The Alpha & the Ice Princess

THE FANG AT NIGHT

Georgia

I wasn't supposed to be there, which is exactly why I went.

Curfew at Rosethorne hits at eleven: lights out, doors locked, prefects doing rounds. The kind of rule that exists to be followed by everyone except, apparently, me tonight.

I wait until Mandi's breathing evens out into sleep, until the hallway outside our door goes quiet except for the occasional creak of an old building settling into itself, and then I pull on my jacket and slip out. I tell myself I'm just going for a walk, that I need air, that two days of strange letters and stranger boys and howls in the dark have left me too wired to sleep.

But the real reason is The Fang.

I've been thinking about the rink since I first saw its twin spires from the admissions building, that impression of a mouth caught mid-snarl against the sky. I want to see it up close before I have to see it during the day, surrounded by other students, everyone watching everyone else the way people always do at a new school. I want one look at it that belongs only to me.

The campus at night is different than the campus by day. Quieter, obviously, but also somehow larger, like the stone buildings have room to breathe now that nobody's cutting across the cobblestones between them. The forest presses in close at the edges, darker than dark, and more than once I catch myself walking faster than I mean to, glancing at the tree line as if it might return the favor.

The Fang's main doors are locked, but there's a side entrance propped open with a rubber wedge, careless or deliberate, I can't tell which. I slip through it into a narrow concrete hallway that smells like rubber and cold air, follow the sound of skates cutting ice until I find a stairwell leading up into the seating area, and climb it in the dark, one hand trailing along the cold railing.

The upper seats are empty and unlit, and from up here I can look straight down onto the sheet of ice below, lit bright and stark under the rink lights while the rest of the building sits in shadow around it. I settle into a seat near the back, pull my knees up to my chest, and watch.

It's hockey practice. A dozen or so players run drills, sticks cracking against the puck, blades hissing across the ice in tight, fast turns. I've watched enough hockey games with Arthur over the years to know what a good player looks like. What I'm watching now isn't that. It's dominance, precision, lethality, something closer to a predator than an athlete.

He's easy to pick out even from this distance, even in full gear with a helmet hiding half his face. He moves like the ice was built specifically to accommodate him and nobody else, cutting across the sheet in lines so clean and so fast that the other players seem to be skating through a different, slower version of the same drill. He controls the puck like it's an extension of his own hand, no hesitation, no wasted motion, reading the play three steps ahead of everyone else on the ice.

This isn't the boy from the bus, wry and dry and half smiling at his own joke. This is something closer to a predator finally let off a leash, ruthless and untouchable, commanding the entire sheet without a single wasted breath.

Then a defenseman catches him wrong along the boards.

It's a hard check, the kind that makes the sound carry all the way up into the empty seats where I'm sitting, a sharp c***k of impact that should, by every law of physics I understand, put him flat on the ice for a long moment. My stomach clenches on instinct, the same reflex I'd have watching any skater take a fall that looks like it hurt.

He's up in under two seconds.

Not stumbling up. Not shaking it off with the slow, careful movements of somebody testing whether anything's actually broken. Up, fully upright, already skating again like the hit never happened at all, like his body simply declined to acknowledge that it should have registered pain.

My stomach drops, a cold, sinking feeling that has nothing to do with the temperature of the rink. I've spent my whole life around athletic bodies, studying the mechanics of impact and recovery the way only someone who's spent a decade falling on ice for a living can. I know what a hard check should do to a human body. This wasn't that.

I lean forward slightly without meaning to, elbows on my knees, watching him skate another lap like nothing happened, and I think about the exact way his hand felt around my skate bag on the bus, catching it out of the air without even looking. Not normal, not for any body I've ever studied.

I don't make a sound. I'm sure of that much.

But his head turns toward the dark seats anyway.

His stick stops mid-motion, the puck sliding away from him untouched, forgotten. Across the entire length of the ice, in front of his whole team, he looks directly at the exact spot where I'm sitting, hidden in shadow, tucked into the back row where no one should be able to see anything at all.

The rink goes quiet. Not slowly. All at once, like someone cut the sound out of the world, the other players slowing to a stop one by one as they notice their captain has stopped moving, as they follow his eyes up into the dark.

He's looking straight at me, and he shouldn't be able to see me at all.

And then he moves.

Not toward his bench. Toward the boards, vaulting the glass in one motion, skates ringing against the concrete the second he clears it, already running for the stairwell that leads up to where I'm sitting.

I don't wait to find out what happens when he gets here.

I'm out of my seat and down the far stairs before his footsteps hit the first landing, out through the side door I came in, into the cold and the dark, my heart slamming against my ribs the entire way back across campus.

I'm cutting through the quad, close enough to the dorm to start believing I've actually made it, when a flashlight beam swings across the cobblestones in front of me and stops dead on my face.

"Stop right there."

A prefect. Not the same one from our door earlier — older, a boy, a badge pinned crooked to his jacket like he put it on in a hurry. He lowers the light but keeps it on me, taking in the jacket thrown on over pajamas, the flush in my face, the fact that I am, unmistakably, not in my dorm.

"Name," he says, already pulling a small notepad from his pocket like this isn't the first time tonight.

"Georgia Steele." My voice comes out steadier than I feel.

"New," he says, not a question, writing anyway. "Curfew's eleven. It's ten past midnight."

"I couldn't sleep. I just wanted some air—"

"Save it." He doesn't say it unkindly, exactly, just tired, like he's said this exact sentence to a hundred new students before me and expects to say it to a hundred more. "First offense gets logged, not reported. Second offense goes to your housemistress. Third, you're explaining yourself to the headmaster, and trust me, you don't want that meeting." He tears the top sheet off, folds it once, and holds it out to me. "Sign it. It just says you were seen."

I sign it with a hand that isn't quite steady, my initials looking like someone else wrote them.

"Rosethorne takes this seriously," he adds, already turning to go, flashlight swinging back toward the path. "More seriously than you think. Get inside."

I don't argue. I walk the rest of the way to my dorm at something just short of a run, the folded carbon copy of the slip crumpled in my fist, and it isn't until I'm back in my room, door shut, back pressed against it, that I let myself breathe.

Mandi is still asleep, one arm flung over her face, undisturbed. I sit down on the edge of my bed and unfold the slip, smoothing it flat against my knee like it might say something different the second time. It doesn't. Just my name, the time, a checkbox marked FIRST OFFENSE.

I don't know what scares me more — that I got caught, or that some part of me is already calculating how long I'd have to wait before I could risk going back.

I don't look at my phone to check if he's still coming. I can feel it, the same way I felt something pass between us on the bus when he pulled my bag out of the air without breaking stride. Except this time it isn't recognition and it isn't warning.

It's a promise that whatever just started between us tonight isn't finished. Not even close.