Page 6 of Shattered Ice
“It’s going to be a nightmare,” she says with a wry grin. “But at least I can get some of my reading done while I babysit a bunch of overgrown toddlers. Seriously, though,” she adds, her voice softening, “if it gets too crazy, you know where to find me. We victims of academic enforcement have to stick together.”
She orders a black coffee and gives me a small, genuine smile before she heads out. It’s a candle in a storm, gone before it matters. “Hang in there, Clara.”
I watch her go, a tiny, fragile warmth spreading through my chest before the cold reality of my situation extinguishes it. Talia gets to babysit toddlers. I have to tame a monster. If I fail, he gets benched. I lose everything.
I stand there, apron strangling my shoulders, knuckles white around a rag, my thoughts reeling. Anger, disbelief, and the sick, helpless knowledge that it’s not hard work that matters here. It’s connections. It’s being in orbit around someone the world has already decided is worth saving. My name isn’t on a building. My family didn’t buy a stadium. Everything I’ve clawed for hangs by the spoiled whim of one golden executioner.
I see my mother’s face after a sixteen-hour shift, exhaustion etched into her skin but her spine straight as steel.We survive, her eyes always seemed to say.That’s what we do.
But this feels different. The world feels like a dark room with the lights cut. I have always been in control, always the one with the plan. Now I’m being dragged into someone else’s game—a violent, careless world where my survival is a footnote in his story. I’m just a variable. A safeguard. A weapon sharpened to protect an investment.
My entire future is chained to saving a boy who never bothers to pick up his own damn pen.
Adrian Hale. The last boy I’d bleed for—and the first they’ll make me.
Chapter 4
Clara
Mydormroomisa box—ten feet by ten, the color of stale paper and old bone. One narrow bed, one battered desk, and an armchair with a rip in the cushion I stitched closed with dental floss. The thread is still tight and white, a scar I made myself. The rug is secondhand, its edge curled with someone else’s regret. The lamp flickers when I plug in my laptop and phone at once, threatening a blackout. My entire life fits into this corner of Briarcliff: cheap, windowless, unchosen. The room no one wanted, the last scrap after every legacy kid picked their sunlit view of the world they inherited. This is what’s left for girls like me. This is what I’ll defend with my teeth.
I drop my backpack by the bed, the thud echoing like the closing of a cell door. Habit drives me to flick on every light—the desk lamp, the overhead’s harsh fluorescent, even the faded string of fairy lights drooping over my mattress. I can’t stand the dark. I don’t care how childish it sounds; I need every watt to push the shadows into the corners where they belong. The dark here is thick. It pools, it waits. If I let it, it will swallow the air, steal the breath from my lungs. The light is a thin armor, a fortress made of glass.
I don’t sit. I can’t. I pace—one circuit, then another. The rug’s worn patch finds my heel every loop, a rut I’ve carved with insomnia and adrenaline. Lansing’s voice still burns in my bones, clinical and cold:You are the most efficient safeguard we have.Not a student. Not a person. Just a tool to protect someone who matters more. The feeling in my mouth is bitter, metallic, like biting down on a coin. Rage and helplessness, old friends.
Adrian Hale. A name with a taste of cold whiskey and blood. Now, a leash on my scholarship—a boy as my executioner.
I boot up my laptop, the fan whining like a trapped insect battering metal walls. Typing his name into the search bar—Adrian Hale Briarcliff Titans—I let the internet deliver the verdict. Articles, images, blog posts. His face stares back at me, jaw clenched, shoulders squared, spotlighted as if carved from stone, not flesh.
I click a video:Hale, Junior Season Highlights—4K Edition. The speakers crackle as the music starts, all violence—distorted guitar, heavy drums. The edits worship him. Goals, hits, Adrian skating like a predator. He doesn’t play; he hunts. He devours. His eyes gleam through the screen like a predator sniffing prey, and for a second, it feels like he’s already watching me.
But it’s smart. His time on ice is insane, and his plus-minus rating is the best in the conference, which means he’s not just scoring but preventing goals, too. My dad would have appreciated his efficiency on the defensive end. A smart player, not just a brute. He bends the game around him. Even the statsbleed in his favor, as if the numbers are afraid to betray him. He’s violent and graceful at once: head low, eyes sharp as broken glass, every movement precise, brutal, inevitable.
Next, I find an interview. Maya Maddox from theBriarcliff Chroniclethrusts a microphone toward his face, her familiar crooked smile flashing.
“That game-winner was incredible, Hale. What went through your mind when you saw that opening?”
He just stares back—blank, cold. “It’s my job,” he says, then turns away.
Maya steps into his path, microphone steady. “And the penalty in the third? Necessary or excessive?” The camera catches her sharp, unflinching eyes before he brushes past her completely.
The highlight reel freezes on the last frame: his face, sweat-slicked hair, set jaw. Those ice-blue eyes stare through the lens, through me. Not arrogant, not happy—just focused. Hollow and sharp enough to hurt. If he looked at me like that in person, I’d either break or burn.
Snapping the laptop closed, the sharp crack of plastic is a satisfying jolt that travels up my arm.What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?
I expected a frat-boy jock—easy to dismiss, easy to manage, a liability I could fix with color-coded charts and a hard line. But the boy in that video is something else entirely. It’s not just the violence on the ice; it’s the profound emptiness in his eyes afterward. He looked like a weapon cooling after the kill, no humanity left in the steel. A storm in human skin. A threat Briarcliff lets run loose because he wins them games and brings in money. They say he doesn’t share victories or women. He takes, and it sticks.
And me? I grind myself to the bone for every decimal of my GPA. One mistake, one slip, and I’m gone. That’s the difference.He gets grace; I get the target. He is everything I’ve fought against my whole life, wrapped up in a jawline and a jersey.
I drag out my Statistics book, forcing my brain into motion. My first act is to rewrite the tutoring schedule, then do it again. Flipping through the class notes I downloaded, I start making lists of his weaknesses, his missed assignments—any crack I can leverage. These aren’t notes; I’m forging weapons.It’s not about him,I tell myself.It’s about survival.But every time my pencil slices across the page, I see his face, sweat-slick and unreadable, staring at me with those empty, lethal eyes.
My phone buzzes with a 6:30 PM reminder, and I jolt. Hours have vanished. My stomach growls as the windowless room’s fluorescent lights flicker, casting everything in that institutional blue-purple glow that makes even my skin look dead. I microwave a café sandwich until the cheese sweats and the bread turns to damp rubber. It gnaws back at my teeth—punishment disguised as dinner. I eat it standing over my desk, pretending my planner matters more than Adrian Hale shadowing the inside of my skull.
Later, I call my mom. She picks up on the second ring. “Hey, baby. You breathing?”
Her voice hums down the line, too fragile for the weight it carries. I press my head into the pillow, eyes closing, clutching the phone like a relic. “Barely,” I say, scraping out a smile she can’t see.
“So how’s that calculus professor treating you? Still making you solve problems on the board?”
