First Blood

POV Lila

Their first practice together lasted forty-seven minutes.

It took Lila less than three to understand why everyone called him the Ice Prince, and it had nothing to do with skating.

The practice rink was private, which meant it was beautiful in a way that made her nervous. The ice was glassy and flawless. The boards had no duct tape. The lights were warm and even, and a little lounge sat off to one side with a coffee machine that looked like it cost more than her car. It was empty except for the three of them. No hockey kids, no birthday parties, no Zamboni coughing in the corner. Lila stood at the boards lacing her skates and felt like she'd been let into a church after hours.

Adrian was already on the ice.

He skated alone on the far side, doing slow crossovers in a black training jacket with his hands loose at his sides. He moved like a machine someone had calibrated. Every stroke matched the last. Every edge cut clean. He didn't look over when she stepped onto the ice, and he didn't look over when she skated three laps to warm up. She started to wonder if he'd forgotten she was coming.

"He knows you are here," Elena said from the boards, not looking up from her clipboard. "He is being rude on purpose. Ignore it."

"Is that a strategy?"

"It is a personality." Elena finally looked up. "Come. Both of you. Center ice."

Adrian skated over like she'd asked him to take out the trash.

It went wrong immediately.

Elena started them on basic hold work. Nothing flashy, just skating side by side, then hands, then the pairs hold Lila had done a thousand times with Marcus. Marcus had been warm and loose and a little goofy. He used to hum off-key under his breath. His hands had been big and forgiving.

Adrian's hands were cold. She felt it through her sleeves.

He took her waist like he was picking up a coat. His timing was perfect, which was the problem, because it wasn't her timing. Every stride landed exact and a half beat ahead of her natural rhythm, and every time she tried to match it he adjusted again, so she stayed always chasing. He led like he was skating with a mannequin. No give in it. No question.

She fought it. She couldn't help it. His grip felt like a cage with a very good lock, and her body had spent twenty-three years learning not to be put in cages. She pulled against his hold. He pulled back. Elena said "No" in a flat voice. They tried again.

"You're resisting," he said, on the third try.

"You're not listening."

"I am leading."

"You're dragging."

He said nothing, just tightened his jaw. They tried again.

The death spiral was a disaster.

In a death spiral the man pivots in place while the woman glides around him on one edge with her body almost flat to the ice. It's all trust. He holds her hand and she leans out over nothing and lets her whole weight hang on a single point of contact.

Lila did not trust him. She was not going to pretend.

He pulled too hard. She felt it in her wrist, the angle wrong, his grip locked instead of guiding. She tried to pull back. He held on. Her edge skidded.

She hit the ice on her side. Hard.

The sound cracked sharp and flat off the empty boards. She slid a few feet, cheek pressed to cold ice, and thought, very clearly, I signed a contract for this.

His blades stopped beside her head.

She looked up. He stood over her, tall and still, his face unreadable.

"You should have stayed down," he said, his voice cool and clipped, like he was stating a note on a score sheet.

Lila heard it the way she'd heard it her whole life, from every coach and judge and teacher who'd looked at her and decided she was too much trouble to keep getting back up.

She got up.

It took two tries. Her elbow bled through the sleeve of her training shirt, a dark, spreading spot she could feel soaking into the fabric. She didn't look at it. She got her feet under her and stood and met his eyes.

"You should have held on," she said.

For one second his face changed. It was small, a flicker so fast she nearly missed it. Something moved behind his eyes and then shut like a door.

Neither of them spoke.

On the boards, Elena watched them with her arms crossed and her clipboard forgotten. Her face was doing something strange. It could have been fury. It could have been fascination. Lila honestly couldn't tell, and she was starting to suspect that with Elena it was often both.

"Forty-seven minutes," Elena said finally. She checked her watch. "That was a record for hating each other. Go home. Tomorrow, six."

The locker room was empty. Lila sat on the bench and pressed a wad of paper towels against her elbow, hands shaking. She blamed the cold.

When the bleeding slowed, she opened her locker.

An envelope lay on top of her bag.

It hadn't been there before. She was sure of it. Plain white, no writing on the front, slightly bent at one corner. She stared at it for a long moment. Then she picked it up and slid a finger under the flap.

Three photographs. Glossy, printed, the kind you'd get from a drugstore machine.

Each one showed a young woman. They were skating in all three, in practice clothes, in rinks she didn't recognize. One had dark curly hair and a gap in her smile. One was blonde and serious. One looked tired even in the photo, thin and shadowed, her skates visibly scuffed.

Lila looked at the skates for a long time.

She knew those skates. Not the brand or the model, just the type. Cracked leather at the ankle. Wrong-color replacement laces. The skates of a girl who didn't have money for new ones and had made do.

She had a pair just like them in her bag.

All three of them looked like that. Scuffed boots, threadbare practice clothes, hunger in their eyes. All three looked like her.

She flipped them over. Dates scrawled in pencil on the back of the first two, months apart, each one less than a year after the one before. On the back of the third, someone had pressed a ballpoint pen so hard it dented the paper.

You're number four.

She didn't remember walking to the parking lot.

One second she stood in the locker room with the photos crushing in her fist, and the next she was outside in the cold with her skate bag banging against her hip, scanning rows of cars. She found his in the far corner, black and polished, parked under a flickering light.

He was inside.

The engine was off. The headlights were dark. Adrian sat behind the wheel with both hands resting on it, staring straight ahead through the windshield at nothing. A brick wall, a dumpster, a patch of dead grass. He wasn't on his phone. He wasn't doing anything at all. He just sat there like a man who'd forgotten how to leave.

It would have been easier to be angry if he'd looked arrogant. She came up to the driver's window and slapped the photographs against the glass, flat-handed, hard enough that it made a sharp crack.

He turned his head slowly.

For a moment he looked at the photos. Then at her. Then, for some reason, at her elbow, at the stain soaking through her sleeve.

He rolled down the window.

His face was not what she expected. She had been ready for the smirk, the cold shrug, the so what. None of that showed. Up close, in the yellow light, he looked tired. Not sleepy. Tired the way people look when they've been carrying something for years and have stopped expecting anyone to offer to take it.

"You used them up," she said. Her voice came out rougher than she meant. "You broke them and moved on. That's what the text meant. That's what I'm looking at."

He said nothing. His jaw worked once, and his eyes dropped to the photographs still pressed against the glass, then came back to her face. The silence stretched long enough that she almost spoke again.

"My father paid them," he said finally. "To leave skating. It's what he does."

"That's convenient."

"It's not meant to be convenient. It's meant to be true." His hand moved to the ignition, fingers resting on the key without turning it. His eyes went back to the windshield, like he'd already decided which way this ended. "Believe whatever gets you through tomorrow's practice. I don't particularly care anymore."

She opened her mouth. Nothing came out. The wind pulled at her hair, and her elbow throbbed, and she held three photographs of three girls in cracked skates and felt something cold crawl up the back of her neck. He wasn't trying to convince her. He wasn't trying anything at all, and that, more than any words, was what told her he had nothing left to protect by lying.

"The question," Adrian said, "is whether you can be bought."

He rolled the window up.

It slid shut with a soft electric hum, and then he was just a shape behind tinted glass, his hands still on the wheel.

Lila stood alone in the parking lot with the light flickering over her head.

Three photographs. Three women with her hunger and her skates and her bills. All of them gone within a year.

She had thought the anonymous text was a warning about Adrian. She understood now that she had read it wrong. It wasn't about him at all.

It was about what was coming for her.