Chasing Gold, Catching Her (Blades & Hearts #1)

Prologue

As Alisa walked out of the airport, the Norwegian cold immediately cut into her lungs.

She shivered in her fur coat, clutching her briefcase with a bare hand that almost instantly turned red.

It was warmer here than where she had come from, and yet the cold felt different, sharper and more deliberate, as if it bit into the skin and tore it into splinters.

Her body trembled uncontrollably, though perhaps it was not only the cold but the exhaustion of a long flight with three transfers, endless hours suspended between time zones and sleep.

All she wanted was to collapse into a hotel room, bury herself beneath a warm blanket, and sleep until morning.

Unfortunately, at the insistence of the Pike, as her coach liked to call herself, she had to feel the ice on the very first day, for luck and for the right mood to win. “You need to greet the rink properly,” the coach always said, “so it knows who you are.”

She looked at her figure skating partner, Lev.

The tips of his usually pale ears were pink, but he stood there with a tired smile and looked at her through half-closed, sleepy green eyes.

Lev had never been to Norway, and neither had she.

To be honest, it had been difficult to get here, with all the visa requirements and endless paperwork, months of waiting, documents, and qualifications for the competition itself.

They had spent six months pushing through procedures that felt designed to test not only their patience but also their determination. And yet they had made it.

Here they were in Oslo, Norway.

She would never have thought that she would end up on this edge of the earth.

When their plane had descended, they had seen fjords stretching beneath them, carved into the land like something ancient and solemn, unlike anything they had ever seen before.

Alisa had made a quiet promise to herself that after the competition she would go there, that she would stand at the edge of one of them and breathe in the silence properly, because they had to win here first.

Lev and Alisa had been skating together for two years now, and they were ready for achievements, ready to rise to a higher level and step fully onto the international stage.

They would leave local championships behind them.

They had already defeated everyone there, taking nothing but gold.

They knew what it meant to stand at the top of a podium and hear the music swell for them.

But the gold Alisa was aiming for was not at this competition in Norway.

It was higher and further, stronger and brighter, something that stretched beyond this frozen air and these unfamiliar streets.

It waited for them at the 2026 Olympics in Milan, Italy, and that was what she was truly hungry for, the kind of hunger that settled deep in the bones and refused to quiet down.

She was hungry for gold.

A car pulled up right in front of them and stopped, steam billowing into the cold air from a pipe above, curling around them as if the city itself were breathing.

“Why are you standing there like statues? Get in the car, quickly!” the coach barked and immediately began pushing them toward the back.

“Hurry up, I’m going to freeze right here!

” she added, issuing commands with her usual cheeky aggression.

They seemed to unfreeze only when she told them to open the trunk for the suitcases.

The driver merely grunted and opened the trunk without even getting out of the car.

Alisa wanted to shush him. This was still a business-class car, after all, and he did not lift a finger to help them.

Back in Russia, he would have bowed by now and helped with the luggage long ago, but apparently that was not particularly expected here.

She rolled her eyes, but Lev, sensing her growing irritation and fatigue, acted like a true gentleman.

He grabbed her suitcase and deftly placed it into the trunk, along with the luggage of their coach, Valentina.

That was her name. It always seemed to Alisa that it carried some kind of antiquity, something straight out of the sixties.

And yet the coach looked to be around forty, young by their standards, and not that mean.

Well, not that mean. Still mean, at least in Alisa’s opinion.

After ten years of training with her, they had somehow grown used to each other.

They huddled into the back seat of the minivan, while the coach sat in the front, explaining something to the taxi driver and showing him something on her phone.

“Da blyat!”1 she snapped in Russian, shut the phone, and waved her hands in frustration. The driver muttered something in Norwegian, nodded silently, and finally pulled away toward the hotel. They were going exactly there.

Lev kept staring out the window, trying to make out something through the fog, even though it was still daytime. The sky was overcast, and because of the low clouds Alisa could not see the sun, which she was so used to. A cloudy mood settled somewhere deep inside her almost immediately.

She pulled her phone out of her fur coat pocket and stared at the empty notifications.

Of course. Who would care whether she had flown safely or crashed somewhere along the way? Everyone was busy, as always.

Her parents were buried in their work, as usual, and what else could she expect from them?

She clenched her jaw until she felt the tension settle there, then shoved the phone back into her pocket and turned her face toward the window as well.

Norway’s architecture slid past them, cold even in its lines.

Minimalism seemed to dominate every corner, the buildings a little too smooth for their eyes, almost sterile.

The lack of greenery struck them immediately.

It was simply a different climate, a completely different one from St. Petersburg.

But Norway, or rather Oslo itself, felt strange.

How could she judge an entire country by one city? That was foolish. And yet, at the same time, it felt as if she had come home.

Why, though? She had no one here. She had never been here in her life, not once in all her twenty years.

And still that inner feeling seemed to smile at her and whisper that she was home.

She smiled faintly at the thought, as if she truly had returned to a place she had been searching for all over the world, only to find it unexpectedly in a completely different country.

She leaned back into the car seat and closed her eyes for a moment, trying not to think about anything at all. She tried to let go of the fact that a whole day still lay ahead of her after the long flights, that in four days they would compete.

Was she worried? Strangely, no.

Alisa was sure that she and Lev could win. They had won at home, after all, and international competitions could not be worse. If anything, they promised new experiences and a new version of themselves.

They had to win.

They had to show the coach that they were ready to go further, ready to follow the dream of the Olympics.