He looked at me like I was reckless, not brave.
The echo of his words—You're limping—still hung in the rink's cold air like an accusation that couldn't be taken back. Silver felt the weight of his observation settle into her chest alongside the throbbing pain in her knee and the deeper ache of knowing she'd been caught in a moment of private desperation.
She turned her back on him with deliberate slowness, her blades scraping rough against the ice surface as she tried to push off toward the far end of the rink. Every movement was an attempt to project normalcy, to pretend her knee wasn't sending sharp signals of distress up her leg, to pretend she wasn't coming apart at the seams in front of the one person whose opinion had somehow started to matter more than she wanted to admit.
But Eli Hayes had spent too many years reading opponents on the ice to be fooled by her performance.
