Chapter 70: The Rosethorn Classic

Georgia

The arena is packed.

I’ve competed in crowded arenas before - big ones, loud ones, the kind where you can barely hear yourself think when your name is announced. This is different. There’s a charge in the air here, a current of expectation that presses against my skin before I’ve even stepped onto the ice.

Cameras line the boards. Press badges flash beneath the lights. Somewhere in the reserved section near the ice, a small group of scouts sits in matching federation jackets, clipboards balanced on their knees. Watching. Judging. Trying not to look like they’re judging, and failing at it in that particular way people do when they think no one notices them noticing.

I find Mollie almost immediately. She’s in the front row, dressed perfectly, sitting straighter than everyone around her. Of course she is. Her spine has never once relaxed in my presence, not even when I was small enough to sit in her lap. Arthur is beside her, looking slightly out of place in a crowd this polished. His jacket is a little too casual, his posture less rigid, but his face is open and warm. Proud, in a way that has nothing to do with medals or scores. Seeing him helps. Just a little. It’s strange how much I’ve come to need that warmth, given how briefly I’ve known him.

I make one last pass toward the boards before my name is called. Coach Ferreira catches my shoulder. Her grip is firm, grounding, the kind of touch that says she believes every word she’s about to say.

"You’ve done the work," she tells me, her voice low and steady. "Now go show them who you are."

Her certainty almost makes me laugh. I wish I could borrow even a fraction of it. I nod instead. My mouth is too dry to trust myself with words, and my throat feels tight enough that anything I said might come out as a whisper or a sob - I genuinely don’t know which.

I push away from the boards and skate toward my starting position. The ice is perfect. Freshly cut, smooth beneath my blades, cold enough that I can feel it seeping through my gloves and into my fingers. I take my position, roll my shoulders back, and try to remember how to breathe like a person who isn’t terrified.

For one long second, everything goes quiet. Not really - the arena is still full of people. I can hear the crowd shifting, the faint hum of voices, the music waiting to begin. But inside my head, there is only one voice.

Puck.

*Skate for yourself.*

I swallow. The memory of his voice is so clear it’s almost as if he’s standing beside me instead of somewhere in the stands two weeks removed from the last time he touched me.

*Not for your mother. Not for the scouts.*

My fingers loosen at my sides, the tension I didn’t realize I was carrying easing out of them one knuckle at a time.

*For you.*

The music begins. And I skate.

The first minute is flawless. Not good. Not solid. Flawless. I’ve never skated this cleanly in competition, not once in all the years of trying. Every element lands where it should. Every turn flows into the next like water finding its own path. My body knows what to do before I have time to think about it, and for once, thinking isn’t required at all.

I’m not counting. I’m not worrying about my mother. I’m not picturing the scouts writing notes on their clipboards, deciding my future in shorthand. I’m not wondering whether one mistake is going to cost me everything I’ve built. I’m just moving, weightless in a way I haven’t felt since I was small.

I remember being little and skating because I loved it - before competitions mattered, before every jump had a score attached to it, before I started wondering whether I was good enough to matter at all. For four minutes, I get that girl back. She’s still in here somewhere, underneath all the years of pressure and correction. I am exactly where I want to be, and for the length of a program, that feels like enough.

Then I go into the triple loop.

Something feels wrong. It’s barely there at first - a strange looseness beneath my right blade, so faint I almost convince myself I imagined it. My stomach drops anyway. I’ve never felt that before. Not in this boot. Not in any boot I’ve ever worn.

My instincts kick in before my brain can catch up. I shift my weight, adjust the entry, and take off, trusting years of muscle memory to carry me through whatever’s happening beneath my foot.

I land. Not perfectly. But I land, and for a breath I let myself believe it was nothing.

I keep moving. *Something’s wrong.* The thought cuts through everything else, sharp and insistent, refusing to be ignored. I don’t know what. I don’t have time to figure it out. The next jump is already coming.

The triple axel. The biggest element in the program. The one Coach Ferreira and I have drilled until I could probably do it half-asleep, until my body could find the rotation blind. I set the entry. Push. Take off.

For one fraction of a second, everything is normal. Then the blade shifts. My stomach drops harder this time, a sick lurch that has nothing to do with the jump itself. The right skate twists beneath me. My ankle rolls hard, and I know immediately - I’m not going to save this.

My body keeps rotating because it doesn’t know the difference between a mistake and a disaster. It only knows the shape of the jump, and it finishes the shape even as everything underneath me gives way.

Then I hit the ice. Hard. My knee takes the impact at an angle it was never meant to take, and for one endless moment there’s no pain at all, just a terrible silence in my body before it catches up to what’s happened.

Then pain explodes through my leg.

The sound of the impact reaches the stands. I hear it echo back at me, delayed, as if my ears are working half a second behind everything else.

Everything becomes white.

I don’t remember the exact moment I hit. I remember the sound. I remember the lights above me, too bright, swimming. I remember trying to breathe and finding it harder than it should be. My leg feels wrong. Not just painful - wrong, in a way that reaches past nerve endings into something more fundamental. Numbness spreads through it so quickly that for a second I can’t tell where my body ends and the ice begins.

Then I hear Mollie.

"Georgia!"

Her scream tears through the arena, raw and unguarded in a way I’ve never heard from her before. I’ve never heard her sound like that - not composed, not controlled, just afraid.

"Georgia!"

Her voice breaks on my name, and something in me aches for her even through the pain, even knowing everything I know about the ways she’s failed me.

I try to move. I can’t. The crowd is still there, but it sounds far away, muffled, as if I’m hearing it through water. I don’t see the Bellamy twins. I don’t see anyone in the stands.

Later, I’ll learn that Bella flinched so hard when I fell that her entire body jerked in her seat, her hands flying to her mouth. Bianca didn’t move. She just stared at me, still and unreadable, as if she were memorizing the moment rather than reacting to it.

"Did you see that?" Bella whispered, her voice shaking.

"I saw everything," Bianca replied flatly, her eyes never leaving the ice.

I don’t know any of this yet. All I know is that I’m lying on the ice and my leg won’t respond, and somewhere beneath the panic there’s a strange, distant calm, like my mind has already decided it can’t afford to feel the full weight of this yet.

Then, somewhere beyond the blur, movement catches my attention.

Puck.

He’s on his feet. I can’t make out his face clearly, but I know it’s him. I know the shape of him even through tears and static vision. He moves as if he’s about to come straight onto the ice, as if the barrier between the stands and the rink means nothing to him in this moment.

Liam catches him before he can.

"Not here," Liam warns, his voice sharp and low, edged with something like fear. "Not in front of everyone."

I don’t understand what he’s talking about. I barely understand anything beyond the pain and the strange golden pull tugging at the edges of my awareness.

Puck’s hands curl into fists. Even from the ice, even through the blur swallowing my vision, I can see that something about him has changed - his shoulders have gone rigid, his whole frame coiled like something is trying to break free of its skin.

His body is tense. Too tense, in a way that doesn’t look human anymore.

Liam grabs his arm. Hard. Puck jerks against him, and for a moment it looks like Liam might not be strong enough to hold him.

"Let go of me," Puck growls, his voice rough and barely recognizable, stripped of anything gentle it might have carried two weeks ago on the ice with me.

"Not a chance," Liam snaps.

He braces himself against Puck, holding him in place with an effort that shows in the strain of his arms. A woman sitting nearby glances over, frowning, some instinct telling her something is wrong even if she can’t name it. For a second, she looks confused. Then she turns back toward the ice, dismissing whatever she thought she saw.

Liam leans close to Puck, saying something too low for me to hear, his mouth barely moving. Whatever it is, Puck stops fighting. Barely. His hands remain curled, his whole body still pulled tight as a wire, but the change stops there, suspended.

I don’t know what I’m seeing. I don’t have the strength to care, not with my knee screaming and my vision threatening to go dark at the edges.

My vision blurs again. The pain in my knee should be the only thing I can think about. But it isn’t. There’s something else. A pull. It starts deep in my chest, warm, insistent, refusing to be ignored even as everything else fades. It reaches toward the stands, toward Puck, and I don’t understand it at all.

My breathing catches. Why can I feel him? Why does it feel as if something inside me is stretching toward him, thin and taut, like a thread pulled nearly to breaking?

I don’t know. I don’t have an answer. I barely have a thought left that isn’t made of pain or that strange golden warmth. But the pull is there. And somehow, it feels more real than the pain. It matters more than the pain does.

The thought drifts through my head, distant and strange, and I don’t know why I think it. I don’t know what it means. I don’t get the chance to figure it out.

A paramedic drops beside me, his hands quick and sure even as his voice stays calm.

"Don’t move her," he orders someone nearby, his voice clipped and professional. "I need eyes on that leg now."

Hands press carefully along my calf. I flinch, or maybe I try to - I can’t tell anymore where my body’s responses end and my mind’s confusion begins. The lights above me smear into long white streaks. The crowd fades. Mollie’s voice becomes distant, thinning into something I can barely follow.

Everything feels muffled now, as if I’m sinking beneath deep water, the surface growing farther away with every second.

I fight to stay awake. I don’t want to close my eyes. I don’t know why. Maybe because I’m scared. Maybe because there’s still too much I don’t understand, too many threads I haven’t pulled yet. Maybe because somewhere in that crowd, Puck is still watching me, and some part of me isn’t ready to lose sight of him.

My vision fades another inch. Then I see them.

Golden eyes. Burning through the blur. Locked on me with an intensity that makes everything else disappear - the pain, the crowd, even my mother’s voice calling my name.

They’re closer than they should be. Much closer, as if the distance between the stands and the ice has folded in on itself.

I try to focus. I can’t.

The last thing I see before everything goes black is Puck staring straight at me.

Then nothing.