บททั้งหมดของ Ice Between Rivals : บทที่ 61 - บทที่ 70

I don’t know why I followed him.I told myself it was coincidence that I was heading in the same direction, that the hallway happened to lead where it led. But I stayed back deliberately, keeping enough distance that my footsteps didn’t register, and that was not coincidence. That was a choice I made without examining it.I stopped at the corner of the hallway and listened.His father’s voice first measured, controlled, carrying the particular authority of someone who has never needed to raise it to be heard.“You played well yesterday, Noah.”A pause. I pictured Noah receiving it that flicker of something that might have been relief or hope before the next part arrived.“But that’s not what I need from you. You have to play harder. Much harder. Yesterday wasn’t enough.”I leaned slightly and looked.Noah stood with his shoulders drawn in almost imperceptibly the posture of someone who has been standing in this exact position, receiving this exact kind of attention, for a very lon

The family dinner required armour I didn’t have.I put on my hoodie instead.It was suffocatingly hot, the kind of indoor warmth that a full dining table and a working kitchen generates without mercy but I had no other option. The hoodie stayed on, hood down at least, and I sat beside Maya and tried to look like someone who was merely cold rather than someone who was actively concealing an entire identity from the man at the head of the table.Maya’s stillness beside me was its own kind of communication. She was more frightened of my secret unravelling than I was, which was simultaneously touching and slightly alarming.Maggie had been helping the last remaining maid with the serving when my father’s voice cut across the room.“Sit down, darling. Let her manage it’s just food. We’ll help ourselves with the rest.”She smiled and sat. Kai settled beside her, and I watched the small ease that moved through him in his mother’s proximity barely visible, the kind of thing you only catch i

Kai’s POVI had never seen Noah like this.He was holding onto me not the way people hold on when they’re steadying themselves, but the way people hold on when everything else has stopped being reliable. His fingers were twisted into my shirt, knuckles pale, and he was shaking. Actually shaking, the kind that comes from somewhere deeper than cold, his forehead tipped forward and his breath uneven and fast.Darkness, I thought. Something happened to him in the dark.I pulled back. Got my hands on his shoulders and held him at arm’s length and looked at him at what was left of his face in the complete absence of light and said, with the flatness I had perfected over years of not knowing what else to offer:“Call your dog. The one you’d rather eat with than me. Let him stay with you.”I turned.He didn’t stop me. Didn’t call after me, didn’t reach out. He just stopped holding on.And then I heard it. The sound of him going down. Not a fall exactly, more a slow collapse knees first, t

Marcus didn’t waste any time. He pushed the heavy oak coffee table to the edge of the room, creating a wide, hollow square on the Persian rug.“We’re starting with Sensory Synchronization,” Marcus said, looking between us with a grin that suggested he knew exactly how much we were going to hate this. “Hockey is about reading intent before it becomes action. If you can’t read your partner’s breath, you’ll never read a defender’s eyes.”He stepped between us, placing a hand on each of our shoulders to line us up.“Toe to toe,” Marcus commanded. “Six inches apart. Eyes locked. No speaking.”I stepped forward, my pulse already starting a frantic rhythm in my throat. I had to tilt my head back slightly to meet Kai’s gaze. Up close—dangerously close—the ‘Step-brother’ mask he wore during the day didn't look as solid. I could see the faint tension in his jaw and the way his pupils seemed to swallow the light of the room.“Shadow drill,” Marcus said. “Noah, you lead. Kai, you are his reflecti

Kai’s POVI hadn’t known it was that bad.That was the thing I kept coming back to, sitting on the edge of my bed in the dark I had created — except now the dark felt different, weighted with something it hadn’t carried before. I had been trying to tease him. A prank. The kind of thing that lands and stings and gets filed under the ongoing war between us, nothing more than that.I hadn’t known about his mother.I hadn’t known she had been killed in front of him. That he had been small and in the dark and she had hidden him and not survived it herself. That every time the lights went out he went back to that night — to being that child, in that dark, with that particular absence that never fully filled.I sat with it for a while. Found I didn’t have anything useful to do with it.Eventually I closed all the doors and went to my room and lay down and stared at the ceiling until sleep arrived.In the morning Marcus was already downstairs when I came down, talking to Noah with the easy, u