Chapter 2 The ice king summons

Aurora's POV

I made it home before my mother. Which was fortunate. Explaining a broken nose was going to require considerably more creativity than I possessed.

I slipped through the front door, toed off my shoes, and went straight to my room without turning on any lights. The dark felt safer. Less revealing. I sat on the edge of my bed and breathed through my nose carefully, the way the nurse had shown me, until the throbbing settled into something manageable.

Then I lay back and stared at the ceiling.

The injuries announced themselves one at a time. My nose first, an ache that spiked whenever I moved too quickly. Then the bruise along my cheekbone, which had stiffened during the walk home. My ribs last, a slow burn that only appeared when I breathed too deeply, which meant I had spent the last forty minutes breathing very shallowly and feeling slightly lightheaded.

I heard my mother's key in the lock just after nine.

I did not move.

Her footsteps crossed the sitting room. The kitchen tap ran briefly, the cabinet opened, closed.

Her shadow passed under my door.

I held my breath.

Then her footsteps continued down the hall, and her bedroom door clicked shut.

I exhaled.

She had not looked in. She never did when she came home this late, and she came home this late most nights now. The double shift at the clinic had become the single shift that ran long that had quietly become just how things were. I understood it. I did not resent it.

I pressed the back of my hand against my cheekbone and looked at the ceiling for a long time.

Eventually, sleep came.

Sunlight found my face before my alarm did.

I lay still for a moment, taking inventory. The ache in my nose had dulled overnight but not disappeared. My ribs pulled tight the second I pushed myself upright. I sat on the edge of the bed longer than I should have, then got up and moved through my chores on muscle memory alone.

“Ugh,” I groaned, my face twisting as I felt a sharp pain.

Mum had already left. Her coffee mug was rinsed and upturned on the drying rack, her clinic lanyard gone from its hook by the door. She had not knocked.

I dressed, covered what I could with concealer, and left.

The staring started before I reached the main building. Two girls near the entrance stopped talking when I walked past. Three separate people checked their phones and then looked at me in quick succession. A fourth laughed into his collar and walked faster when I turned around.

I pulled out my phone before I reached my locker.

The notification was already waiting. A link posted to the academy's student forum at eleven forty-seven the previous night, titled Future Alpha Struggles With High School Biology.

I pressed play.

Forty-three seconds. Whoever recorded it had a steady hand and excellent instincts for framing. Nolan's posture. His dismissive questions. Mr. Hayes's careful patience. The silence that followed when the class was asked to explain what Nolan could not. My raised hand. My answer, delivered pleasantly and precisely and with every embedded insult intact.

I watched it twice. Then I put my phone away.

I had not recorded that video. I had not uploaded it or sent it to a single person.

Nolan Blackwood would not care about any of that.

"You look terrible," Sienna said, appearing beside me.

"Good morning to you too."

"The video has four hundred views already." She fell into step beside me, scanning the corridor. "It had two hundred when I woke up. That was an hour ago."

"I'm aware."

"Nolan's teammates have been watching you since you walked in."

"I noticed."

"And you are not concerned?"

"I am extremely concerned. I am simply doing it quietly, which is the only dignified option available to me at this point."

She pulled me sideways into an alcove near the water fountain. "Did you post it?"

"No."

"Do you know who did?"

"No."

She searched my face. Did not find what she was looking for.

"So someone else started this war and put your name on it."

"That is a very accurate summary, yes."

"What are you going to do?"

"Walk to class. Behave normally. Attempt not to acquire any additional broken bones before lunch."

Sienna pressed her lips together. "That is not a plan."

"It is absolutely a plan. It is just not a good one."

The morning moved slowly. Each class felt longer than the one before it.

The video climbed past six hundred views before second period ended. By lunch, people were quoting it in the corridors. Northcrest students understood self-preservation well enough to keep their entertainment private. But I caught it twice in passing. A murmured fragment of my answer delivered in mock-academic tones. A laugh that stopped too quickly when Nolan's teammates walked past.

For the first time in eight months, the academy was laughing at Nolan Blackwood instead of with him.

I could not decide if that made me feel victorious or nauseous.

Both, if I was honest.

I heard the commotion before I saw it. A sudden cluster of voices shifting from conversation to alarm. I turned the corner into the east corridor and found a crowd forming around a student on the floor.

Unconscious. A junior I recognized from the library. Face slack, body folded at an angle that meant he had not gone down gently.

Everyone was standing in a circle doing nothing.

I moved before I thought about it.

"Step back," I said, pushing through. "Give him room."

Nobody questioned it. The moment someone moved with certainty, everyone else defaulted to them out of pure relief.

I knelt down,breathing was shallow but present. Pulse was steady. No visible injury. I checked his airway, confirmed he had not bitten his tongue, and turned to the nearest person.

"Call the medical office. East corridor, second floor. Unconscious student, breathing, no visible trauma."

He blinked at me.

"Now," I said.

He moved.

I checked his temperature, and looked at his eyes. No sign of a seizure. Possible heat exhaustion or a blood sugar drop. I loosened his collar and spoke to him quietly, even when there was no response.

That was when I felt the atmosphere change. I felt a pressure at the back of my neck, slowly spreading across my body.

I kept my hands steady, Finished adjusting his collar and Pressed two fingers to his pulse point and counted.

I told myself it was nothing.

The feeling did not agree.

I looked up slowly, scanning the loose ring of students around us. Faces I half-recognized,Phones half-raised,A teacher pushing through from the far end. I moved past all of them one by one, searching without knowing exactly what I was searching for, and then my gaze reached the edge of the corridor where the crowd thinned out near the row of glass trophy cases.

Hockey portraits lined the wall. Framed captains going back decades, each one posed with a stick and the same serious expression, all that inherited authority preserved behind glass. The Northcrest crest hung above them on a mounted board, the school colors falling on either side in deep green and gold.

Nolan stood beneath all of it.

He stood alone, arms at his side and his piercing blue eyes fixated on me.

My stomach dropped before I could stop it. Something clenched low in my chest, and I felt my next breath come out slightly wrong.

He was not doing anything. He was simply standing there, eyes steady and unreadable, and somehow that was worse.

My pulse climbed in a way I did not appreciate and could not explain, and I became very aware, all at once, of how still he was. How long he must have been standing there.

How long he had been watching before I felt it.

I looked away. Refocused on the boy in front of me. Checked his breathing again. Gave my hands something to do.

My pulse did not slow down.

The medical team arrived and took over. I stood, stepped back, brushed off my knees. The crowd dissolved.

I was reaching for my bag when his voice came from directly behind me.

"Find somewhere to be after school."

I turned around.

He was closer than I expected.I had to tilt my chin slightly to meet his eyes, and up close they were exactly what I remembered from across that mourning field.

My heart did something inconvenient.

I ignored it.

"I beg your pardon," I said.

"The east courtyard. Four thirty." Flat. Unhurried. An instruction, not an invitation. "Be there."

"You are going to need to use a complete sentence that includes a reason."

Something moved briefly behind his eyes. Gone before I could read it.

"Four thirty," he repeated.

Then he walked away.

I found Sienna at the library doors and told her everything in a low, even voice. Inside, something was still trembling.

"He said what?" Her voice climbed.

"Four thirty. East courtyard." I dropped into the chair across from her. "Those were the complete contents of the message."

"That is not a meeting. That is a summons."

"I am aware of the distinction, Sienna."

She leaned forward. "You are not actually going."

I looked at her.

She sat back. "You are actually going."

"Someone has to find out what he wants."

"What do you think he wants?"

I thought about the blue eyes beneath those hockey portraits. The expression I could not name. The way he had stood apart from everyone and watched me work without saying a single word until it was over.

"I have absolutely no idea," I said. "Which is the part that worries me."

The east courtyard sat at the back of the main building, half-hidden behind the old groundskeeper's wall. The Northcres

t flag hung from the post at its center, the school crest embroidered in deep green and gold catching the last of the afternoon light when it turned.

It was empty when I arrived.

Then, I heard foot steps.