Chapter 27 JULIAN
JULIAN
The cold should help. It usually does. The moment my blades hit the ice, the world is supposed to go quiet, clean, sharp enough to carve all the noise out of my skull.
But today the rink feels wrong. Too bright.
Too loud. Too full of people who won’t stop looking at me like I’m either a bomb or the crater after it goes off.
The scrape of metal on ice is too thin, too hollow.
The boards echo too hard. Every breath burns at the back of my throat where it’s still raw.
My voice is fucked from screaming—my jaw aches from clenching around a gun barrel—my thighs burn with every push because of what Rafe did to me last night and what I begged for without words.
I should be fine. I should be floating on whatever the hell Rafe did to me in the dark, the way he slid my nightmares back into place with his body and his voice and his hands.
But I’m spiraling. Quietly. Neatly. Like someone pulled the floor out from under me but forgot to warn my lungs.
I skate slow laps at first, head down, breath hissing through clenched teeth.
My hands shake around my stick. I can’t stop replaying it—the tape echoing in the walls, Ezio smiling with blood on his teeth, the gun in my mouth, the way Rafe forced air back into me with nothing but his voice and violence.
It loops. My brain keeps replaying everything out of order.
The moans. The panic. The steel. Rafe’s snarl.
My own screams ripping my throat open. And the worst part? The silence after.
The silence last night was worse than the noise.
I drift into the corner of the rink where the shadows swallow the light on purpose.
I let my shoulder press into the boards, chest heaving, breath misting out in quick pulses.
My fingers tighten around my stick until my knuckles go pale under my gloves.
My eyes burn, not with tears—those dried hours ago on Rafe’s neck—but with the kind of rage that comes after humiliation.
A cold, clean fury that sits low in the ribs and waits for something to kill.
I look around. Everyone’s giving me space.
Finn keeps glancing my way like he’s waiting for me to blow a crater through the ice.
Luca is pretending not to stare but he’s tense—jaw tight, shoulders stiff, like he’s expecting me to snap at any second.
Misha’s skating slow circles around the far blue line, watching me from the corner of his eye with something that almost looks like pity—if pity came with teeth.
Only one person I don’t avoid. I look to the bench.
Rafe is there. He’s not dressed to skate.
Black jacket, black shirt, black pants, leaning against the boards like a shadow that learned how to breathe.
His arms are crossed, but his eyes are on me like he could choke the whole rink with a look.
He doesn’t blink when I meet his gaze. He doesn’t look away. He doesn’t soften.
He just watches.
And something in my chest unclenches a little. Not much. Just enough to breathe without tasting blood.
I push off the boards and skate back toward center ice. My legs burn. My throat throbs. My heart is beating too fast, too shallow, too wrong. I’m not panicking—not exactly. Not like yesterday. Not like my brain is trying to drown me again.
But the edges of it brush me every few minutes. A whisper under my tongue. A shadow behind my ribs.
“Gun.”
The word slips out of me before I even realize it.
Quiet. Barely a breath. Just a mouth shape with sound behind it.
It’s stupid. It should scare me. It should make me feel worse.
But it doesn’t. It grounds me. The idea of steel, the weight of it, the cold curve of a barrel against my tongue—it wipes the panic away like someone dragging a cloth over glass.
It’s the only thing that stopped the spiral last night.
The only thing that cut the noise. The only thing that forced my body to breathe again.
I whisper it again.
Gun.
My heartbeat steadies a fraction and I skate faster. The ice starts to feel like home again. I cut tight turns, feel the burn in my thighs, the pull on my stitched-up muscles. I ignore the pain. I always do. Pain is easy. Pain makes sense. Pain is clean. Panic isn’t.
Another lap. Another whisper.
Gun.
Rafe’s eyes narrow when he catches the shape of the word on my lips. He knows. Of course he knows. He always knows. His posture shifts—subtle, protective, territorial in that quiet, terrifying way he gets when my head turns wrong. He doesn’t move from the bench. But every line of him sharpens.
My skates carve into the ice too aggressively on my next stop, spraying shards across the boards. The cold air punches into my lungs. I drop my head and inhale through my nose, slow, controlled, trying not to bite through the guard of my mouthpiece.
I want violence. I want blood. I want to break something until the shaking stops.
But mostly? I want Rafe’s hand on my jaw again. I want that voice in my ear telling me what to breathe and when to stop. I want anything that isn’t the memory of that fucking tape.
I lift my head. Rafe’s already stepping onto the ice, boots crunching, expression carved from stone and murder. Good.
The door opens. I don’t look up right away.
The air shifts when he enters. There’s a ripple across the rink, a change in posture, a crackle of anticipation that dances up the spine like static before a storm.
Conversations drop, sticks go still, even the fucking puck seems to pause mid-glide like it doesn’t want to get involved.
Then I lift my head. And there he is: Ezio Bellini, golden boy turned porcelain doll—jaw wrapped in medical tape, lip split, one eye bloodshot from the impact of my stick to his mouth yesterday.
His jacket is pristine; his ego isn’t. He stands in the doorway, one foot planted on the rubber mat, the other testing the edge of the ice like he’s daring the world to remind him he no longer belongs here.
He shouldn’t have come back. He knows it.
He also knows I’m looking at him. He meets my stare across the rink like we’re opponents in a war no one else understands.
The silence thickens, heavy and electric.
Finn stops mid-turn. Kai glances up from his clipboard.
Even Luca drops the pretense of indifference. Everyone watches.
And I smile—not nice, not polite, not even remotely fucking sane. My lips pull back slowly—razorblade grin, no warmth, all teeth.
Ezio flinches, just a flicker. But I see it.
I let my stick drag along the ice behind me as I skate forward—one slow, deliberate push at a time—eyes still locked on his like a heat-seeker. My smile doesn’t waver; it only gets worse. Wider. Wilder. Like I’m no longer a player. Like I’m something no training program was ever built to contain.
Ezio’s hand slips into his pocket—probably touching the phone, probably reassuring himself the tape is still there. It doesn’t matter.
I already replaced it.
I keep skating. He keeps watching. His mouth twitches like he’s trying to remember what a smirk feels like. But this time I see the fear—clear as a crack in porcelain—just a breath of uncertainty behind the arrogance.
And I want him to feel it. I want him to fucking drown in it. The ghosts aren’t mine anymore. They’re his now.
Ezio opens his mouth. It’s a mistake. A stupid, arrogant, Bellini-born mistake.
The tape around his jaw strains, pulling taut as he tries to shape words around the swelling and the bruises and the two teeth he no longer has because of me.
He wants to smirk. He wants to gloat. He wants to remind me he’s untouchable, golden, the prince of this rotten little empire.
He’s about to taunt me. I see the exact second he decides to speak—the twitch of his cheek, the arrogant lift of his chin, the way his tongue presses against split lips like he’s preparing to insult me with a jaw that no longer works.
He gets three syllables in. “Well, if it isn’t—” Crack. His jaw audibly shifts wrong, the tape pulling too tight, cartilage grinding against bone. The sound echoes across the rink like someone stepping on a wishbone. Ezio’s breath hitches; his face contorts in raw, involuntary pain.
And I laugh—loud, sharp, unhinged. It rips out of me like a bark, like a glitch in reality, like my body can’t contain the dark amusement tearing up my throat.
I bend forward slightly from the force of it, one gloved hand slapping against my knee as the laugh bounces off the boards and comes back bigger, filling the entire space with something feral and unstoppable.
Ezio’s eyes widen. His hand flies to his jaw. He looks humiliated—utterly, publicly humiliated.
Perfect. Absolutely fucking perfect.
I straighten slowly, still smiling, still giggling under my breath like something cracked open in my ribs and let the madness breathe.
I skate toward him—one slow glide at a time, each stroke cutting deeper lines into the ice, carving a path straight to where he stands frozen in the doorway like prey pretending to be a statue.
My smile spreads wider the closer I get. Ezio takes one half-step back—good. Back up farther. Or don’t. Let me touch you. Let me finish what I started. Let me—
A hand closes around the back of my neck. Hard.