3. Nico
I was hallucinating.
Or maybe I needed to get eyes checked. I blinked rapidly. Rubbed my eyes. Shook the hair out of my face.
Nope.
He was still there.
I stood in the tunnel that led from the locker rooms to the ice, my skate bag hanging off one shoulder, and stared through the plexiglass like an idiot. Like if I looked long enough the image would correct itself. Resolve into someone else. Anyone else.
He looked different than the last time I'd seen him. To be fair, he looked different every time I saw him—Adrian Zhao treated his appearance the way other skaters treated their programs, constantly tweaked, never quite the same twice. I only saw his side profile from here but even so I recognized him immediately. It seemed like I couldn’t avoid chaos in my life these days.
His hair was pale pink now, soft and overgrown, curling against the nape of his neck.
I could see the silver ring that circled the corner of his lower lip and knew without having to look that there was a matching one on the other side.
The rink lights caught on the tiny pink gemstone in his nose—chosen to match the hair, obviously—and his ears were stacked with silver.
His fingers were covered in rings and delicate tattoos, and I knew there were more beneath the long sleeved compression shirt he had on.
They peeked out from under the sheer competition shirts he favoured.
Floaty, barely there things that somehow read as high fashion rather than underdressed.
The fans ate it up. Everything that should have worked against him had a way of working for him instead.
I hated that about him.
He was on the ice now, moving through what looked like a warm up lap, unhurried and loose limbed, and even at half effort there was something in the way he moved that made it hard to look away. I forced myself to anyway.
What was he doing in my home territory? At my rink? On my ice?
I'd been off the ice for a little over a month. Almost a week in the hospital after my mother found me on the bathroom floor—stomach pumped, hooked up to an IV, and under observation.
Then a month at a residential facility in Aurora.
A place where I learned to say out loud what I had done and, harder still, why.
The public got a different story—exhaustion and dehydration, Nico Fontaine taking a much needed rest ahead of the Olympic push—a fiction so tidy I almost envied it.
After that, a final week to transition back to the real world, whatever that meant for someone whose real world was a rink and a coach and a country's expectations.
My therapists had gently suggested I ease back in. Take it slow. Take time to heal.
The Olympic window did not care about my timeline.
I had worked too hard, given up too much, swallowed too many things whole and smiled through the wreckage, to let one night cost me my shot at gold. I was 21 years old and this was supposed to be my moment. I was not going to let a month in Aurora and a bottle of sleeping pills take that from me.
But this. This I had not factored in.
Even though Coach Renaud was my uncle—and yes, he required me to call him Coach at the rink, a boundary he had enforced since I was a child and one I had never once tested—he had not said a single word to me about Adrian fucking Zhao being in Toronto.
Why was he here? In my rink, on my ice, in my peripheral vision.
There was only one plausible explanation for his presence but my mind refused to accept it. There had to be a mistake.
On the ice, Adrian completed a lazy back crossover and glanced toward the tunnel. I stepped back into the shadows on instinct, which was humiliating, and also too late.
His eyes—dark, annoyingly sharp—found me lurking in the shadows like a creeper.
He didn't wave. Didn't smile. Just looked at me for a long, unhurried moment with an expression I couldn't read from here and didn't particularly want to.
Then he turned away and kept skating.
I stood there in the tunnel, typing and deleting several texts before settling on: Coach Renaud, we need to talk. I’ll come by the office after practice.
My chest felt tight. That familiar constriction wrapping around my ribs, making each breath feel shallow and insufficient. My hands were trembling slightly as I stuffed my phone into the pocket of my skate bag.
When I looked up, Adrian had made his way over to me, skate guards over his blades. He was already taller than me but the skates made him significantly taller which only irritated me further.
“Hello, Nicky.” The corner of his mouth lifted. “I was wondering when I would see you.”
There was genuine curiosity in it—not just the usual provocation. His eyes moved over me quickly, cataloguing, assessing. I probably looked different from the last time he'd seen me. Thinner. Paler. With darker circles under my eyes.
“Zhao.” I kept my voice flat. Neutral. He was the only person who ever called me Nicky and today I wasn't going to let it bother me. A month of therapy and I could do neutral. Or at least fake it.
He quirked an eyebrow expectantly. “No 'nice to see you' or ‘how have you been’? I'm wounded.” His gaze lingered a beat too long. “You've been off the grid. Injury?”
I ignored his question. “What are you doing here?”
“What does it look like?”
The dismissiveness in his tone cut through the panic spiral like a hot knife. I looked at him standing there with his pink hair and piercings, loose and unbothered like he belonged here. Like this was his rink. “It looks like you're warming up.”
“Perceptive,” he replied dryly, tilting his head slightly. “Seriously though—where've you been? You missed the Maple Leaf Classic. Renaud gave some bullshit answer about rest and recovery but you don't strike me as someone who rests voluntarily.”
“I don't owe you an explanation.”
“No, you don't.” Something shifted in his expression—the smirk softening which was somehow worse. “But it seems like your uncle owes you one. He really didn't tell you?”
The dread turned molten. Heat flooded up through me—burning through the panic until all that was left was anger. My hands stopped shaking.
I had been gone for less than six weeks. I had come back this morning determined to pick up exactly where I left off—same schedule, same goals, same Nico.
I knew the answer before I even asked. “Didn’t tell me what?”
Adrian had the decency not to gloat for once in his life.
“Well, this is awkward. Coach Allen's wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. He retired to take care of her. I needed an Olympic level replacement and there are limited options.” A small shrug, like it was the most obvious choice. “I moved here two weeks ago.”
While I was in rehab, my uncle had recruited my biggest rival to train under the same roof. And he hadn’t even bothered to tell me.
“Are you okay?”
It was only then I realized I had gone very still and quiet.
It was something my therapist had pointed out—that my distress response was inward rather than outward, that I had a tendency to go quiet and contained in exactly the moments I should probably be saying something out loud. I was still working on it.
“I'm fine,” I said, reflexively. The anger was a living thing in my chest now, coiled and vicious, but my voice came out perfectly level. Perfectly controlled. “I’m sorry to hear about Mrs. Allen.”
“Yeah, fuck cancer,” he agreed. “They caught it early so they're optimistic.”
“That’s good. Early detection makes a huge difference.” Even furious, I couldn’t help being polite. “So now you're here. Training with Coach Renaud,” I ended dumbly.
He snorted. “You call your uncle Coach? Is it a secret? Even I know he's your uncle and I don't know shit about you except your ranking.”
“It's a sign of respect.”
“Clearly it's not a two way street.”
The words hit like a physical blow. My jaw clenched so hard I felt it in my molars.
Heat crawled up my neck, across my face.
Adrian always did this—always found the exact nerve and pressed down hard, always knew exactly what to say to make me feel like a fool for trying so hard to do everything right.
I stiffened. My voice came out colder than I intended, which was saying something. “I need to lace up and you should get back to practice. I don't know what kind of program Coach Allen ran but Coach Renaud is very structured.”
“Whatever you say, Prince Nicky.” He flicked off his skate guards and stepped back onto the ice without a backward glance.
Prince Nicky. As if the press calling me the golden prince of figure skating wasn't bad enough, Adrian had to go and create his own version. I hated both—hated the golden prince because it was a crown I'd never asked to wear, hated Prince Nicky even more because it was patronizing.
My heart was hammering as I laced up my skates—but my hands were steady now. The panic was gone, completely obliterated by rage. Anger had a way of doing that. Making everything simple. Making everything clear. Making it possible to move forward when fear would have frozen me in place.
The thing was, it made sense. Objectively, if I removed myself from the equation entirely and looked at it from Coach Renaud's perspective, it made complete sense.
Adrian was 23, in his second Olympic cycle, chasing a medal he'd come close enough to taste in the last Games.
He was definitely a top contender to be standing on the Olympic podium come February. Of course Renaud wanted him.
There were three of us who had been grouped together in the skating press for years now—the inevitable shorthand of a generation.
Théo Beaubien, who had been my boyfriend and then my loss and then my lesson.
Adrian Zhao, who had been my measuring stick and then my standard and then my nemesis.
And me, Nico Fontaine, the golden prince with an Olympic legacy to maintain.
My uncle was an Olympic gold medallist and had trained a dozen skaters that had medalled though none had matched the gold he had earned himself.
Théo had won Nationals two years ago. Adrian the year before that.
I had won last year, my first national title, the one that was supposed to announce that I had arrived.
Théo was in Chicago now under Coach Miller, quietly recovering from his own traumatic downfall.
Adrian had trained his entire career under Coach Allen in Vancouver, a pairing so established it had seemed permanent.
Nothing was permanent, apparently.
I completed a lap and let myself look back across the ice at my uncle who was standing at the boards talking to Adrian now, one hand gesturing toward the far end of the rink in the way he did when he was mapping out a program.
My uncle who had been coaching me since I was old enough to skate.
My uncle whose name was connected to my career in ways I couldn't fully separate from my own effort.
My uncle who had held the secrets of what happened with Théo and me, managing the press narrative, and preparing for the Olympic season.
Who somehow found time to recruit Adrian Zhao to his roster of Olympic calibre skaters.
Was his legacy more important than blood?
I didn't let myself answer that. Not here, not on the ice, not with Adrian twenty metres away and the Olympic clock loudly ticking in the background.