They had lives. I had silence. I absently touched my neck, missing the comforting weight of the delicate white-gold chain anchored by a single star. My fingers curled around nothing—just skin and the ache of memory.
Luke gave the necklace to me after our night under the stars. It was a symbol of that shooting star we’d seen. Of distant fate. Of hope we didn’t say out loud.
I’d left it for him, thinking he would find it and know what it meant. But we left that night. No goodbyes. No warning. I never got it back. And there was no way he would have kept it. Right?
I tossed the phone onto the bed and sat back, the cheap springs creaking beneath me. My eyes drifted toward the window again, to the shadow of the academy and the glowing lights of the arena just beyond it.
That ice had seen too much. Our first kiss. His first fight over me. The last time we spoke face-to-face. I remembered the sting of his words. The heat of his grip. The way the air fractured between us as though something sacred was breaking.
And now I was back.
The plan was to be invisible. But Luke never let things lie. Not when he felt wronged. Not when the past left scars that still stung.
This time, I wasn’t scared of what he would do to me. I was scared of what we might do to each other.
CHAPTER TWO
LUKE
The first day of senior year, I hit the main corridor flanked by Theo, Jax, and Chase. The hallway split like the damn Red Sea. Heads turned. Conversations halted. Even the ones who hated me kept their eyes low.
One more year. Then I was out.
Not that college would be better. But it would be something else. Somethingmine—not preordained by my father or tied to the legacy of the King name. If I made it that far.
We moved as a unit, shoulders brushing, our presence too loud for anyone to ignore. Theo threw a lazy grin at a passing cheerleader who blushed and tripped over her own feet. Chase zeroed in on some sophomore he’d probably already hooked up with over summer break. Jax stayed quiet—watching, always watching, his mood unreadable behind the sharp lines of his face.
He was the only one who might understand the noise in my head.
My mouth was dry. I barely registered the girls whispering near their lockers, or the way teachers stood a little straighter when we passed. It didn’t matter. None of them mattered.Hockey did. Or it used to. It had been everything—was everything—until she left and took the hope I’d had for something different with her.
Plans I’d made to rewrite the story—mine, hers, ours—disintegrated the second she vanished. That was a year ago, and I still hadn’t figured out how to bury the ache she’d left behind. I’d tried. God, I’d tried. But some wounds preferred to rot from the inside.
We turned down the final hallway, and the sea of students shifted again. A ripple of tension followed us like smoke. I didn’t stop it. Didn’t acknowledge it. Power, when wielded right, didn’t need noise.
I was captain of the undefeated Blackwood Blades. Heir to a kingdom built on silence and blood. No one questioned me. No one dared. Until her.
A flash of long, wavy dark hair at the far end of the corridor stopped me mid-step. My pulse kicked hard. A familiar tilt of the head. The curve of a cheek I knew as well as my own reflection.No.
My chest hollowed. It wasn’t the first time I thought I saw her. Hell, I saw her everywhere. In dreams. In crowds. On the ice. My brain liked to torture me with ghosts.
But this wasn’t a trick. The crowd split again, and she turned.Mila.
The world snapped to silence. And there she was.
My breath hitched like I’d been shoved. Air refused to find the bottom of my lungs. For a second, I couldn’t tell if the sound cut out or if the sparking weight inside my chest had simply muted everything else. The lights blurred at the edges. Faces dissolved into a wallpaper of motion. It felt like I’d been pulled under and there was no surface.
She stood maybe twenty feet away, her shoulders straight and chin high. Same dark waves tumbling down her back. Samefull mouth that used to whisper truths against my skin. Her gray-green eyes scanned the crowd, not landing on me. Not yet.
I should have moved. Heat crawled up my spine, my hands going numb at the fingertips. A prickled cold started at the base of my skull and spread down, sharp and electric. My vision tunneled until I could see Mila and nothing else. I could see the line of her jaw, and the little scar that freckled the curve of her collarbone.
Panic tightened a fist around my throat. It didn't make sense—I'd trained for games that mattered, for finals that decided seasons. But this was different—older and meaner and wrong. Old plans and promises I’d buried—the ones I’d swore I’d never speak—rose like tidal water and tried to wash me away.
There are rules, I told myself. King rules. Captain rules. There was no fracturing in public. I couldn’t look weak, or give away anything that someone could use against me.
So I did what I’d always done—I moved. Slower than anyone would notice but with mechanical purpose.
Hiding didn’t stop the tremor though. It just made it smaller—contained in a chamber behind my ribs. I pressed my thumb into my palm until it hurt while counting. If Mila saw, she could peel the bandage back and show the wound like it was some trophy. The thought made something hot and ugly climb up my throat.
