All Chapters of Claws on Ice: Chapter 111 - Chapter 117

Trixie's POVYasmine showed up at my place three days before the exhibition rematch with a phone full of increasingly elaborate trash talk texts from Cole, apparently determined to make me suffer through every single one of them before the game arrived."Listen to this." She scrolled through her phone, already laughing before she got the words out. "He says, and I'm reading this exactly as written, 'Tell your sister's boyfriend's team we've been studying tape all season and their power play has more holes than Coach's excuse for a defensive system.' He doesn't even know Coach, Trixie. He's never met the man.""That's not going to stop Cole from having strong opinions about him, apparently.""Apparently not. Lenin says he's been like this the entire two weeks since the schedule got announced, unbearable at practice, insufferable at dinner, allegedly wore his old jersey to bed the night the rematch got confirmed." Yasmine set her phone down, still grinning. "I've decided I find it charm

Trixie's POVWinter arrived properly the week after the exhibition rematch, the first real snow of the season blanketing the estate grounds in the kind of quiet that made the whole property feel briefly suspended outside of time.I found Harlan out by his father's memorial stone that Sunday morning, a simple marker the pack had placed near the tree line months earlier, close enough to the main house that anyone could visit easily, far enough that visits still felt private rather than performed. He hadn't heard me approach, wolf senses apparently otherwise occupied with whatever conversation he was quietly having with a man who could no longer answer him back."I didn't mean to interrupt," I said softly, once he noticed me."You're not interrupting." He held out a hand, pulling me down beside him in the snow without hesitation. "I was just telling him about the game. Cole's scouting report. The dinner afterward. I think he would have liked hearing about it, honestly. He always did enjo

Harlan's POVI marked the anniversary of my father's collapse alone, early, before the house properly woke, standing at his memorial with coffee going cold in my hands while the sun came up slow and gold over the tree line.A full year. It didn't feel like enough time to hold everything that had actually happened inside it, and it didn't feel like too little either, just the strange, honest shape a hard year actually takes once you're finally standing on the other side of it, looking back instead of just surviving forward through it one difficult day at a time."Been a lot, hasn't it," I said, quiet, mostly for myself. "Lost you. Found my footing anyway, eventually, mostly because you spent your last clear hours making sure I had somewhere to actually start from. Married the right woman, the way you always said I would, even when you were fussing over the decision a year before that. Built an alliance out of a threat that could have swallowed two packs whole. Won a tournament that did