I cup both hands around my mouth and project with the full volume of lungs conditioned by fifteen years of ice rinks and a childhood spent arguing with Eleanora Ashford-Holloway across formal dining tables.
"SMOKE HIM, MAEBELL!"
Rafe pushes harder. I can see the urgency entering his stride, the lengthening of his reach, the slight forward pitch of his shoulders that signals an Alpha deploying his final reserves. He expected to be ahead by now. The realization that he is not is converting his confidence into desperation in real time, and desperate Alphas make the same mistake that desperate hockey players make: they spend everything they have before the play is finished.
Mae's posture changes at the halfway mark.
The shift is subtle enough that only someone who has studied her movement language would catch it. Her shoulders drop. Her breathing slows. The controlled, pace-matching rhythm she maintained for the first half dissolves, replaced by something I have not seen from her in over a decade.
She lets go.
Her strides transform. Short, explosive pushes that barely separate her blades from the surface, each one building on the previous, each one fractionally faster, the acceleration compounding like interest on a debt the ice owes her for every year she was denied access to it. Her body drops lower. Her core tightens. The wind catches her dark hair and pulls it backward in a stream that traces her trajectory like a comet's tail.
She begins pulling away from Rafe.
Not gradually. Not in the incremental, contested fashion of two athletes separating by centimeters over dozens of strides. Mae creates distance between them with the sudden, violent acceleration of a figure skater launching into a sprint thatborrows its mechanics from disciplines most hockey players have never studied and therefore cannot replicate.
One stride of separation. Two. Three. Four.
The gap widens with each push. Rafe is giving everything he has, his blades carving desperate furrows in the ice, his breathing visible in sharp, frantic clouds, his body operating at an output that his conditioning can sustain for approximately five more seconds before lactic acid converts his muscles from propulsion into protest.
Mae is flying.
The word is not metaphorical. Her blades are producing so little friction against the surface that the sound of her skating has disappeared entirely, replaced by the whisper of a body moving through air at a velocity that the arena's architecture was not designed to contain. The lights overhead streak in her peripheral vision. The boards rush toward her with the accelerating proximity of a wall that is approaching faster than her stopping distance can accommodate.
She needs to brake. She is running out of ice.
"PUCK!"
The shout erupts from multiple positions along the boards, overlapping voices producing a single, frantic warning that crosses the rink in the time it takes my brain to process the word and redirect my gaze toward the ice surface in Mae's path.
A stray puck. Black rubber against white ice, barely visible at speed, sitting directly in the trajectory her left blade is about to intersect.
No.
The contact is minuscule. Her blade catches the edge of the puck at full sprint velocity, the tiny collision producing a disruption that would be negligible at jogging speed and is catastrophic at hers. Her left foot kicks sideways. Her right ankleovercorrects. The balance that has been carrying her across the ice with surgical precision shatters in a single, horrible instant.
She is falling.
Hurtling toward the boards with the full momentum of a sprint and none of the control to arrest it. The plexiglass wall that separates the playing surface from the spectators is rushing toward her at a speed that will convert impact into injury and injury into the kind of damage that ends athletic careers before they begin.
I scream her name.
The sound tears from my throat with a rawness that I feel in my vocal cords, my body lurching against the boards as if I can reach her from across thirty feet of ice through sheer force of terror. Around me, the arena erupts in gasps and curses. Cal's voice, sharp and panicked. Étienne shouting in rapid French. Rafe, his competitive aggression evaporating into a single, raw syllable that strips his cruelty down to its foundation.
"FUCK! Mae!"
He cares. Beneath everything, he cares. That fear in his voice is not performance. It is the involuntary response of a man who has been pretending not to feel and just lost control of the pretense.
Mae closes her eyes. Braces for impact.
And a body materializes between her and the boards.
The screech of skates against ice splits the arena's acoustics like a blade through fabric, the sound of someone executing an emergency stop at a speed that should not be physically compatible with maintaining an upright position. A figure plants between Mae's trajectory and the plexiglass, bracing with legs spread and arms open, absorbing her full-speed collision against a chest that barely shifts on impact.
The arena gasps.
Mae crashes into the stranger with enough force to produce a grunt that carries across the rink, her body slamming into his with the kinetic energy of a sprint converted into sudden, violent deceleration. His arms wrap around her instantly, pulling her closer rather than pushing her away, his balance holding despite the impact, his skates grinding the ice beneath them in twin furrows that testify to the force he just absorbed.
