wrapped my arms around her.

She stiffened, probably afraid I was about to bury a knife in her back. I didn’t let go.

“Good luck today, Frannie,” I whispered.

Francesca stared after me, caught between fury and confusion, as I walked out.

I was confused too, about why such a promising young skater would risk her own career for the sake of petty sabotage. Between Francesca’s family money and Dmitri’s criminal connections, all of it would have been easy enough to pull off.

But to what end? They couldn’t really believe that was enough to stop me and Heath, not after all we’d been through. Then again, they weren’t like us. They’d both grown up rich and coddled. Everything in their lives had worked out in their favor thus far, so why wouldn’t this?

You can’t win, she’d told me, but it hadn’t sounded like a threat—and that, more than anything, was what troubled me. Francesca had said the words with such supreme, chilling confidence, like the outcome was already decided. Like she already held an unbeatable hand, and all she had to do was lay her cards on the table.

Heath leaned against a pillar in the backstage area, our skate bags at his feet. As I approached, he clapped a hand over his mouth, then took a swig from his water bottle.

More painkillers. He’d taken a dose in the morning. Another before we left for the arena.

“Your back is still bothering you?” I said.

“Yeah. I swear it’s like the meds are making it worse instead of taking the edge off.” He winced as he bent down to stow his water bottle. “Don’t worry, though: I only took one. I’m still below the maximum daily—”

“Let me see.”

“See what?”

“The bottle.”

He handed it to me. I twisted off the cap and took out one of the white tablets. Francesca and Evan were about to take the ice. Then it would be Yelena and Dmitri’s turn. Then ours.

“What’s the matter?” Heath asked.

I studied the pill, running my thumb over the chalky edge. I thought of the sequins I’d found on the ice at the Grand Prix in Moscow—tiny white discs, so like the ones on my dress. But not quite the same.

Not quite right.

“We have a problem,” I said.





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?”