Page 46 of Shattered Ice
“You don’t know that.”
“I do,” he says, his voice unwavering. “Because she’s not looking at you like you’re broken. My sister… she has a friend on the newspaper staff. Said Maya Maddox is doing a profile on the ‘unsung academic heroes’ at Briarcliff. Your tutor is one of them. People see her as smart, tough. Unbreakable. She’s not looking at you as a project.” He pauses. “She’s looking at you like you’re worth understanding.”
I let the words sit. Let them sting. Let them settle somewhere deep inside me I don’t have language for.Worth understanding.I’ve been an asset, an investment, a disappointment, a captain. Never something worth understanding.
“She’s different,” I say, the admission low and rough. “She doesn’t back down. Doesn’t let me get away with shit. It’s not about me being a Hale, not about hockey. It’s just… me.”
Declan gives a rare half-smile, the expression foreign on his usually stoic face. “Sounds terrifying.”
“It is.”
We sit in it for another minute. Me, sweaty and wired. Him, solid and quiet.
Finally, he pushes off the lockers. As he passes, he slaps a hand on my shoulder, a firm, grounding pressure. “We’re all broken, Hale,” he says, his voice quiet but clear. “You just hide it better than most. Maybe it’s time you stop trying so hard.”
I sit there long after he’s gone, the locker room slowly emptying around me, the used tape still stuck to my palm. My chest feels too full. Not all cracks show. But Clara Harrington saw mine.
Let her look. I’ll teach her what it costs to see me.
Chapter 27
Clara
I’minourtutoringroom by 4:45 on Monday, my heart a frantic, uneven rhythm against my ribs. The usual anxiety of waiting for Adrian is there, a low hum under my skin, but tonight it’s sharpened to a razor’s edge by a new, more dangerous fear.
It’s the fear of being right.
On the table in front of me are my notes, but they’re not the color-coded fortresses I usually build. They’re a gamble. A hypothesis. I’ve rewritten the densest history paragraphs into simple sentences. I’ve broken down complex stats problems into visual, step-by-step instructions. It’s a completely new approach, based on a suspicion I’m terrified to even name in my own head.
What if I’m wrong?The thought is a cold knot in my stomach.What if he’s not struggling? What if he’s just an arrogant asshole who has been playing me this whole time, and my attempt to ‘help’ is just a profound, humiliating miscalculation?
I’m so lost in my own spiral of doubt that I don’t hear him arrive. No loud footsteps, no aggressive slam of the door. I only know he’s there when his shadow falls over my desk. The scent of ice and sweat clings to him, sharp as steel, tightening something in my chest. I look up, my breath catching. He’s standing in the doorway, but he’s different. The aggressive, coiled energy is gone, replaced by a quiet, watchful stillness like a predator that’s stopped chasing and has started waiting. It’s somehow even more intimidating. He’s on time. And when he moves to the chair across from me, he doesn’t yank it out. He just… sits.
The absence of his usual antagonism is a vacuum, sucking all the air from the room. The lack of his bite presses harder than his bark ever did, a silence thick enough to choke on. He doesn’t speak. He just watches me, his blue eyes intense and unreadable. The silence stretches, heavy and awkward. I’m the one who breaks it, my voice thin and reedy.
“Hi.”
“Harrington,” he says, a simple acknowledgment. He gestures to the papers on the table. “What’s this?”
I take a steadying breath, my pulse hammering in my ears.This is it.“I want to try something different tonight,” I say, my voice more stable than I feel. “A new approach. Humor me.”
He looks from the notes to my face, his expression suspicious. “What kind of approach?”
“A strategic one,” I say, pushing a simplified history sheet toward him. “We’re not going to read the chapter. We’re going to break it down. I’ll read the key concepts aloud. You listen. Then you tell me the main takeaway, in your own words. No bullshit. Just the play-by-play.”
He stares at me for a long, tense moment, his gaze scraping over me like glass. I can see the war in his eyes—ingrained pride fighting a new, uncertain resolve. I expect him to tell me to fuck off, to call it a stupid game. Instead, his jaw works for a moment, a silent battle, before he gives a single, clipped nod.
“Fine. Go.”
The surprise is a physical jolt. I start reading, my voice even, breaking down a dense paragraph on post-war economic policy. My voice trembles once; his pen stills, lethal in its quiet. He listens, his focus absolute, his eyes fixed on a point on the wall behind me as if he’s watching a play develop. When I finish, he distills a page and a half of text into two, brutally efficient sentences. They are perfect. And they are entirely his own, cutting clean like a blade sharpened against my voice.
A surge of pure, shocking validation rushes through me.Holy shit. I was right.I have to quickly mask my reaction, keeping my expression neutral. “Good,” I say, my voice betraying none of the turmoil in my chest. “Next one.”
We build a rhythm. I read. He summarizes. A clean, efficient exchange. But when we get to a section heavy with dates, he falters, his brow furrowing. He gets the year of a key piece of legislation wrong.
This is the real test. I take a breath. “This might sound weird,” I start, my heart pounding, “but let’s try anchoring the dates to something you already have memorized. Like… jersey numbers.”
His head snaps up, eyes flashing with suspicion. “What is this? Some kind of pop-psychology bullshit?”
