Fear inched its way through me, cold and relentless.
Has something changed? Has Luka spent the last twenty-four hours realizing what this could cost him and decided he couldn’t survive it after all?
The possibility lanced through me with a sharpness that felt so fuckingacute.
I would survive losing Luka—eventually.
What terrified me was the thought of Luka returning to that carefully managed version of his life where every emotion had to pass inspection before it reached the surface.
Mark shifted on the seat beside me, lowering his voice while arena lights dimmed around us. “You want my honest opinion?”
I let out a controlled breath. “Not sure, but go ahead.”
“He looks exhausted.”
I swallowed. “Yeah.”
Mark was quiet for a second. “Whatever’s going on with him, it doesn’t look like somebody backing away.” I looked at him sharply and he shrugged. “That’s not what people look like when they’re done caring.”
The words hit hard because part of me already knew they were true.
Across the rink, Luka finally lifted his head. For one brief second his gaze found mine.
The arena disappeared.
I knew that look. I’d seen versions of it before competition, but never like this.
Whatever had happened during the last twenty-four hours, it had stripped something away. The fear was still there, the pressure too. But when our eyes met, I had the strange feeling that he had finally stopped arguing with himself.
Then the moment vanished as Luka looked away again, his expression smoothing back into Olympic composure as he removed his jacket, and the pair of them stepped onto the ice, to the sound of rapturous applause.
Mark leaned back in his seat beside me. “Well, whatever’s happening with him…”
I swallowed hard, eyes fixed on Luka. “Yeah?”
“That boy looks as if he’s about to skate like he has nothing left to lose.”
Luka
The first note of ‘Burn’pulsed through the arena like a heartbeat beneath my skin, and everything else fell away.
The lights, the flags hanging high above the rink. The cameras waiting for Mila and I to become a story the world could understand for four minutes and fifteen seconds. All of it blurred into irrelevance the moment I felt Mila settle beside me in our opening position, her shoulder against my chest, our breathing matched while silence spread across the arena.
We did not look at the audience. That was deliberate.
This program had never belonged to them.
The opening edge curved deep beneath my blades as Mila’s fingers slid into mine exactly on count. The music moved low and intimate through the rink, all restrained tension and inevitability, and my body followed instinctively.
But tonight the program felt different, because somewhere during the endless months leading to Milan, obedience had started feeling less like loyalty and more like disappearance.
Mila’s hand tightened around mine before the twist entry, and Idrove deeper into the edge, gathering speed until the rink began to blur around us. Timing narrowed into instinct. I waited half a heartbeat longer than usual before launching her upward, taking the risk because suddenly I no longer cared about playing it safe.
She flew higher than we planned, her body opening late beneath the white glare of Olympic lights while the audience gasped aloud. Then she dropped back toward me, and my hands locked around her waist hard and clean, the impact jolting through my shoulders before the arena erupted.
Mila stayed close on the exit instead of drifting outward, orbiting me with absolute trust.
One mistake could destroy both our lives. Somehow she never hesitated.
