Chapter 16
The ice had never felt so hostile.
Camille knew the Forest Vale Titans by reputation—a team that played on the edge of legal, that used intimidation and aggression as weapons just as much as skill.
But knowing something intellectually and experiencing it physically were two entirely different things.
Every shift since the opening face-off had been a battle, the kind of grinding, brutal hockey that left bruises on bruises and made every stride feel like climbing a mountain.
She was exhausted. Emotionally. Physically. Mentally.
Her muscles ached from the constant collisions, the endless battles along the boards where elbows found ribs and sticks found shins.
She'd already taken two hard hits in the first period alone, both clean enough that the refs let them go, but punishing enough to leave bruises blooming beneath her pads.
The Titans weren't trying to beat them—they were trying to break them.
Six days since Lou had driven away from her in the parking lot. Six days of silence, of professional distance on the ice, of Lou's gaze sliding past her like she was invisible. Six days of pretending everything was fine while her heart felt like it had been scraped raw.
The crowd noise washed over her as she set herself for another face-off—a wall of sound that she barely registered anymore. The Forest Vale center across from her was big, mean-looking, with a scar bisecting her eyebrow and a smile that promised violence.
The puck dropped.
Everything happened fast after that.
Camille won the draw, swept the puck back to Frankie on defense.
Started her sprint up ice, anticipating the outlet pass that would give her a chance at the offensive zone.
The crowd was loud, the lights were bright, and somewhere in her peripheral vision she could see Lou moving into position to support the attack.
She didn't see the hit coming.
The Titans' defenseman caught her from the blind side—a clean hit, technically legal, but timed with malicious precision to catch Camille at her most vulnerable. Shoulder met shoulder, and for a moment Camille was airborne, her body rotating in ways physics shouldn't allow.
Then she hit the ice.
Her knee bent wrong. She registered the sickening twist of ligaments before the pain arrived—a half-second of terrible wrongness, her body telling her something had happened that couldn't be undone. And then the pain hit, and everything else ceased to exist.
Camille screamed.
She couldn't help it. The sound tore from her throat as white-hot agony exploded through her knee, radiating up her thigh and down her shin until her entire leg felt like it was on fire.
She curled around the injury instinctively, hands clutching at her knee through the padding, trying to understand what had just broken inside her.
The whistle blew. Shouts surrounded her—teammates, officials, the roar of the crowd shifting from excitement to concern. Camille couldn't focus on any of it. Could only focus on the pain and the terrible certainty that something was very, very wrong.
"Camille." Frankie's voice, close and urgent. "Camille, don't move. Help's coming."
"My knee—" The words came out strangled, barely audible even to herself. "Frankie, my knee—"
"I know. Just stay still. Medical's on the way."
Hands were on her now—gentle, professional, the medical team that lived for moments like this.
Camille forced her eyes open, forced herself to look at the faces hovering above her.
Dr. Hamilton, the team physician, was already running through assessment questions.
How did it happen? What did you feel? Can you move your toes?
She answered on autopilot, her brain providing information while her heart screamed.
Not now. Not like this. Not when they were so close.
"We need to get you off the ice," Dr. Hamilton said, her voice calm in ways that didn't match the concern in her eyes. "Can you put any weight on it?"
Camille tried. The attempt sent fresh agony spiking through her knee, and she collapsed back against the ice with a sob.
"Stretcher," Hamilton ordered. "Let's get her to the treatment room."
The next few minutes blurred into a haze of movement and pain.
Strong hands lifted her onto the stretcher, strapped her down, wheeled her across the ice toward the tunnel.
The crowd applauded—that particular sound of fans showing support for an injured player—but Camille couldn't acknowledge it.
Could only stare at the arena lights passing overhead and try to breathe through waves of nausea.
She caught a glimpse of Lou as they carried her past the bench. Just a flash—green eyes wide with something that might have been fear, hands gripping the boards hard enough to turn knuckles white. Then the tunnel swallowed her, and Lou was gone.
The treatment room was bright and sterile, smelling of antiseptic and the particular cold of medical spaces. They transferred her to the examination table, cut away her protective gear with practiced efficiency, and began the process of assessing the damage.
Camille stared at the ceiling and tried not to cry.
"The good news," Dr. Hamilton said after what felt like hours of prodding and testing, "is that it doesn't appear to be your ACL. The joint is stable. I'm thinking MCL sprain, possibly a meniscus issue. We won't know for sure until you get an MRI."
"How long?" The question scraped her throat raw. "How long will I be out?"
"Let's not get ahead of ourselves. The scan will tell us more."
"How long?" Camille pushed herself up on her elbows, ignoring the fresh spike of pain. "The qualification games. We have four left. Will I be able to play?"
Hamilton hesitated. That hesitation told Camille everything she needed to know.
"It depends on what the MRI shows," she said finally. "Best case, a few weeks of rehab. Worst case..." She trailed off, but Camille heard the unspoken words: worst case, your season is over.
The tears she'd been fighting finally broke through.
She'd worked so hard to get here. Had sacrificed so much—New York, her relationship with Mario (such as it was), her carefully constructed public image.
She'd come to Phoenix Ridge to prove she could be more than a celebrity athlete, more than Mario King's famous girlfriend.
She'd found something real here. Something worth fighting for.
And now her body was betraying her at the worst possible moment.
"I need to call someone." The words came out before the decision was fully formed. "Can I—can I have a moment?"
Hamilton nodded, ushering her staff out of the room with practiced discretion. The door clicked shut behind them, leaving Camille alone with her pain and her fear and the phone someone had retrieved from her locker.
Her thumb hovered over Lou's name in her contacts.
Three days of silence. Three days of Lou treating her like a stranger. Three days of pretending that what they'd built meant nothing, that the woman she loved hadn't walked away from her in a parking lot.
But Camille needed her. Needed Lou's steady presence, her calm certainty, her ability to make chaos feel manageable. The thought of going to the hospital alone, of waiting for scan results in a sterile room without anyone to hold her hand, was unbearable.
She almost pressed call.
But then she imagined what would happen if Lou came.
The questions. The looks. The inevitable speculation from teammates and staff about why Lou Calder had dropped everything to accompany Camille Laurent-Dubois to a medical appointment.
The rumor mill would spin into overdrive, and Mara's warning would prove prescient.
Distraction. That's what Lou had called them. A liability.
Camille set the phone down.
She would do this alone. Had done everything alone for years, really—the loneliness of public life, the isolation of constantly performing a version of herself that wasn't quite real. She'd survived that. She could survive this.
Even if it felt like another piece of her heart breaking.
The door opened, and Dr. Hamilton returned with a wheelchair and a sympathetic expression.
"MRI suite is ready for you. Astoria’s people arranged transport—you'll be at Phoenix Ridge Hospital in twenty minutes."
"Thank you." Camille's voice came out steadier than she expected. "Any word from the game?"
“We are up by one with eight minutes left." Hamilton helped her into the wheelchair, careful with her injured leg. "Your teammates are playing hard. Playing for you."
The words should have been comforting. Instead, they twisted in Camille's gut like a knife.
Her teammates were out there fighting, and she was being wheeled away like damaged goods.
Lou was still on the ice right now, defending leads and sacrificing her body, while Camille sat useless in a wheelchair waiting to find out if her season was over.
The transport to the hospital was a blur of fluorescent lights and the particular smell of medical facilities everywhere.
The ambulance driver tried to make conversation, something about the game and how well she'd been playing, but the words bounced off Camille like stones off ice.
Her knee throbbed with every heartbeat, a relentless drumming that made it impossible to think about anything else.
Phoenix Ridge Hospital’s emergency entrance was all glass and chrome, painfully bright.
The wheelchair felt clinical, impersonal, a vehicle for someone who couldn't function on her own.
Staff in scrubs moved past with practiced efficiency, barely glancing at her face.
To them, she was just another injury, another chart, another body to process through the system.
They wheeled her into the MRI suite, explained the procedure, loaded her into the machine that would tell her fate.
Forty-five minutes of lying perfectly still while magnets hummed around her, the machine clicking and clanking in patterns that sounded almost like morse code—except no one was sending messages, no one was listening.
Forty-five minutes of staring at the curved ceiling of the scanner, the plastic surface inches from her face, close enough to trigger something claustrophobic that Camille had never known she possessed.
The headphones they'd given her piped in classical music, something bland and orchestral that did nothing to mask the industrial sounds of the machine examining her from the inside out.
She tried counting her breaths. Tried thinking about technique, about skating drills, about anything other than the question pounding through her skull in time with her heartbeat: how bad is it, how bad is it, how bad is it.
Forty-five minutes of trying not to think about everything that hung in the balance.
Her career. Her team. Her relationship with Lou—whatever was left of it.
By the time they pulled her out of the machine, Camille was exhausted in ways that went beyond physical. The adrenaline had faded, leaving behind a dull ache that encompassed her entire body. Her knee throbbed with every heartbeat, a constant reminder of how quickly everything could change.
"Results will take a few hours," the technician said, helping her back into the wheelchair. "Dr. Hamilton will call you as soon as they're ready."
Hours. She had hours of waiting ahead of her, alone in a hospital room with nothing but her thoughts and her fears.
They moved her to a private room to wait—a small kindness arranged by the team, she assumed.
The bed was narrow and uncomfortable, the thin mattress doing nothing to cushion her aching body.
The lights buzzed overhead with that particular fluorescent hum that seemed designed to make everything feel more clinical, more sterile, more alone.
A monitor somewhere down the hall beeped in steady intervals, marking time in a way that made every minute stretch into an hour.
The window looked out onto the parking lot—rows of cars baking in the Phoenix Ridge sun, their metal surfaces throwing back white-hot glare.
Not a view, exactly. Just a reminder that the world continued on without her, that people were driving to dinner and picking up groceries and living their normal lives while she lay here waiting to find out if her season was over.
The silence pressed against her ears like physical weight. Camille pulled out her phone and stared at the screen.
No messages from Lou.
The Valkyries had won 3-2, according to the sports notification that popped up. A hard-fought victory that kept their qualification hopes alive. Frankie had scored the winner with two minutes left. Rowan had played the game of her life on defense.
And Camille had watched none of it, had contributed nothing to the victory beyond getting injured and making everyone worry.
She scrolled through her contacts again. Lou's name sat there, three letters that contained multitudes. All she had to do was press call. All she had to do was reach out, admit she was scared, ask for what she needed.
But Lou had made herself clear. She needed space. She was protecting them both by pulling away.
Maybe this was what Camille deserved. Maybe this was the universe telling her that wanting too much always led to losing everything. She'd wanted Lou, wanted a life beyond performance and public image, wanted something real and messy and alive.
And now she was alone in a hospital room, waiting to find out if her knee would ever be the same, while the woman she loved pretended she didn't exist.
Camille set the phone down on the stiff hospital sheets and closed her eyes.
The tears came quietly this time—not the desperate sobs of the ice, but the slow, steady leak of someone who'd run out of ways to fight. She let them fall, let the pillow absorb them, let herself feel the full weight of everything she'd lost.
Not just her knee. Not just her season.
But the hope that had just started to bloom before Lou drove away. The possibility of something real and lasting and worth the risk. The future she'd glimpsed in hotel rooms and whispered conversations—a future where she could be fully herself, fully loved, fully seen.
Now the silence from Lou's end of the phone felt permanent. Final. Like a door closing that Camille wasn't sure could ever be opened again.