All Chapters of THE ICE WE BREAK :Fake dating the ice king : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

73 Chapters

The morning after

Maya The morning after the rivalry win felt less like a celebration and more like the aftermath of a controlled explosion, because everywhere I looked the campus seemed determined to relive every second of Leo Thorne’s overtime goal as if it had personally saved their semester, giant screens outside the student center replayed the winning shot on an endless loop, students wore Northridge jerseys to classes they normally slept through, hockey highlights dominated every social feed I opened, and for the first time since being dragged into Cassandra’s ridiculous Redemption Season, I understood just how badly this university needed its Ice King to stay standing, because when Leo won, Northridge acted like it won too. My phone had been vibrating nonstop since sunrise, the notifications stacking on top of one another faster than I could clear them, and while most of them came from students obsessing over last night’s game or fans dissecting every

The locker room lines

Leo The closed-door meeting felt worse than any game I had played all season, because hockey at least followed rules that made sense, where effort led to results and mistakes could usually be corrected before the final buzzer, but locker rooms were different, locker rooms remembered every frustration, every slight, every resentment that had been swallowed for the sake of winning, and as I sat in the front row of the Northridge team room watching my teammates file in with guarded expressions and tight shoulders, I had the uncomfortable feeling that Coach wasn’t gathering us together to solve a problem, he was gathering us together because the problem had finally become too large to ignore. Nobody talked much while we waited for the meeting to begin, which in itself was unusual because hockey players rarely stayed quiet for long, especially after a win, yet the usual noise was absent as players took seats around the room and avoided certain co

Unnecessary jealousy

Maya The playoff race had somehow managed to make the entire campus even more unbearable than the fake relationship already had, because every win pushed Northridge closer to the postseason while simultaneously turning Leo into a larger celebrity than before, and after his overtime goal against Hayes’ team became one of the most replayed hockey highlights of the month, every sports outlet in the state suddenly wanted interviews, feature stories, analysis pieces, and behind-the-scenes coverage of the captain who had apparently transformed from hockey’s biggest liability into its favorite redemption narrative. Unfortunately for my sanity, one particular reporter seemed far more interested in Leo than she was in hockey. Her name was Vanessa Hart, she worked for a regional sports network that had recently secured expanded coverage rights for college hockey, and from the moment she first appeared at Northridge she had made it painf

Pressure system

Leo The worst part about rebuilding a reputation was realizing that nobody actually cared about redemption as much as they claimed to, because the moment you gave people evidence that you were improving they immediately demanded more proof, more consistency, more perfection, and by the time Northridge entered the final stretch of the regular season I felt less like a hockey player fighting for his future and more like a science experiment being observed by people waiting to see whether I would succeed or self-destruct, which made every practice, every game, every interview, and every decision feel like another test that could either move me closer to the NHL or erase everything I had spent years working toward. The scouts were everywhere now, appearing at practices before sunrise, sitting behind benches during scrimmages, occupying entire sections during games, and standing near locker room exits afterward with notebooks filled with observat

Documentary system

Maya The strange thing about spending months filming someone you could barely tolerate was that eventually the camera started collecting things you never intended to notice, because what had begun as a carefully controlled image-repair project designed to rehabilitate Leo Thorne’s reputation after one disastrous punch had gradually evolved into something far more complicated, and as I sat alone in the editing suite surrounded by hard drives, notebooks, interview transcripts, and hundreds of hours of footage collected since the beginning of The Redemption Season, I found myself staring at a story that looked nothing like the one Cassandra had originally paid for. Outside the editing room, Northridge University was consumed by hockey fever as the playoff race reached its final stages, with students wearing team jerseys across campus, sports analysts debating postseason predictions, and social media accounts dissecting every shift Leo played as

The Captain’s Burden

Leo The closer Northridge moved toward the playoffs, the less hockey seemed to belong solely to the ice and the more it felt like a constant battle fought in locker rooms, press conferences, social media feeds, and conversations that happened behind closed doors, because every win pushed us higher in the standings while simultaneously increasing the scrutiny surrounding our team, turning every practice into an evaluation and every interaction into something people analyzed for signs of weakness, division, or instability, and although our record suggested we should have been focused entirely on postseason preparation, the reality inside the program felt far more complicated than the scoreboard could ever capture. Jax’s popularity had become impossible to ignore, not because his performance failed to deserve recognition but because the attention surrounding him had evolved into something larger than hockey, creating a narrative that reporters

The wrong side

Maya The deeper I got into filming the hockey team, the harder it became to keep pretending that everything happening around me existed in neat categories, because when this project started there had been villains and victims, arrogant athletes and ordinary students, spoiled captains and people forced to clean up their messes, yet somewhere between early morning practices, exhausting road trips, endless media appearances, and hours spent standing behind a camera while everyone else lived their lives in front of it, those lines had started blurring in ways that irritated me more than I wanted to admit, especially because every time I thought I had Leo Thorne figured out, he did something that contradicted the version of him I preferred to believe, leaving me trapped between what I wanted him to be and what I was actually seeing. The hockey facility had become almost a second home over the past few months, which was strange considering I had s

Breaking point

Leo The loss followed us all the way back to campus like a shadow none of us could outrun, because no matter how many times Coach reminded us that one defeat would not define the season, every player in that locker room understood exactly how much damage it could cause at this stage of the year, especially when playoff positioning had become so tight that a single bad week could undo months of work, and as I sat staring at the statistics glowing from my phone screen long after midnight while the rest of the campus celebrated a Friday night I had no interest in joining, I could already hear tomorrow’s headlines forming before they were even written, because losing games always created questions and lately every question somehow found its way back to me. The next morning started exactly the way I expected, with my father standing across from me in his office wearing the same expression he reserved for disappointing financial reports and underp

The bench

Maya The first thing I noticed when I walked into the rink that afternoon was not the noise, the drills, or even the tension hanging over the team after another difficult stretch of games, but the fact that Leo Thorne was standing with the second line during warmups while players moved through formations under Coach Reynolds’ watchful eye, because for months I had filmed practices from nearly every angle imaginable and there were certain things that simply felt permanent, certain images that had become part of the identity of Northridge hockey itself, and Leo leading the first line as captain was one of them, which was why seeing him positioned somewhere else created a strange feeling in my chest that had nothing to do with sympathy and everything to do with witnessing something that looked fundamentally wrong. Word spread through the facility before practice even ended, moving through players, staff members, student reporters, and eventuall

Captain Under Review

Leo Coach Reynolds did not say a word during the walk to his office, and somehow the silence felt worse than any lecture could have because after years of hockey I had learned that coaches only raised their voices when they believed a mistake could still be corrected quickly, while the quiet conversations were reserved for problems that had grown deep enough to threaten entire seasons, and as I followed him through the athletic wing while players and staff moved around us preparing for another day of practices, meetings, and playoff preparation, I found myself wishing for the first option even though I knew exactly which one I was about to get. The office door closed behind us with a soft click that seemed far louder than it should have been, while Coach crossed the room and sat behind his desk without immediately speaking, choosing instead to study several documents spread across the surface in front of him as though organizing his thoughts

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