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POV Lila ·

The video had 2.3 million views by the time Lila woke up.

She didn't know that yet. She woke at 4:40, before her alarm, to her phone buzzing itself across the nightstand like a dying bug. Eleven missed calls. Thirty-some texts. The top one was from Jenna and was just a row of skull emojis, followed by DO NOT LOOK AT ANYTHING, followed by okay look but I'm sorry.

She looked.

Someone had filmed their first practice. The one with the death spiral, the one where she hit the ice and Adrian stood over her and said you should have stayed down. The footage had been shot from somewhere high, probably the lounge window, and cut together with a skill that made her feel sick. Every fall. Every missed count. Every time she yanked her hand out of his grip, and every flat, cold look he'd given her. Someone had added a pop song with a bouncy beat so it played like a sitcom.

The caption read: Ice Princess meets Trailer Trash 💀

She watched it all the way through. Then she scrolled down.

The comments were exactly what she'd expect, except worse, because they were creative.

People had opinions about her skates. Her hair. Her body, which they discussed like it was a used car. Someone had found the name of her hometown and posted a joke about it that got forty thousand likes. Someone had written a long, thoughtful paragraph about how it was sad, really, that the Federation was wasting a spot on a girl who sounded like that. They'd transcribed her accent. Phonetically.

And near the bottom, in a thread with only a few hundred likes, a stranger had posted her mother's street address and the name of the hospital.

lol imagine paying the bills on that, the comment said.

Lila sat in bed in the dark with her knees pulled up and the screen lighting her face. She read it twice. She didn't move. She felt very calm and very far away.

The phone rang in her hand. Jenna.

"Are you reading the comments?" Jenna said, before Lila could say hello. Her voice was shaking. "Stop reading the comments. Where are you? Are you okay?"

"I'm not reading them."

"Liar."

"I don't care about them," Lila said.

Silence on the line.

"Lila."

"I don't. It's a video. People are idiots." She pressed her thumbnail into the side of her finger. "I've got practice in an hour."

"Babe, you don't have to be okay."

"I'm okay," Lila said, and hung up before Jenna could hear anything in her voice.

She was lying. She knew she was lying. She'd gotten very good at it over the years.

A text came in a minute later. Call me after practice. I mean it. She didn't answer it. She put the phone face-down on the blanket and sat there until the alarm went off.

Elena acted like nothing had happened.

That was the first thing Lila noticed when she walked into the rink at six, with her bag over her shoulder and her face arranged. Elena was at the boards with her thermos and her clipboard, exactly as always. She said "Good morning." She said "Warm up." She did not say a single word about a video.

Adrian was already on the ice.

He was skating slow laps, hands loose, in the same black jacket as always. He looked up when she stepped on and looked away again. His face told her nothing. She braced for it anyway, for a smirk or a comment or even a careful, pitying silence. None of them came. He didn't mention the video. He didn't mention anything.

Practice was brutal.

Elena ran them through the same basic holds for forty minutes without a break. Then lifts, over and over, until Lila's shoulders burned. Then the death spiral again, the same one that had ended in blood a week ago. Her entry was ugly. Her edge was off. She tried again. And again.

On the eleventh try, it held.

It wasn't pretty. His grip was still cool and exact and she still felt the old urge to fight it. But she leaned out over the ice, trusting a hand she didn't trust, and for three seconds her blade drew a clean circle, and her hair brushed the surface, and nothing fell.

Elena said nothing. Then she clapped once, very short.

"Again," she said.

Lila understood. It wasn't cruelty. It was a message in the only language Elena spoke. They can say what they like. The only answer is to be undeniable.

So she did it again.

She was lacing her skates in the locker room afterward, Jenna's unanswered text still sitting on her screen, when her phone buzzed with a notification she didn't recognize. A tag. Then another. Then so many that the phone seized up in her hand.

Adrian Braxton had posted.

She stared at the screen. She knew his account only because Jenna had once shown her, with a bewildered laugh, that it had eleven posts and the last one was three years old. A photo of a trophy, no caption.

The new one was a picture of her.

She was in the air. Mid-jump, from a throw she'd landed on Thursday - one he must have photographed without her noticing.

There was no caption. No explanation. No hashtag. Just the photo.

It went viral in the opposite direction.

By lunch, the comments had split like a cracked windshield. Half of them were still cruel. The other half were wait, who IS this, and look at that landing, and she's actually insane, I love her, and a hundred people tagging each other with this is the girl they were making fun of?? The pop song video was still up, but now a hundred voices were underneath it saying you guys are so mean.

She read for a long time, sitting on the locker room bench with one skate half laced.

She didn't know how to feel. She really didn't. A week ago she would have told you she wouldn't take a favor from Adrian Braxton if she were drowning. And he hadn't even done it like a favor. He'd just posted one picture, with no words, like it was a fact.

She should say something. She knew that. Thank you was the obvious one.

She walked out into the corridor and he was there, coming the other way, bag over his shoulder, hair damp.

They both stopped.

He looked at her. She looked at him. The hall was very quiet. Her throat tightened.

"Practice was fine today," he said finally.

"Yeah," she said. "It was."

He nodded once and walked on. That was it. She stood there with her heart going strangely fast and realized she hadn't said thank you, and he hadn't said you're welcome, and neither of them was going to bring it up.

But something had shifted. It was tiny, a millimeter of space that hadn't been there before. She wasn't sure she liked it. She wasn't sure she didn't.

Elena called her into the little office behind the rink at four.

She was sitting at a desk with a laptop open, and the screen showed a grainy black-and-white grid of camera feeds. "The security system," Elena said. "I asked for the footage from the day of your practice. Whoever filmed that video did not come through the front door."

"You think someone was in the building?"

"I think someone was in the lounge." Elena tapped a key. The feed jumped to a rear hallway, time-stamped Tuesday afternoon. "Watch."

A figure appeared at the edge of the frame. A woman, tall, wearing a long camel coat belted at the waist. She walked down the hallway toward the back exit with her phone in her hand and her head slightly down. Her stride was smooth and deliberate, each step placed carefully, like she had practiced being watched.

She turned, just for a second, to push open the door. A sheet of pale gold hair swung over her shoulder.

Lila knew the walk before she knew the face. She'd seen it on a hundred magazine covers. She'd seen it on the news on Thanksgiving, in the lobby, with her mother's hospital window still fresh in her mind.

"That's Sabrina Wilde," Lila said.

"Yes," Elena said. "It is."

"She was here. She filmed us." Lila's mind raced ahead of her. Maybe Sabrina wanted Adrian back and saw Lila as the obstacle. Maybe she hated the partnership itself, hated watching someone else take the ice she'd lost. Or maybe she was simply following orders, another piece moved by the same hand that had moved her once.

"She did." Elena closed the laptop. Her face gave nothing away, but her mouth was very tight. "My guess is money. Richard Braxton has a way of making his old problems useful again. It would not be the first time he's sent someone back to do his work for him."

That night, Lila sat on the edge of her bed in the dark apartment with her feet on the cold floor, unable to sleep. The radiator clanked. Out in the hallway, the elevator was making its usual noises, which meant it was a Tuesday, which meant it was broken. Jenna's text still sat unanswered on her phone. She thought about calling, about letting someone else carry part of this for an hour, and then she thought about what she would have to say out loud to do that, and she set the phone down instead.

It buzzed on the nightstand.

She looked down. A name she hadn't expected to see lit the screen.

Sabrina Wilde.

She'd saved the number that afternoon, off a list of contacts Elena kept for the Federation, without letting herself think about why. She stared at it for a long moment before she opened the message.

That video was a warning.

A pause. Three dots.

Not from me. For you.

Lila read it three times. Her heart picked up speed. She typed what does that mean and deleted it. She typed you're the one who filmed it and deleted that too.

Before she could decide, the phone buzzed again. Thirty seconds, almost exactly. A second text.

Meet me, and I'll tell you everything.

Lila sat very still.

The woman who'd just spent two million views trying to destroy her was offering to save her. Or it was another trap, another careful, glossy, beautifully photographed trap with a bow on it. She sat in the dark with the phone shining in her hand and tried to tell the difference.

She couldn't.

In this world, Lila was starting to learn, the two looked exactly the same.