Page 28 of Shattered Ice
Calder raises his voice, pitching it for the whole room. “Scholarship special today: boiled moral superiority.”
Gio’s knife flips. “Comes with a side of babysitting.”
The line is tired. The room laughs anyway. That’s how ritual works: orderly, anesthetized cruelty. They don’t want new jokes; they want proof the old ones still sting.
Zoë is already halfway turned in her chair, ready to deliver an offensive that will land us all in administration offices for a week. Genny touches her wrist—the smallest pressure.Not here.Zoë snaps her mouth shut, seething glitter.
Clara opens the lid on a plastic cup of fruit and doesn’t look over. It pisses me off more than if she had. The refusal burns hotter than any insult, as if she’d branded me nothing. The hunger to crack her composure prowls, circling, its teeth just under the surface. I wait. The pack hates a vacuum; it fills it.
“Hey, Harrington,” Calder calls. “How’s the overtime? Keep our captain coloring in the lines?”
I don’t give him the satisfaction of looking at him first. I look at her. She has a fork halfway to her mouth. She lowers it, setting it on the tray’s edge. Precise even in interruption. She turns just enough to let him know she heard.
“You should try it,” she says, her voice clear and calm. “Most people stop mistaking laziness for personality once they try discipline.”
Zoë sucks a breath through her teeth, delighted. Genny coughs into her hand to hide a smile. Calder’s grin goes thin. He points his bottle at me without looking away from her. “Tell your babysitter I’m sensitive. She’s hurting my feelings.”
I’ve got sixteen ways to end this, sixteen ways that keep us king of the room. I pick the one that will sell the longest. “She doesn’t answer to you, Calder,” I say, my voice cold and easy. “She answers tome. And Compliance doesn’t like when numbers cry.”
They laugh the way rooms do when the biggest animal tells them it’s time. It rolls, hot and thick. I keep my face blank. The tight piece under my sternum doesn’t exist. I ignore the way my own blood heats at the sound of her voice.
Clara doesn’t look at me. It’s a choice. That’s new. She’s past wanting to see if I’ll be human. She angles her body toward her food like I’m just a column in the room to navigate around. The quiet act of it burns hotter than any insult.
I stand to dump my tray. A pointless piece of theater, but habits are armor. I take the long route that puts me at the end of her aisle because I can. Because the marble here was poured in shapes that say I can. Zoë sees me first and straightens. Genny’s eyes flick up, cool and assessing. Clara doesn’t telegraph. She lifts a grape to her mouth and chews as if this is not a battlefield. Her pulse beats once at her throat, then stills.
I stop just short of her table. Not close enough to be personal, but close enough to be pressure. The clink of my tray landing on the return is louder than it should be. “Looks like you’re running on half speed tonight,” I say, my voice steady. “Try not to stumble over the little words.”
Zoë hisses “asshole” like it’s incense. Genny doesn’t move.
Clara looks up at me, finally. Her eyes are winter glass—clear, cold, and promising breakage. “If you can manage not to skip the instructions,” she says, her voice level, “I’d hate for your ego to sprain something.”
“Five,” I say.
She nods once, not to me, but to the schedule. “Five.”
I take my tray to the bin and dump it. The scrape of plastic drags like a gavel through the room. When I cut back past our table, Declan’s eyes meet mine for a second. That’s all.What are you doing?I give him nothing to read. The chandelier’s hum follows me, brittle and wrong.
Chapter 16
Adrian
Thegranddiningroomof the Hale estate feels like a mausoleum with chandeliers, every facet polished to a blinding sheen, every echo designed to remind me of the joy that has died within these walls. This room is an artifact of a time when men still thought of themselves as conquerors, their ghosts preserved in the lacquer of the centuries-old paneling and the silent, careful steps of the serving staff. It’s Friday, and the air is heavy with the ritual of obligation, a scent more pungent than any aged whiskey or blue-label cigars that linger in the space.
I stand at the edge of the marble-fanged table, my posture perfect, my nerves held tight in a grip that would impress my father’s military forebears. The guests around me are a parade of manufactured elegance: men with stock portfolios for skeletons,women with faces engineered to mimic their younger selves. Their laughter pings off the mirrored ceiling and comes back warped, a hint of desperation folded in with each clangorous ha-ha. My own reflection, double and triple refracted in the cut glass, looks like a boy cosplaying as a man.
The place setting before me is a minor monument to excess: twelve pieces of silver, three wine glasses, a name card withAdrian E. Halein calligraphy more expensive than most people’s monthly rent. The seat opposite me is reserved for the patriarch and the weight of every expectation he’s never voiced. Around the table, corporate generals and Ivy League deans jostle for conversational ground, occasionally glancing at me as if to audit the asset, to gauge whether the investment is maturing on schedule.
I don’t remember what died first in this room—my mother’s laughter or my own hope for an unexamined life—but I know the order in which the pieces were removed. The last to go was privacy: the small, human moments when you could be a person and not a brand. That was an unceremonious burial, hastened by my father’s earliest lesson:Everything you do is being watched, even when it isn’t.
I’m thinking about this when my father’s voice, a low-frequency weapon, detonates across the table. Charles Hale moves through the room with a predator’s economy, his gaze sharp enough to inflict paper cuts on the unwary. He wears his power like a second skin: perfectly tailored, impossibly crisp, the kind of apparel that makes lesser men sweat just by proximity.
He takes his seat without looking at it, trusting the world to have arranged itself for his comfort. “Adrian,” he snaps, pulling me back into the present. “Your jacket. Adjust it. You look like a street urchin.”
The starched collar cuts into my throat, sharper than his words. A ripple of polite laughter comes from the two nearestguests, but I catch the flicker of disappointment that always follows. I correct the lapel with the practiced speed of someone trained by threat more than by reward.
“Yes, sir,” I answer. Everyyes, siris a knife I keep sheathed.
Tonight, the guest list is studded with the sort of people who run for office unopposed. The president of Briarcliff University to my father’s left, a hedge fund CEO to his right, and two board members with their spouses on the far end. The Provost sits like a blade at the table—lean, sharp, her gaze calibrated to dismantle engines or men.
