Friction (Cold Blades #1)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Milano Ice Skating Arena, Assago, Milan

Luka Davorin

The ice was the only place where my mind stopped turning against me.

Most days, that was enough.

Cold air burned through my lungs while my blades carved deep, clean lines beneath me, every movement exact enough to drown out the rest of the world. Out here, my body always knew what to do before thought could interfere. There was comfort in that certainty.

The rink made sense in ways people rarely did.

If I stayed disciplined—inside the lines, inside the rules—nothing slipped loose. Nothing revealed itself accidentally. I could skate for hours without thinking about the parts of myself I spent the rest of my life trying to contain.

By the time I stepped onto the practice ice in Milan, the arena was already awake beneath the pale wash of overhead lights. Half a dozen skaters moved through drills and jump entries, most of them American judging by the jackets thrown over the boards.

I barely looked at them.

I’d come here to skate.

My blades bit cleanly into the ice, and the familiar certainty of movement returned. One push, then another, speed gathering beneath me while muscle memory settled the noise in my head into quieter territory.

Mila wasn’t there yet, though she would be eventually despite complaining repeatedly that civilized people shouldn’t be conscious this early after international travel. I already had a sarcastic reply prepared for when she arrived.

Predictability had its comforts.

I circled the rink again, leaning deeper into the edge while repetition wore my thoughts down into manageable shapes.

That was when I noticed the people gathered along the boards. They weren’t officials, or even coaches with clipboards and sharp eyes.

Partners.

One man leaned over the barrier watching a skater drift toward him across the ice. I couldn’t hear whatever he said, but the skater laughed, changing direction without hesitation until their hands brushed together as he passed, an easy contact, no caution attached to it.

Such a small act, yet it stayed with me for the length of the rink.

I pushed harder into my next turn, forcing my attention back toward technique, but moments later I saw two women standing near the gate with their shoulders pressed together while one adjusted the other’s glove.

The gesture looked absentmindedly intimate, followed by a quick kiss before they separated again.

Nobody stared.

Nobody cared.

My edge wavered beneath me, and I corrected automatically before anyone could notice.

Focus.

I should have been concentrating on my skating.

Instead, the image lingered, a hand brushing another, a kiss against a cheek. Small, ordinary things that most people never had to think about at all.

I forced my attention back to the ice.

This was not new. I’d seen couples like this at Worlds, at Europeans, in countries where people moved through public space without carrying fear inside every gesture.

It had nothing to do with me.

I’d spent years teaching myself to believe that.

“Your edge dropped.”

Mila’s voice cut through my thoughts.

I hadn’t realized she’d stepped onto the ice beside me until I felt the faint rush of air from her movement.

“I fixed it.”

“You always do.” She matched my pace while I kept my attention locked ahead.

“I’m fine,” I insisted.

“I know.”

That should have ended the conversation.

“But you were watching,” she added in a low voice.

The briefest flare of panic choked me before I locked it down.

I expelled a long breath. “It was nothing.”

“What you saw is normal here.”

I let silence stretch between us while the scrape of our blades echoed across the rink. Then I stopped near center ice. For a moment I considered keeping the thought to myself.

But this was Mila.

“Svobren.”

Freedom.

Mila went quiet beside me. “You don’t need to think about that here.”

I frowned. “It’s a word.”

“With you, words are never only words.”

I looked away before she could read too much in my face and pushed into motion again, letting speed cut the conversation apart before it could reach dangerous territory.

Then I saw him.

Kvrat.

Every thought escaped me as my pulse lurched, hard enough to throw me off my next push. My focus shattered.

Dean Foster moved through center ice with the confidence of somebody who had never spent years training himself smaller.

His edges cut deep and aggressive beneath him, upper body open, every movement carrying more space than necessary because apparently nobody had ever taught him to apologize for taking it.

I recognized him in a heartbeat.

Worlds last year.

The warm-up for the Men’s final had been running while Mila and I waited for our own practice slot. I’d stood at the boards half-listening to Mila complain about the music choices while mentally running through lift entries and jump timing.

Then Dean Foster took the ice.

At first I’d only noticed speed. He moved faster than anyone else out there, driving hard through his edges without looking out of control for even a second.

Most skaters at that level carried tension somewhere in their bodies—tight shoulders, rigid hands, the constant effort to contain mistakes before they happened.

Dean didn’t seem interested in containing anything.

He attacked the ice. Every movement looked larger than necessary, as though he had never learned the instinct to make himself smaller for other people’s comfort.

That was what caught me. Or at least, that was what I told myself afterward.

The truth was harder to pin down.

I remembered the way he grinned after a landing. The way he shoved damp hair off his forehead. How he laughed at something one of his teammates shouted from the boards.

Tiny, meaningless details, the sort of things I had absolutely no reason to notice, yet somehow I still remembered them.

“You’re staring.” Mila’s voice had drifted through my thoughts.

“I am not.”

“Oh, but you are.”

I hadn’t answered, mostly because I was no longer entirely certain she was wrong.

Dean skated like the ice belonged to him.

Watching him had felt dangerous.

At the time, I refused to examine the reason too closely.

I only knew that my pulse didn’t behave around him.

I noticed things I shouldn’t have, like the shape of his mouth when he laughed, the flex of muscle beneath a training shirt.

The warmth that settled low in my stomach whenever he wandered too close.

I’d treated all of it like a problem to be solved.

That should have told me something.

Now, standing in Milan less than a year later, I understood the danger.

It had never been about curiosity, or admiration, or even desire on its own.

What unsettled me was how quickly my attention became invested in him.

How easily he occupied space in my thoughts.

How often I’d found myself looking for him before I was even aware of doing it.

That hadn’t felt safe then, and it felt worse now.

Dean turned into a jump and landed cleanly before flowing straight into the next sequence without losing momentum. His body absorbed impact differently than mine did. Even his mistakes looked temporary instead of catastrophic.

He missed the edge on a turn and laughed under his breath as he corrected it.

Mila slowed beside me. “You remember him.”

“Yes.”

An inadequate answer, concealing months of denial. It was like describing a blizzard as weather.

Dean accelerated again, carving across center ice with enough force that spray lifted behind his blades. He skated aggressively without ever looking tense, and the contrast between us unsettled me more than I wanted to examine closely.

Stop staring at him.

Another jump. Another clean landing.

Then Dean glanced toward the boards and our eyes met across the rink.

My next breath stalled in my throat.

For one suspended second the noise of the arena seemed to recede beneath the sharp awareness locking through my body. I saw recognition register in his expression before curiosity followed close behind it, focused enough that heat flared in my chest.

I broke eye contact first.

I drove into the next edge and gathered speed, letting the familiar rhythm of movement take over while my pulse hammered.

The instinct to regain control arrived immediately—faster edges, sharper turns, cleaner lines—because movement had always been the quickest way to force my thoughts back into order.

It didn’t work.

My pulse was still too fast. The muscles across my shoulders felt tight.

I could not seem to remove him from my head.

What was worse, I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

I am not in control anymore.

“I am done,” I muttered, drifting toward the exit much earlier than planned.

Mila stayed on the ice, though I knew without looking that she was watching me.

The bench felt cold through my training pants as I sat down with my forearms braced against my thighs. I focused on slowing my breathing, counting each inhale while the sounds of the rink settled around me again.

Then I looked up.

Dean was still there.

He was a little older than most of the skaters training this early, probably mid-twenties, built for power without carrying unnecessary bulk. Strength sat naturally on him, balanced with flexibility and control rather than fighting against it.

But it was his face that kept drawing my attention back.

Dark hair curled across his forehead, seemingly incapable of following instructions.

Strong cheekbones caught the light whenever he turned.

His mouth was expressive in a way I found distracting, always on the verge of a smile.

When he turned beneath the lights, I remembered thinking that he looked impossibly alive.

He came to a stop near center ice and looked toward me again, and although every instinct told me not to, I watched him watching me.

Dean smiled.

The warmth of it hit me with surprising force. My stomach dropped. For a heartbeat it felt directed at me.

My pulse stumbled.

Kvrat.

This was ridiculous. We had never even spoken.

I turned away, my jaw tight, and fixed my attention on the boards, the rafters, the ice.

Anywhere except Dean Foster.

Seconds later I found myself looking at him again.

Dean had resumed skating as though nothing unusual had occurred. A few seconds later he lost an edge entering a turn, laughed again, and recovered without the irritation I would have expected from myself.

That laughter…

Suddenly I was fourteen again, sitting on a freezing bench while older skaters finished practice at my home rink. One of them, a boy with dark hair and flushed cheeks, fell hard during a jump attempt and laughed as he hit the ice before climbing immediately back to his feet.

I’d watched him for the rest of the session. I told myself it was because he was a good skater.

Even then, I knew I was lying.

Later that night I’d lain awake staring at the ceiling while panic twisted in my stomach.

I told myself I was being ridiculous. Plenty of boys admired older skaters. Plenty of boys paid attention to people they wanted to emulate. That was all this was.

To prove it, I tried thinking about girls.

Girls from school, from the rink. Girls whose names I barely knew.

Nothing.

I kept trying anyway, growing more desperate with every passing minute. If I could just make myself feel something, then this awful certainty clawing at my chest would disappear.

My thoughts slipped straight back to the boy from the rink.

Dark hair damp with sweat. Flushed cheeks. The grin he’d flashed after hitting the ice.

Heat rolled through me so suddenly that I sucked in a breath.

For a long moment I lay frozen in the darkness, my heart pounding hard enough to hurt.

I knew what it meant.

That was the frightening part. I couldn’t even pretend to be uncertain. The answer had arrived before I was ready for it, and it wasn’t going away.

By morning I had a plan.

Skate harder. Think less. Keep it hidden.

I followed that plan for so long that eventually it stopped feeling like a choice.

Then Dean Foster smiled at me from the other side of a rink.

And I was still watching him.

No tightness existed anywhere in the way he carried himself. Even resting between passes, his body stayed open and unguarded in ways mine never had.

I curled my fingers harder against my knees.

This changes nothing.

It can’t.

Dean launched into another jump. I watched him take off, land, then skate away.

And when he disappeared behind a group of skaters, I found myself looking for him again.

Fourteen-year-old me would have known exactly how dangerous that was.