chapter 4

The emergency lights along the boards threw long yellow stripes across the ice. Everything else was shadow. Damian stood three feet away and the air between us felt too thin.

I should have left when he told me to. Every part of me that still understood danger said the same thing. Instead I stayed where I was, stick loose in my hand, and watched the careful distance he always kept start to crack.

He rolled his shoulders once, like something under his skin itched. A fine tremor ran through the hand that held his stick. His breathing had changed—deeper, uneven. In the low light his eyes looked almost black.

“Arabel.” My name came out rough. “Walk away. Now.”

I didn’t move.

Something flickered across his face—anger or warning or both. Then he dropped the stick. The sound of wood hitting ice was too loud in the empty rink. He closed the space between us in two long strides and stopped so close I had to tip my head back to meet his eyes.

Heat rolled off him. Not the normal warmth of a body after hard work. Something sharper. Feverish. The scent of clean sweat and ice and something darker filled my lungs when I dragged in a breath.

“You’re shaking,” I said.

“Leave.”

The word was a command. It still carried authority. But the voice under it had frayed. I saw the exact moment the last thread of control snapped.

His hand closed around the back of my neck. Not gentle. Not careful. He pulled me forward until my chest hit his and the air left my lungs in a rush. For one suspended second we just stood there, breathing the same cold air, and then his mouth crashed down on mine.

There was nothing soft in it. Nothing asking. His tongue pushed past my lips like he had already decided I would open for him. The taste of him—mint and metal and heat—flooded my mouth. I made a sound that might have been protest. He swallowed it and kissed me harder.

My stick fell. The clatter echoed and died. His other hand gripped my hip hard enough to bruise and hauled me against him until I felt every rigid line of his body. He was already hard. Thick. Insistent. The knowledge sent a jolt of pure panic and something darker straight through me.

I shoved at his chest. He didn’t budge. He walked me backward until my spine met the glass and the cold of it bit through my hoodie. His mouth left mine only long enough to drag down the side of my throat, teeth scraping, tongue hot against the frantic pulse under my skin.

“Damian—stop—”

The words came out broken. He made a low sound in his chest that wasn’t human and bit down on the place where my neck met my shoulder. Pain flared bright and sharp. My knees nearly gave. He held me up with the weight of his body and the iron grip of his hands.

I tried to turn my face away. He caught my jaw and forced me back to him, kissing me again like he was starving. One hand shoved under my hoodie and the thin shirt beneath, palm rough and burning against the bare skin of my waist. He dragged it higher, over my ribs, until his thumb brushed the underside of my breast. I gasped into his mouth. He took the opening and pressed closer, grinding the hard length of him against the softest part of me.

The rink was freezing. I was burning.

He yanked the hoodie and shirt up together. Cold air hit my stomach and then my chest as he shoved the fabric over my sports bra. A second later the bra was dragged down and his mouth closed over my breast. Hot. Wet. Hungry. He sucked hard, teeth grazing the peak, and a helpless sound tore out of my throat. My hands fisted in his hoodie, whether to pull him closer or push him away I no longer knew.

He released me only long enough to spin me around. My palms hit the glass. He crowded in behind me, one arm locking around my waist, the other already working the waistband of my leggings. The cold of the boards bit into my bare stomach when he shoved the fabric down over my hips. I felt the scrape of his knuckles, the heat of his fingers, and then the thick press of him against the bare skin of my ass.

“Fuck,” he muttered against the back of my neck. The word was broken. Almost lost. “Can’t—need—”

I tried to speak. His hand slid between my legs and found me already wet. The sound he made then was pure animal. Two fingers pushed inside me without warning, thick and relentless, stretching me open while his thumb dragged over the swollen nerve that made my vision white out. My forehead dropped against the glass. My breath fogged the surface in frantic bursts.

He worked me until my legs shook and soft broken noises spilled out of my mouth without permission. Then the fingers were gone. I heard the rasp of a zipper. The blunt, burning head of him pressed against me from behind.

I had one second of clarity—one second to understand what was about to happen—and then he thrust in to the hilt.

The stretch was brutal. I cried out. He didn’t stop. He pulled back and drove in again, harder, deeper, the sound of skin meeting skin loud in the empty rink. One hand stayed locked on my hip, holding me still for every powerful stroke. The other braced against the glass beside my head. His breath scorched the side of my neck. Every thrust forced a broken sound from my throat.

There was no rhythm meant to please. Only need. Raw and endless. He fucked me like the world outside the rink had ceased to exist. My cheek pressed to the cold glass. Tears slipped free and froze against my skin. Pleasure and pain tangled so tightly I could no longer tell them apart. Each deep stroke dragged against something inside me that made my whole body seize. I came with a shattered cry, walls clenching around him, and still he didn’t slow.

He chased his own end with a single-minded violence that left bruises in the shape of his fingers. When he finally buried himself to the root and spilled inside me the sound he made was low and ruined. His forehead dropped between my shoulder blades. His body shuddered once, twice, then stilled.

For a long moment the only sound was our breathing.

Then the weight of him lifted. Cold air rushed in where his heat had been. I felt the slow slide of him leaving my body, the wet trail of what he had left behind running down the inside of my thigh. My leggings were still tangled around my knees. My sports bra was shoved under my breasts. I couldn’t make my hands work to fix any of it.

Behind me cloth rustled. A zipper closed. When I finally managed to turn my head he was already stepping back, chest heaving, eyes still too dark.

Something like horror flickered across his face for half a second. Then it was gone, locked down behind the captain’s mask so completely I might have imagined it.

He looked at me—disheveled, marked, shaking—and the only thing he said was a single rough word.

“Go.”

I pulled my clothes back into place with trembling fingers. My legs barely held me. I didn’t look at him again. I just walked, one careful step after another, off the ice and through the tunnel and out into the night that suddenly felt too wide and too cold.

The walk back to the hostel passed in fragments. Snow had started to fall. It melted against the heat still radiating from my skin. Every step sent a deep, throbbing ache through the place he had been. I could still feel the imprint of his hands. The taste of him. The exact moment he had forced my body to come apart around him.

Inside my room I locked the door, stripped everything off, and stood under the shower until the water ran icy. Even then the marks remained—dark fingerprints on my hips, the red scrape of his teeth on my shoulder, the dull burn between my legs that promised I would feel him for days.

I wrapped myself in the thin hostel towel and sat on the edge of the bed.

Hate settled into my chest like a second heartbeat.

I hated him for taking what I had never offered.

I hated my body for answering him.

I hated the part of me that already knew this night would live under my skin forever.

Outside, the snow kept falling. Inside, I stared at the wall and waited for morning, knowing that when I stepped onto the ice again he would be there—captain, legend, the man who had ruined me in the dark—and I would have to look him in the eye like nothing had happened.

I didn’t yet know that something had been done to him that night.

I only knew that Damian Kane had claimed me in the most brutal way possible.

And I would never forgive him for it.