Chapter 3 .,.

POV: Mia Hayes

I stood outside the arena with my hands in my jacket pockets and let the ocean wind hit my face, and for exactly thirty seconds I forgot who I was supposed to be. The sky was wide and gray and beautiful. The waves were loud and far away. I just breathed.

Then someone called out Ethan’s name, and I snapped back.

The charity game was packed: local families, little kids with foam fingers, coaches from three different academies sitting in the stands with their arms crossed and their eyes sharp. The Falcons filed in through the side entrance. I kept my helmet bag over my shoulder and my head slightly down and focused on walking like Ethan. Loose. Easy. Confident without trying.

I was getting better at it.

Then I heard his voice.

“Ethan!”

My stomach folded in half.

Jack Sullivan came through the crowd like sunlight through a window, tall, with an easy smile and broad shoulders under a blue Eagles jacket with the captain’s patch stitched on the chest. I’d known Jack since I was eleven. He’d eaten dinner at our house more times than I could count. He was Ethan’s best friend.

He was also the reason I had spent three years pretending I didn’t have feelings.

He grabbed my shoulder and pulled me into a hug before I could do anything about it. I stood very still, arms stiff at my sides, my heart screaming.

“Man, it’s been too long,” he said. He pulled back and held me at arm’s length, studying my face.

I smiled. Flat. Easy. Ethan’s smile.

But something strange happened in Jack’s eyes. They moved across my face slowly. Not suspicious, exactly. More like someone hearing a familiar song played slightly differently and not being able to name what had changed. His smile stayed, but something behind it went quiet and thoughtful.

“You look different,” he said.

“New haircut.”

He stared one second longer than was comfortable. Then he laughed and shook my shoulder. “Come on. Coach wants a photo before warm-up.”

I followed him and told my heart to behave.

After the photo, the two teams drifted down to the beach below the parking lot, where a pregame bonfire was apparently a tradition. Someone had dragged out a speaker, and the music played low and warm under the waves. Players sat around the fire in groups, laughing and throwing things at each other and pretending the game wasn’t only two hours away. The sky had gone dark and orange at the edges, and the wind was cold and sweet.

I sat a little apart with my knees pulled up and watched Jack across the fire.

He was laughing at something a teammate said, his head thrown back, his eyes crinkling at the corners. He looked so easy inside his own skin. I’d always loved that about him, the way he never seemed to be fighting himself.

I was always fighting myself.

“Since when do you look at Sullivan like that?”

I turned my head fast.

Rhys was sitting two feet away on the same log, close enough that his shoulder almost brushed mine. I hadn’t heard him sit down. His face was turned toward the fire, but his eyes were on me. Calm. Watching. Like always.

“Like what?”

“Like that.” He tilted his chin toward Jack. “Like you’re trying to memorize something.”

“I’m not looking at him in any particular way.”

“You’ve been staring at him for six minutes.”

“Are you counting?”

Rhys looked at me directly then. Something flickered across his face, quick and gone. “I notice things,” he said. “You know that by now.”

I looked back at the fire.

“He’s Ethan’s best friend,” I said. “We go way back. I’m allowed to look at someone I know.”

Rhys was quiet for a moment. Then he said nothing else. But he didn’t move away, either, and I was very aware of exactly how much space wasn’t between us.

---

The game wasn’t supposed to get ugly. It always got ugly.

Rhys and Jack had history, and everyone knew it. Two years of tournament clashes and no love lost. Jack was a physical player. Rhys was a psychological one. When those two styles met on the ice, the result was never clean.

It started in the second period.

Jack drove into Rhys’s side, and Rhys retaliated with a slash across the gloves. The referee called it, and Jack got in Rhys’s face and said something I couldn’t hear. Rhys smiled, which was worse than anything he could have said back. Both benches got loud. Coach Donovan was on his feet.

I was watching too closely and not closely enough.

The play shifted fast. The puck came my way, and I went for it hard. I had it. I was building speed, eyeing the opening on the left side of the net.

Then the hit came from my right.

I never saw who it was. It didn’t matter. It was heavy and brutal, and it took my feet out completely. I went down hard. My shoulder hit the ice, my helmet cracked against the boards, and the world went white and then very loud.

My helmet had shifted.

I grabbed it, pressed it down, and lay completely still.

Get up. You have to get up before anyone gets close.

But someone was already there. Rhys dropped to one knee beside me before I could move. His glove came off. His bare hand touched the side of my face and turned it gently toward him, checking my eyes the way you do when you’re scared and trying not to show it.

“Hey.” His voice was low and different. The sharp edges were gone. “Look at me. Are you in there?”

I looked at him.

The whole rink went somewhere far away. There was only his face close to mine, his hand on my jaw, his eyes searching mine with something urgent and unguarded I had never seen in them before. Something real.

My helmet was still slightly crooked. Neither of us moved. His expression shifted slowly, something crossing behind his eyes that I couldn’t name. His hand stayed on my face one second longer than it needed to.

Then a shadow fell over us both.

Jack shoved Rhys’s shoulder with both hands, and Rhys rocked back and stood up fast.

“Get your hands off him,” Jack said.

His voice was sharp and tight, and it wasn’t about hockey. Not entirely. His eyes moved from Rhys to me and back to Rhys, his jaw set hard, his chest heaving.

Rhys met his gaze steadily.

The tension standing between the three of us wasn’t about the game anymore. It wasn’t about rivalry or points or who had scored what.

I sat up slowly on the ice, pressed my helmet down, and said nothing, because I had no idea what was happening.

But I had a feeling everything was about to get very complicated.