Chapter 4 ,,,

POV: Mia Hayes

I made my first real mistake on a Tuesday.

We were gathered in the dim film room, watching tape from the charity game. Coach Donovan paused the footage on a crucial play and asked me to walk the team through my decision-making on the left-wing sequence. I leaned forward in my chair, fully immersed in the tactical breakdown, and started talking. I used animated hand gestures the way I always do when I explain a game I love, and my voice naturally lifted at the end of the sentence—the light, fluid lilt that was entirely my own.

Just me.

Across the dark room, Rhys turned his head slowly. The shift in his attention was so sharp it felt like a cold breeze. I caught myself immediately, cleared my throat roughly, brought my voice down into Ethan’s lower register, and fixed my eyes on the projection screen as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. But when I stole a glance two minutes later, he was still staring at me. It wasn't full suspicion yet—it was the quiet, razor-sharp focus he reserved for a puzzle he hadn't solved.

That night in our room, I pressed my face deep into my pillow and screamed without letting out a single sound.

This was getting harder by the day.

Not the hockey. The hockey was pure muscle memory; I could play it in my sleep. It was everything around the game that was grinding me down. Pausing to think before opening my mouth every single time. Guarding my posture, holding my laugh back, making sure I walked into every room with a widened, easy stance to take up physical space.

And then there was Jack, who kept looking at me with that strange, searching expression—a look that made my chest tighten for two completely different reasons. First, because he was Jack, and he’d always made my heart race. Second, because if anyone on earth was going to spot the difference between Ethan and me, it would be his best friend.

And above all, there was Rhys, watching me like a complex problem he’d personally volunteered to solve.

He had started quietly testing me. I noticed the subtle shift three days after the charity game. Little traps. He casually brought up a girl from a school two towns over—someone Ethan had supposedly dated—and paused to gauge my reaction. I gave him a blank face and zero response. He dropped a story about a regional tournament two years ago with deliberately wrong details buried inside it, waiting to see if I’d correct him. I said nothing, because I simply didn't know enough about Ethan's private memory bank to challenge him.

With every test, Rhys filed the silence away behind his calm, icy eyes and said nothing further.

I was running out of time, and the weight of it was suffocating.

The storm rolled in on Thursday night.

It swept off the coast hard and mean, and by nine o’clock, heavy rain was slamming against our window panes. The overhead lights flickered twice and died completely. Emergency backup generators cast a faint, amber glow down the hallway, but our room was plunged into shadow.

To make matters worse, a ceiling pipe directly above Rhys’s bed decided that exact night to spring a slow, steady leak.

Without asking for permission, Rhys dragged his mattress across the floor and set it down on my side of the room, right between my bed frame and the wall. I sat up on my mattress, looking down at him in the darkness, and didn't bother arguing. Fighting him felt like wasting energy on something that barely mattered in the grand scheme of things.

For a long while, neither of us said a word. The drumbeat of rain against glass was deafening, and the darkness felt intimate and suffocatingly small.

Then Rhys spoke into the dark. “My father called this morning.”

I stared up at the black ceiling. “What did he want?”

“To remind me that you beat me at regionals two years ago.” He paused, his breath quiet. “He does that. Finds the sharpest blade available and uses it. He said if I lose to you again this season, I’m wasting my talent on sentiment instead of strategy.”

The room grew very still around us.

“That’s a terrible thing to say to your son,” I said softly.

“He’s a terrible person in some very specific ways.” His voice was flat—the practiced, smooth flat of someone who had spent years hiding the sting. “I’ve been trying to beat you since I was fifteen. Half of that is because I love the thrill of competing. The other half is because I want just one phone call where he can’t throw your name in my face.”

Something heavy and warm opened in my chest. I leaned over the edge of my bed and looked down at him. In the dim amber wash filtering under the door, I could just make out the hard angles of his face. He was lying flat on his back, hands resting behind his head, looking younger and far more human than he ever allowed himself to look during the day.

I wanted to tell him right then.

The truth was right at the tip of my tongue. I’m not Ethan. Ethan is my brother. My name is Mia Hayes, and I’ve spent my entire life pretending and fighting for a chance on the ice, too. I know exactly what it feels like to chase something for two heavy reasons at once.

I clamped my jaw shut and swallowed the words.

“You’ll beat whoever you need to beat,” I whispered instead. “On your own terms.”

Rhys turned his head slowly in the dark and looked up at me. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “Maybe.”

Coach Donovan gathered the entire team in the main auditorium after morning practice the following day.

Falcons versus Eagles. Season opener. Three weeks away. He announced that six elite scouts were officially confirmed for the stands, including two top recruiters from the national development programs.

The auditorium erupted into cheers and wild shouts.

I stood frozen in the center of the noise, feeling the floor beneath my skates tilt violently. National scouts. Men whose entire careers rested on analyzing every subtle stride, every habit, every discrepancy on the ice. They would see everything.

Everything.

Afterward, I walked back to the locker room with my head bowed and my hands trembling slightly. I approached my locker and pulled the latch open.

Rhys was standing right beside me. He reached past my shoulder with slow, deliberate grace, his fingers brushing the interior rim of my open locker, and pulled something out. Something small and light that must have slipped out of my jacket pocket when I threw my gear inside. Something I had brought from home as a senseless security blanket because old habits die hard.

A hair tie. Pink, thin, and unmistakably female.

Rhys held it up between his thumb and forefinger. Around us, the loud locker room was rapidly emptying out as players headed for the showers. Rhys’s dark eyes moved from the thin pink elastic straight to my face, and the subtle shift in his expression was immediate.

“Hayes,” he said, his voice dropping into a dangerous, deadly quiet.

“Explain this.”