Chapter 5

Jace's POV

Dana Whitlock was sitting four rows up on the visitor side, clipboard on her knee, sunglasses pushed up into her hair even though we were indoors, and I had been aware of exactly where she was sitting since the second I stepped onto the ice, the way you're aware of a live wire in a room even when you’re not looking directly at it.

“Whitfield, center ice, let’s run the breakout one more time, clean.”

Coach’s voice carried across the rink, and I skated into position, stick tapping the ice twice out of habit, and let the drill fill up the space in my head where everything else usually lived. This was supposed to be the easy part. Fifteen years of doing this exact motion until my body did it without my permission, breakout pass, cut to the middle, drive the net, finish clean. I had done this ten thousand times in front of nobody. I could do it once in front of somebody who mattered.

The puck came to me off the boards exactly on time, and for half a second, gliding into the open ice with the whole rink watching, something old and familiar rose up under my ribs, uninvited, the way it always did right before something big. A gym full of people at a state championship four years ago, every seat filled, my name announced over the speakers, and afterward, standing in the parking lot with a medal around my neck, checking a phone that had exactly one text on it, from my mother, and nothing from anyone else, because there had never been anyone else whose watching actually counted.

It still was not enough. It was never enough. I had built an entire life out of being seen by everyone and known by no one, and some stubborn, humiliating part of me kept believing that if I just did this one more time, big enough, clean enough, in front of the right person, it might finally add up to something.

I drove toward the net.

The door on the far side of the rink banged open, and I registered it only as noise, a distraction I didn’t have time for, right up until the exact half second where a full grown person came flying out of it at a dead sprint and collided directly into my skating lane.

There was no time to redirect. My skates caught an edge trying to avoid her and instead clipped straight through her legs, and the two of us went down together in a tangle that ended with me slamming shoulder first into the boards hard enough that the glass shuddered and the entire rink went dead silent for one full second before the sound came rushing back in all at once.

Whistles. Somebody shouting to hold play. My own pulse loud in my ears, louder than any of it, and pain lighting up my shoulder in a bright, ugly line straight down to my elbow.

I pushed up onto one knee, jaw tight, and the first thing I saw clearly through the ringing in my head was a dozen phones already up along the glass, red recording dots blinking, somebody’s laugh already cutting through the shocked quiet like this was the most entertaining thing that had happened on this campus all year.

The second thing I saw was her.

Some girl I had never seen in my life, sprawled half on the ice in a coat that did not belong anywhere near a rink, staring at me with an expression that looked exactly as horrified as I felt, and past her, four rows up, Dana Whitlock was no longer looking at her clipboard.

She was looking at me. Writing something down.

I got to my feet slow, shoulder screaming, humiliation working its way up my throat hotter than the pain, and I looked directly at the girl still sitting on the ice like she hadn’t quite processed what she’d just done, and something in me reached for the ugliest, most immediate thing I had.

“Who the hell are you?”

It wasn’t a question. It came out flat and low, aimed like something meant to land, and I didn’t know yet, standing there in front of every phone on that ice, exactly how much that one sentence was about to cost both of us.