Page 8 of Ice Princesses
“The fancy rink,” I confirm.
His eyes brighten at that. “That one has the big screens.”
“Yes.”
“And the cameras.”
“This one also has cameras.”
He grins. “So maybe I should go freshen up my hair?”
“You should drink water.”
He laughs and moves as if he’s going to keep walking, but then he stops again, his head turning slightly. The shift is subtle. The kind of shift I only notice because I’ve been watching this boy almost daily for five years.
He’s clocked something, or most likely, someone.
“What,” I say, not a question so much as a warning.
Rodrigo doesn’t answer immediately. His gaze lifts over my shoulder, then drops to my face, then lifts again. He’s trying to decide if this is something he can say out loud without me shutting him down.
“Ceci,” he murmurs, voice low, “is that…her?”
I don’t turn right away, because I don’t have to.
I feel it.
The sensation of the air changing behind me. When someone’s attention lands on your back with weight. The hair on my arms lifts under my jacket and a chill runs through my body, and it’s not because I’m inside a facility that exclusively trains winter athletes.
Rodrigo’s eyes are wide in that way that has nothing to do with nerves and everything to do with being suddenly starstruck. I’ve seen it only twice before, and I know he’s trying to play it cool and failing completely.
“Who,” I say, still not turning.
He makes a sound of disbelief, like I’ve offended him by pretending not to know. “The Ice Princess.”
The nickname hits me like ice running through my veins.
Even now, it sounds stupid. It sounded stupid back then, when we were both competing at the same time, but nobody said it like it was. They said it like it meant something, like you were supposed to curtsy a little when it left your mouth. A sponsor-friendly moniker and a neat label for the daughter of skating’s most famous dynasty, as if her parents’ crowns were something she could inherit without question.
I turn.
And there she is.
I’ve been here before.
Not like this—not in a hallway lined with pictures and framed awards and cameras humming softly in the walls—but close enough that my body recognizes it. Close enough that I know exactly where the bruise is, even if I’ve spent years pretending it healed clean.
It wasn’t personal. That’s the thing people like to getwrong. It was a sentence said in passing, during a quick interview I rewatched hundreds of times on a cracked phone screen years ago, when I was still skating and still hoping the world might tilt my way if I worked hard enough and showed how I could also be technically perfect. Something about clean lines and about how skating didn’t need embellishment when the fundamentals were strong.
Harmless, if you were already sitting on the right side of the table with federation-backed money, teams of people buzzing around you, and a last name that carried so much weight, it was probably heavy on your back.
But where I was standing, it landed differently. It was almost like a verdict, confirmation of what the sport had already been telling me in quieter ways—that some of us were allowed to be simple because we were already seen, and some of us were expected to sparkle just to earn the right to exist at all.
Isabella Pierce.
The world’s most decorated figure skater. Taller than most of the people moving through the corridor—or at least she reads that way because she carries the height like she owns it. Five-ten, maybe. Long limbs and pin-straight posture. She’s dressed in a sleek off-white coat with what looks like feathers at the ends of her sleeves that probably cost more than my monthly rent, and she still looks like she belongs on ice even standing on cold, unforgiving concrete in flat velvet shoes.
She doesn’t look like she’s aged much.
