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Prologue: Margot

"You're not seriously going to drink that."

The cup vanishes out of my hand.

Jax Hunter holds my beer out of reach, grinning down at me. My brother's best friend. My secret crush.

"That's mine." I lunge for it. He lifts it high up a clean foot out of reach, and turns me into an Olympic event, because he is six-foot-three of freshly minted champion and I am five-five.

"Your brother would bury me in the backyard." He pours my drink into the sink, holding my gaze like he's daring me to stop him.

Gray eyes, warm at the edges tonight, and it is deeply unfair that he got handed a gorgeous face. "Remember, you’re nineteen, Margot. Be good."

I have loved Jax since I was twelve when he stood behind me in my parents' driveway, folded his hands over mine on a hockey stick, and told me to follow through. With his best friend, my brother at our side.

I have spent every year since building a rich inner life in which I do NOT, in any way, want to climb him like a rec-league rock wall. It’s going great. Lying keeps my hands to myself.

Up close he's such a problem.

Still in a team hoodie, his dark hair shoved off his forehead, a split healing at one eyebrow from a fight he absolutely started.

He has a strong jawline I’ve written unhinged thoughts about in my journal, I plan to burn before I die.

"You look different." He gives me a once-over I feel deep in my heart.

I wore the green sweater tonight. The soft one that slips off one shoulder.

Jax said, years ago, mouth full of my mom's lasagna, that green was his favorite color, and I have been quietly, pathetically weaponizing that fact ever since.

His gaze snags on my bare shoulder holding a beat before he drags his eyes back up.

"Taller?"

"Nope. Same height but I have a brand-new crippling self-esteem."

"It's a good look on you." The grin again, the menace of it. "Does Cade know you're drinking his beer?"

"Cade knows I'm nineteen and fully capable of ruining my own liver, thank you. Plus he shouldn’t have left it unattended."

"Not on my watch." He steals a pretzel off the counter and points it at me like a tiny salted gavel. "Somebody's gotta keep you out of trouble."

The irony of that sentence is going to keep me warm for years to come.

Someone's speaker rattles the windows. The bass is booming.

The house reeks of spilled lager and the cold mineral bite of a rink that never quite washes out of these boys, and I’ve spent my whole life in rooms like this one.

The little sister. The tagalong. The girl who learned to love this sport by watching two boys chase it across every sheet of ice in the county.

Cade materializes long enough to sling an arm around Jax's neck and haul him toward the living room, toward a trophy the size of a toddler and the ritual retelling of the game-winner.

Jax follows, because Jax always goes where Cade goes, the two of them stitched together since a peewee tournament.

I watch them from the doorway. My brother, all easy, the guy everybody trusts. Jax beside him, louder and faster, a grin permanently loaded, the guy everybody wants. Including me.

Cade's built like our dad, all shoulders and reach, the same red-brown hair as mine gone wild at the ends, a nose broken and set crooked.

My brother’s got the kind of open, sunburned face that makes strangers hand him their car keys and tell their whole life story inside ten minutes. My whole life he's been the calm one. The one who shows up and protects me.