Chapter 3

Elara

"You good?" Leah asked.

"Fantastic," I said.

She gave me a look that said I know, and I'm choosing to let it go and then Blake materialized at her elbow and her attention redirected like a compass finding north. I didn't blame her. I'd agreed to one hour of wall-standing. I was prepared to deliver exactly that.

A guy held out a red cup without looking at me. I shook my head. He moved on.

Somewhere to my left, two people were making out against the pool table with a level of commitment that seemed to belong in a different venue. I looked away.

Leah reappeared briefly to elbow me and tilt her head toward the staircase.

A blond girl was coming down — white low-cut top, black mini skirt, flanked by two other girls who were clearly operating in a supporting capacity. She moved like she knew exactly how much space she was taking up and had decided it was precisely the correct amount.

"Victoria Chase," Leah said quietly. "Stay off her radar. She has territorial instincts and she's very good at making people feel like they wandered into the wrong room."

Victoria's eyes swept the room in one clean pass. They landed on me for approximately two seconds — not hostile, more like a customs official noting an unfamiliar passport — and then moved on.

"She looked at me," I said.

"She looks at everyone. You'll know when she's actually clocked you." Leah paused. "Don't worry about it yet."

Then something shifted in the room. Not a sound exactly — more like a change in pressure, the way a crowd unconsciously reorganizes itself around a new gravitational center. I looked toward the far end of the space and saw that a gap had opened up near the kitchen doorway, not because anyone had stepped aside deliberately but because some people simply generate that kind of geometry wherever they stand.

The guy at the center of it was in a dark henley that didn’t even try to hide how broad his shoulders were. Blond hair, sharp jaw, that easy half-smile people wore when they already knew half the room wanted them. He held a cup he wasn’t drinking from and somehow still owned the entire fucking kitchen doorway.

He looked exactly like the type who rotated girlfriends the way most guys rotated playlists.

Something clicked.

The ice rink. The second-floor corridor. The voice that had cut straight through the flashback and pulled me back to the surface.

He turned slightly, scanning the room with the same unhurried efficiency he'd had on the walkway this morning, and I took one step back into the shadow behind me before I'd consciously made the decision to move.

"That's Declan Hayes," Leah said at my shoulder, her voice carrying a particular quality — not admiration exactly, more like the careful neutrality you'd use to describe something genuinely unpredictable. "Captain. Number eleven. He's the reason we won last night and the reason this party exists. And he is the most complicated person in this building, which is saying something given the building." She paused. "Don't go near him."

"I wasn't planning to."

"I know. I'm saying it for the record." Another pause, shorter this time. "He's not a bad person. I don't think. He's just the kind of person who doesn't do anything halfway, on the ice or anywhere else. Life motto is supposedly three P's: party, praise, and pussy. Rumor is he's gone through half the girls on campus already. That particular quality is genuinely dangerous when you're still finding your footing somewhere new."

Three P's. Party, praise, and pussy. I almost snorted. Way too exaggerated. The kind of campus legend that got inflated every time someone needed a cautionary tale. Still — looking at him now, at the way the room bent around him without him even trying, I could see how the rumor had stuck. He was unfairly, almost ridiculously handsome. The kind of face and body that made people stupid. I felt the pull of it for half a second, then shut it down hard.

Absolutely not. I had zero interest in getting anywhere near a serial-playboy hockey captain who treated women like rotating entertainment. That path led nowhere good, and I was done walking into things that looked shiny and left scars.

I looked back across the room. Declan Hayes had turned away, laughing at something his teammate had said, and for a moment I could only see his profile — sharp jaw, the clean line of his back under the dark fabric — before someone moved in front of him and blocked my view entirely.

Don't go near him. Fine. Easy. I hadn't come here to go near anyone, least of all someone whose entire reputation screamed temporary and messy.

"Elara?"

The voice came from my right. Something about it — the slight softening of certain consonants, a cadence I'd heard through headphones at two in the morning when I hadn't been able to sleep and the walls of wherever I was staying had felt very close — made me turn before I'd even processed why it was familiar.

A guy stood a few feet away. Dark brown hair, slightly messy. Gold wire frames over warm brown eyes, that same careful smile that always asked permission first.

I knew that voice. I'd heard it on the other side of the world, in a dark room, on the worst nights of a very bad year, telling me to focus on what I could control and let the rest burn. And now, seeing him in person for the first time, the small, private crush I'd never quite admitted to myself stirred again — warmer, sharper, impossible to ignore.

"Alex?" I said.

Alex Volkov's smile settled into something warmer, a little more certain. "I wasn't sure it was you," he said, his Russian accent lighter in person than it had ever been over the phone but unmistakably present. "When did you get to NU?"

Three weeks ago, I almost said. I've been here three weeks and this is the first time I've felt like maybe I made the right call coming here.

I didn't say that. But I thought it.