Heart On Ice, Puck The Rules

Nova's POV

I walked into Crestwood Academy with a well curated plan. I had to be invited to dine at the right table by the end of the day.

I had spent three weeks rehearsing the version of myself that would survive this treacherous school — the clothes rented, the posture practiced, the smile calibrated to land somewhere between approachable and untouchable. I had one shot at a first impression and I had engineered it down to the minute.

7:52 a.m. I pushed through the front doors and the hallway did exactly what I needed it to do.

It stopped.

Conversations dropped mid-sentence. Someone's locker swung open and stayed that way, forgotten. A girl near the foot of the stairs actually turned to look, which made the girl beside her turn, which made it a small, beautiful chain reaction moving down the corridor in both directions.

I kept walking. Unhurried. Like I had nowhere urgent to be and several places I was choosing not to go.

Nobody at Crestwood knew my name yet. Nobody knew where I came from, why I transferred, or what I was really doing here. All they knew was what they could see — and right now, what they could see was working perfectly.

Somewhere in my chest, just beneath the scar I kept carefully hidden, a borrowed heart beat steady and even.

I'm here, Lily, I thought. I'm going to find out what happened to you.

Six months ago I woke up in a hospital bed with someone else's heart keeping me alive. The doctors called it a successful transplant. What they didn't tell me, what nobody tells you — is that sometimes the heart remembers things the brain never knew. Fragments at first. A smell, a sound, a laugh I didn't recognize coming out of my own chest. Then clearer: a hockey rink, a phone screen lit up with unsent messages, a hallway that looked exactly like this one.

I did what any reasonable person would do. I researched the donor.

Lily Chen. Seventeen. Scholarship student. Discovered brain dead at the bottom of a school balcony at Crestwood Academy. The official reports said suicide. A few news outlets said accident. Her parents said she would never.

I didn't know which version was true. What I knew was what the memories showed me — that in her final months, Lily had been afraid. And that the face that appeared most often in those fragments, always composed, always watching, belonged to a girl named Harper Caldwell.

I had spent two months researching Harper before I ever set foot here. What I found wasn't a smoking gun, it was a pattern. Whispers about another student two years before Lily, a girl who had "transferred out" under circumstances nobody liked to discuss. A thread of quiet, methodical cruelty that Harper left behind her like a signature. Lily might have killed herself, but I was almost certain someone drove her to do it.

That was why I was here, to find out who exactly drove her to her death.

The first part of the plan was to get into Harper's inner circle. Get close. Get trusted. Find out what really happened on that balcony. Everything else came after.

I was scanning the hallway for my target, Harper Caldwell and her click when the doors behind me opened.

The hallway shifted.

I felt it before I saw it, a change in pressure, the specific electricity of a room reorganizing itself around a new center of gravity. Conversations that had stopped for me started again, then redirected. Heads that had turned my way swung back toward the entrance. Someone made a sound that was almost embarrassingly close to a sigh.

I turned around.

He was tall, broad-shouldered, with the kind of disheveled dark blonde hair that looked accidental and almost certainly wasn't. A hockey bag hung off one shoulder like it weighed nothing. He moved through the doorway the way people move when they have never once in their lives needed to make room for themselves, like the space simply adjusted.

Within seconds the hallway was no longer mine. Girls materialized from directions I hadn't clocked. A crowd formed the way crowds do around something everyone already knows is worth watching, and I was standing in the middle of a corridor that had forgotten I existed thirty seconds ago.

I turned back around. Faced forward. Kept my expression neutral.

Fine.

"Brutal, right?"

The voice came from my left, a girl leaning against the locker beside me, arms crossed, watching the crowd with the expression of someone who had seen this particular show before and found it more tedious than impressive. She was slight, dark-haired, with sharp eyes and the kind of mouth that looked like it was always halfway to saying something it probably shouldn't.

"Does that happen often?" I asked.

"Every single day since he arrived." She pushed off the locker and extended a hand. "Priya. I'm going to assume you're new because I've never seen you before and I know everyone."

"Nova." I shook it. "Who is he?"

Priya tilted her head toward the crowd like the answer was self-evident. "Ryker Lennox. Hockey star. International. Transferred in last week." A pause. "He's been here seven days and already has half the school absolutely unhinged. There's a waiting list. An actual, informal, tragically real waiting list of girls hoping he'll notice them." Another pause. "He won't. He'll smile at them, say exactly the right thing, and move on to the next one. He does it so smoothly they don't even realize they've been dismissed until he's already gone."

I looked at the crowd. At the easy way he moved through it, a smile here, a word there, never stopping long enough for anyone to actually hold on to him.

Threat assessment, I thought. Campus Casanova. Unpredictable. High visibility. Everything I cannot afford to be near right now.

I looked away. "Not my problem."

Priya smiled like I'd said something funny. "Sure."

The crowd began to thin as the warning bell approached, and Ryker Lennox started moving down the hallway in my direction. I turned back to my locker, spine straight, studying the inside of it with the focused attention of someone who had somewhere to be and no interest in whatever was happening behind her.

He passed me.

And then, for less than a full second he glanced sideways just as I turned to take a closer look.

Our eyes met and I seemed to forget how to breathe.

My heart stopped.

Not slowed. Not stuttered. Stopped. One clean, full beat of nothing and then slammed back so hard I felt it in my throat. It was not the ordinary skip of nerves or surprise. It was the specific, physical shock of recognition, the kind that lives in the body before the brain has any say in it.

His expression narrowed as if he had felt it too, but he looked away almost immediately and kept walking. Disappeared around the corner like nothing had happened, like he hadn't just walked past me and rearranged something I couldn't name.

I stood very still with my hand on my locker door.

Beside me, Priya was watching my face with an expression I didn't like at all.

"Not your problem huh," she said, very pleasantly.

I didn't answer. I was too busy trying to figure out why Lily's heart had just recognized a boy I had never met, or seen in her memories and why, in the six months since the transplant, it had never once done that for anyone else.