ON ENEMY ICE

CHAPTER FOUR

JACE

The drive to my place felt longer than it should have, but I wasn't about to complain.

The penthouse isn't too different from the syndicate base. Too big, too quiet, and too perfect. But it's mine.

I keep it cold on purpose. I like the cold. It feels clean and honest, and it does not ask me to perform or feel anything. I chose this sector specifically because it is far from the base and completely out of reach from the ancestral estate I am supposed to call home.

I come out of the bathroom barefoot.

My bedroom is not like the bedrooms most people have. It's too open, too cold, and entirely impersonal. That's the way I like to keep it. The way I've always kept it.

The floor is a solid black marble slab laced with thin white veins, remaining freezing beneath my steps even in the dead of summer. The walls are a muted grey, the ceiling arches high, and the entire far side is composed of floor-to-ceiling glass offering an unobstructed view of the urban sprawl. I refuse to install curtains. Never wanted them. I want to see everything, and I want everything to see absolutely nothing when they look up at me.

The bed is large and low, sitting dead center in the room with black sheets and a grey duvet that I never bother to straighten. Two doors break the monochrome wall—one leading to my vault-like walk-in closet, the other to the bathroom. A large TV interface is mounted opposite the bed, scaled big enough to simulate a movie screen. There is nothing personal on the flat surfaces. No photographs, no sentimental clutter. It is clean, quiet, and dead in the exact way I require it to be when I return.

Grey sweats sit low on my hips as I move around the tile. My hair is still damp from a violent shower where I tried to wash the brine off my skin. The stone under my feet is cold, but my nervous system doesn't register a reaction. I am used to it.

For the first time all day, I'm entirely alone. There's no handler watching me, no father grading my metrics, and no audience waiting for me to execute a performance. I stand in the middle of the bedroom and stare at the city through the glass, still coming down from having to hold myself perfectly still for hours under scrutiny.

My back doesn't sting the way most people would expect it to after what happened in the tank. There's no sharp pain anymore, only a consistent buzz under my skin that I barely allocate mind to. I got used to these structural punishments a long time ago. The biological marks and tissue scars don't bother me anymore; I wear them like quiet trophies for what I've survived. When a new laceration heals, I have it professionally removed and covered.

l That's why the ink exists.

The phoenix on my back stretches dynamically when I roll my shoulders. The chains wrapped around its wings pull with the muscle, covering every inch of old family damage. On my right chest, the hourglass sits directly over my heart, and the identification sequence on my right waist reads XIV.VI.MMXII in a precise horizontal line. The idiots in the university locker room see aesthetic athletic tattoos. They remain completely blind to the tracking mechanics underneath.

Viktor's voice arrives in my thoughts without an invitation. It is flat, perfectly even, and entirely bored—the precise vocal register he employs when he is at his most dangerous. I hear his voice replay the assessment that I turned the puck over. I see the blue line again, my stick coming a fatal half-second late, the quick interception, and the counter-rush that drove the opposite way.

I don't feel guilt about the error. I feel the immediate necessity to correct the flaw. I mentally calculate the precise angle of my foot, the shift of my weight, and where my eyes were, processing the failure exactly as I was trained to do. If I can break the event down into a tactical report, I can file it away. If I file it away, it never touched me.

I am halfway through archiving the report when the uninvited memory cuts through the data. It is the sensation of fingertips pressing against the bare skin of my wrist. Light and certain—not a desperate grab, just finding my pulse. And a voice saying there you are, backed by a smirk that said he had been waiting in the dark specifically to catch me.

I hated it in the hallway. I hated losing my psychological control in front of Elian Cole. Because of him. I've always hated that precise vulnerability. Now, in this soundproofed condo where no living asset can see me at all, my body wants that friction again. I tell myself the condo is safe. I tell myself it feels comfortably dead. I tell myself the tunnel felt highly dangerous—and it felt entirely alive.

My phone lights up on the granite dresser. The screen is completely saturated with missed messages from my team, my coach, and from numbers I do not maintain in my contacts. I ignore the entire feed.

I pick up the phone and open the league's digital draft tracker. Elian's post-game interview is the pinned media asset. I press play, and his voice fills my bedroom for a brief second—low, thoroughly amused, and talking casually about our performance on the ice. I mirror the device to the wall-mounted television.

The picture jumps to the big screen across the bedroom, and I immediately turn the sound off to avoid his vocal cadence getting stuck in my head for too long like it did earlier.

The video file starts over on an infinite loop with zero volume. Just Elian's mouth moving, that arrogant smirk coming and going rhythmically, and his green eyes looking right at the camera lens like he knows exactly who is tracking him from the dark.

I sit down at the foot of my bed. My feet are bare against the cold marble, water is still evaporating off the back of my neck, and the phantom burn on my back hums beneath the ink of the phoenix. I watch the silent frames repeat over and over.

Until I can mathematically calculate the precise words he is deploying without needing the audio track. Until my own mouth can trace the rhythm of his sentences without looking at the display. Until his face is the only visual asset left in my mind, even when I shut my eyes.

I stand up and slide the heavy glass door open to step onto the concrete balcony. The freezing night air hits my bare chest like a physical strike.

I reach for the pack of cigarettes resting on the small table by the threshold, extracting a single cylinder and placing it between my lips. I find the lighter in the pocket of my grey sweatpants and flick the wheel once. The flame catches, and I draw the heat in deep. The tobacco burns violently on the inhale, and I hold the smoke stationary in my lungs before exhaling it over the steel railing into the dark.

I lean my weight against the perimeter, the cigarette balanced between my fingers as the massive city lights stretch out into infinity below my position. My feet are still bare against the freezing marble floor, and my spine buzzes lightly under the ink of my chained phoenix.

On the television behind the glass, Elian is still talking into the void with no sound. I mouth his final line in perfect synchronization with the loop without needing to turn around, the smoke leaving my mouth and curling into the freezing air as I restart the cycle of his words.