บททั้งหมดของ Ice Between Rivals : บทที่ 71 - บทที่ 80

I sat up so fast the room tilted.Maya was still in the doorway, hands over her face, eyes wide above her fingers — and before I could get a single word of explanation assembled, Kai’s arm tightened and pulled me back down. I went with a small, undignified sound, landing against his chest, my face pressed into the warm skin of his shoulder.Maya closed the door behind her.I could hear her on the other side of it, not leaving, just — closing the door. Giving us privacy we absolutely did not need for the reasons she was almost certainly imagining.I tried to pull away.“Mummy,” he murmured. His grip didn’t loosen. “Wait. Don’t go. I just want you here — near me.”My heart was making itself very loudly known.I pulled again, carefully, extracting myself from his hold with the focused patience of someone defusing something — and this time he didn’t resist. He turned slightly, settled deeper into the pillow, and stayed asleep. I stood beside the bed for a moment looking at him.Then I lef

“Why don’t you want to be seen with me?”I looked at him. The question was direct in the way Kai’s questions sometimes were — not aggressive, just genuinely wanting an answer.“It’s not that I don’t want to be seen with you,” I said carefully. “It’s the situation. Maya found me lying on your bare chest, Kai. That’s not — that’s not something that’s easy to explain away.”His expression shifted. Something moved across it quickly — the particular colour of embarrassment, which I had never seen on him before and which made him look, briefly, like someone entirely different.“And,” I added, because I had started and may as well finish, “you kept saying my name in your sleep.”He put his fingers over his mouth.“I did?” A pause. “Wow.” He seemed to be processing this from a significant distance. “That’s — okay.” He redirected. “How did you end up on my chest?”“You were sweating through everything, so I was helping, and at some point I must have fallen asleep in the chair and—” I shrugged.

My mind wouldn’t settle.I sat in the meeting room beside Ken and turned it over quietly — who had said something, how it had moved so fast, whether there was any version of this that made sense — while the rest of the team filed in around us and the noise of a group reassembling after time apart filled the space.Then Kai came in and sat down beside me.“Why didn’t you come get me?” he said. Low, flat, directed only at me.I felt the eyes before I saw them — the shift in attention that happens when a room notices something it’s been given new context for. Everyone was looking at us. The stepbrother thing had done its work and now every interaction between us was being read against it.I kept my voice quiet. “Because everyone already knows we’re brothers. I didn’t want to make it a bigger moment than it needed to be.”He absorbed this without responding.Coach arrived before anything else could develop — the room straightening instinctively at his entrance, the ambient noise dropping.

I hadn’t expected it.Any of it — not Noah stepping in front of my father, not the words he’d used, not the steadiness in his voice when he said them. I had stood behind him and watched my father’s face move through shock and calculation and retreat, and felt something I didn’t have a clean name for moving through my chest alongside it.I had endured my father for years. The hands, the humiliation, the particular cruelty of a man who had decided his son was a reflection of his own failures and punished him accordingly. I had built walls around it — high, thick, maintained with the daily effort of someone who cannot afford for them to come down — and I had told myself that endurance was the same thing as strength.Noah stepping in front of me had quietly, completely dismantled that argument.Because what it showed me, without saying it, was that I hadn’t been strong.I had been afraid. All this time, behind all of it — the coldness, the aggression, the relentless performance of someone

I walked out of the dorm still trying to understand what had just happened.Kai had asked me to be his friend.Kai. The same person who had made the first weeks of my time at this academy feel like a sustained exercise in surviving someone who had decided, on principle, to make everything harder. Who had pushed me, provoked me, switched off the lights to watch me fall apart, and said things I’d spent real energy recovering from.That Kai had sat in front of me with tears drying on his face and asked — quietly, genuinely, with all the armour temporarily gone — if we could be friends.My heart, completely against my permission, was very happy about it.I needed air. I walked until the cafeteria appeared and went in, and that was where Miller found me — arriving at my shoulder with the easy certainty of someone who has been looking.“Where have you been?” He nudged me as we sat down.“Around,” I said.He looked at my face with the focused, unhurried attention of someone who notices thing