Page 71 of Shattered Ice
I swallow. “He’ll pivot to money, image, punishment. When he can’t control you with fury, he’ll try quiet. Freeze you out. He thinks icewins.”
Adrian huffs once, humorless. “Ice is where I live.”
The road unspools. My pulse steadies. I can feel something new forming between us—less tinder, more steel. I push once more, careful. “Same principle off the ice. With the reading.”
His hand leaves the console and finally touches me, firm, just above my knee. “Clara.”
“I’m not saying try harder,” I say, meeting his eyes. “I’m saying stop letting a broken tool bruise you. Get the read on the opponent. Make the adjustment. If the Academic Center runs the battery and calls it dyslexia, that’s not a scar. It’s scouting. Extra time on exams, alternate formats—those aren’t favors. They’re leverage. You don’t win by playing blind when there’s a floodlight two feet away.”
He doesn’t tense. He goes very, very still, the kind of stillness that comes from not breathing at all. That’s more dangerous. The Audi shivers as we pass a semi. He signals, pulls onto the shoulder with a decisive sweep, and kills the engine. The sudden quiet roars.
Adrian looks at me then—really looks. No mask. No captain. Just the man who let me see the wound and didn’t flinch when I touched it. His eyes are a winter sky.
“You think I’m weak if I ask,” he says, the words low and raw.
“I think you’re lethal when you pick the right weapon.”
Something breaks—in him, in the air—like the low hum of a high-tension wire finally snapping. His hand slides higher on mythigh, a claiming heat, but not to distract. To anchor. “Tell me what I do.”
“I email the Academic Center,” I say, my voice steady because he needs steady. “I book you with the specialist. I’ll sit in the hallway while you do it, or I’ll sit in the room if you want. You get the paper with your name on it and you make it yours. Then we redesign how you study around the brain you actually have. No more swinging at the dark.”
He exhales like someone who’s been underwater too long. He nods once, sharp. “Set it up.”
Pride hits so hard it’s almost pain. I reach for him, my fingers sliding over the back of his hand, tracing the tendons and the small, white scars across his knuckles. He watches my touch like it’s a sacrament. Then he takes my wrist and brings my knuckles to his mouth, his lips closing over the bones like a vow.
“Good girl,” he murmurs, and it shouldn’t make my vision blur, but it does.
We pull back onto the road. Campus rises out of the dark, all stone and money. Nothing has changed. Everything has. He parks in the shadow of the library and rests his forehead against the wheel for a beat, a soldier bracing before the next fight. When he looks at me again, the softness is gone from his face, but not from his eyes.
“I’m not handing him you,” he says. Not a promise. A ruling.
“You don’t have to,” I answer. “We’re building something he doesn’t know how to touch.”
His mouth curves—feral, proud. He leans in, not to kiss me, but to press his palm flat over my sternum, checking that I’m still there. My heart kicks hard against his hand.
“Still mine,” he says, possession and relief braided.
I catch his wrist. “Say you’re mine back.”
His eyes darken. “You already know.”
“Say it,” I insist, my voice steel.
A slow, dangerous, and intimate smile. “Yours, Clara.”
The word moves through me like heat through glass—dangerous, warping. He walks me up the dorm steps, his hand on the small of my back, casual to anyone watching, proprietary to me. At my door, he doesn’t ask to come in. He tips my chin with two fingers, studying my mouth, then kisses me once—brief, brutal, claiming. It feels like the click of a safety being flicked off.
“Tomorrow,” he says against my lips. “We start the war my way.”
“Strategic,” I remind him softly.
He smirks. “You give the orders. I break the ice.”
He steps back only when I unlock the door. I watch him through the thin pane of glass as he walks away, a man people part around without knowing why.Mine. A dangerous, beautiful problem I have no intention of solving.
I shower, my forehead pressed against the tile, the taste of him still in my mouth. I pull on one of his shirts he “forgot” at my place; it hangs off me like a flag. At my desk, I open my laptop and draft the email.
Subject: Assessment RequestBody: Clinical, clean, efficient. I attach the referral template Addison gave me months ago ‘in case’.
