Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 21 - Chapitre 30

Trixie's POVThe blade came off mid-stride.Not slowly. Not with warning. One second I was cutting toward the net on a breakaway drill, and the next my left skate folded sideways underneath me like the boot had forgotten it was supposed to hold a blade at all.I hit the ice hard enough to hear it before I felt it.For a second I just lay there, staring up at the rafters, waiting for my body to tell me how bad this was going to be. The whole rink had gone quiet around me, whistles stopped, pucks left rolling wherever they'd landed.My wrist screamed first. The one that had just barely healed. The one I'd been so careful with for three straight weeks, guarding it through every drill like it was made of glass.Coach was at my side before I'd even tried to sit up."Don't move," he said. "Someone get the healer.""I'm fine." I wasn't. My wrist throbbed in time with my pulse, and my palm was already swelling where I'd caught myself wrong. "It's just the wrist. Again.""Just the wrist," Coac

Harlan's POVThe council chamber always smelled like old wood and older grudges. I'd hated that smell since I was a kid trailing behind my father through these doors, and I hated it worse now, standing in the center of the room while seven elders decided how to talk about a girl who wasn't even there to defend herself.My father stood beside me, hands clasped behind his back, the picture of calm authority. I knew better than to trust that calm. It was the same voice he used on the phone the night before, soft and reasonable right up until it wasn't.I'd worn my formal jacket for this, the one that felt more like armor than clothing, and I still felt underdressed for the way seven pairs of ancient eyes tracked me across the room."Alpha Darius Vale has filed a formal grievance," the head elder said, reading from a paper like the words weren't already burned into my memory from three separate conversations this week. "Regarding an incident at your family's estate involving a member of a

Trixie's POVI lost Harlan somewhere between the locker room and the ice, pulled away by Coach for some last-minute lineup discussion, and I used the fifteen minutes of freedom to find a quiet corner of the corridor and stretch out my wrist without an audience.The arena noise faded back there, muffled through concrete and distance, just the occasional echo of skates on ice drifting down the hallway. I liked it that way. Quiet enough to think, close enough to still feel like part of the team instead of separate from it.That was where he found me."You looked terrified out there earlier," he said, leaning against the wall like he owned it. "In the parking lot. I promise I'm not that scary."Up close, he was better looking than I wanted to admit, all sharp angles and easy confidence, the kind of face that knew exactly what it was doing to people and had stopped apologizing for it a long time ago."I wasn't terrified. I was curious.""Even better." He smiled, unhurried, waiting for some

Harlan's POVI found an empty equipment room at the visiting arena, the same kind of space where all our worst and most honest conversations seemed to happen lately, and Trixie followed me inside without asking why I'd chosen somewhere that smelled like rubber mats and old sweat instead of anywhere reasonable.The noise of the celebrating team faded behind the closed door, muffled into something distant and unimportant. I'd spent the whole walk over here rehearsing how to start this, and every version had sounded worse than the last."Talk," she said, arms crossed, still in her gear, cheeks flushed from the win."Hugo is my half brother."She blinked, clearly expecting something else, something bigger or stranger, and for a second I almost laughed at how anticlimactic the truth sounded out loud after weeks of dreading saying it."Your half brother." She repeated it slowly, like she was testing the shape of the words against everything she'd already seen."My father had an affair years

Trixie's POVThe bus should have been loud.We'd won. Qualifiers were done, championships were real now instead of hypothetical, and every other year I'd played this sport, a win like that meant sticks banging against seats and somebody's playlist blasting through a phone speaker until the driver threatened to turn the bus around.Instead it was quiet. Not silent, exactly, just muted in a way that made the whole ride feel heavier than it should have. A few of the guys near the front tried to start something, a chant that fizzled out after half a verse, like even they could feel the strange weight sitting over all of us.I sat near the back again, wrist propped on my bag, watching the dark highway slide past the window and thinking about vending machines and half-brothers and a question I still didn't have an answer for.Has he ever actually had to fight for anything in his life?I hated that it was still rattling around in my head hours later.Yasmine dropped into the seat beside me s