POV: Luci
"You should not be here."
The words sliced through the steam filled darkness of the locker room like a blade wrapped in velvet, and Luci felt them land somewhere deep in her chest where her heart had suddenly forgotten how to beat in a steady rhythm because the voice that spoke them was not the voice of the Easton Reed she had watched from the bleachers, the golden boy of Oakhaven hockey, the untouchable king of the ice who smiled for the cameras and signed autographs for children and never once looked up at the shadows where she sat watching him. This voice was lower and rougher and threaded with something that sounded like pain and hunger and a warning she did not fully understand but felt in her bones nonetheless.
"I found your phone," she heard herself say, and her own voice was steadier than she felt because she had spent a lifetime learning to hide her fear behind a mask of composure, but the mask was cracking now as she watched him rise from the bench where he had been hunched over like a man being torn apart from the inside. "I came to return it. I did not come to... I did not know you would be..."
"You did not know I would be what?" He turned toward her then and the low light caught the planes of his face in a way that made him look less like a man and more like something carved from ice and moonlight and old and terrible secrets. "Human? Because I am not. You have seen that now. You have seen what I am."
Luci wanted to deny it, wanted to pretend that the shift in his eyes had been a trick of the light and the heat radiating from his skin had been her imagination and the growl that had rumbled through the empty arena had been nothing more than the ventilation system settling, but she could not lie to herself and she could not look away from the molten gold of his gaze and she could not ignore the way her own blood was singing in response to something she had no name for. "What are you?"
He laughed then, a low and bitter sound that held no humor and only the jagged edges of a man who had been asking himself the same question for a very long time. "I am the monster parents warn their children about," he said, and he took a step toward her while she took a step back until her shoulders hit the cold metal of the lockers and there was nowhere left to run. "I am the creature that hunts in the dark. I am the wolf that wears a man's skin and pretends to be human while the moon calls to something ancient and hungry inside me."
"A wolf," she whispered, and the word felt absurd on her tongue, a relic of childhood stories and campfire tales and everything she had stopped believing in the moment she learned that the real monsters did not have fangs and fur but wore business suits and smiled while they destroyed lives. "You expect me to believe that you are a werewolf?"
"I expect you to believe what your eyes are telling you," he said, and he was close enough now that she could feel the heat of him through the thin fabric of her shirt, could see the way his pupils had dilated until there was almost no blue left in his eyes, could perceive the clean sharp scent of pine and something wilder that made her want to press her face against his chest and breathe him in until she forgot her own name. "I expect you to believe what your body is telling you. Because you feel it, don't you? The pull. The bond. The way your heart is racing not from fear but from recognition."
She wanted to deny it, wanted to tell him that he was wrong and arrogant and delusional, but her body betrayed her because her hand rose of its own accord to press against his chest where his heart was hammering with the same frantic rhythm as her own, and the moment her palm made contact with the heated skin beneath his torn jersey she felt something snap into place inside her, a lock clicking open, a door swinging wide, a truth she had never known she was searching for suddenly standing in front of her with golden eyes and bloodied knuckles and a secret that could destroy them both. "What is happening to me?"
"You are waking up," he said, and his voice was softer now, almost gentle, as if he understood that she was standing on the edge of a precipice and he did not want to push her but he could not let her walk away either. "The bond does not care about timing or convenience or the life you have built for yourself. It only cares about the match. And you are mine, Luci. You have always been mine. I have been searching for you for three hundred years and I did not even know it until I caught your scent in the bleachers tonight and every star in the sky finally aligned."
"Three hundred years," she repeated, and the words felt like stones in her mouth because they were impossible and ridiculous and yet something deep in her soul recognized the truth of them. "You are telling me that you are three hundred years old?"
"I am telling you that I have been waiting for you for longer than this country has existed," he said, and he raised his hand to cup her face with a tenderness that made her eyes sting with unexpected tears because no one had ever touched her like that, like she was precious and fragile and worth protecting. "I am telling you that every game you watched from the shadows, every moment you spent wondering if I could see you, I could. I always could. And I wanted to come to you. Every single night I wanted to walk into those bleachers and pull you into my arms and never let you go. But I was afraid."
"You? Afraid?" The laugh that escaped her was shaky and disbelieving because this was Easton Reed, the Ice King, the man who faced down enforcers twice his size without flinching, and he was telling her that he had been afraid of her. "What could you possibly be afraid of?"
"This," he said, and he leaned down until his forehead rested against hers and his breath mingled with her breath and the world outside the locker room ceased to exist entirely. "Of how much I need you. Of what I would become if I lost you. Of the war that is coming because the moment I claim you, every enemy I have ever made will come for your blood. And I do not know if I am strong enough to protect you from all of them."
As the lights in the locker room flickered and died, plunging them into a darkness that was absolute and complete, and Luci felt his arms wrap around her and pull her against his chest while the sound of howling rose from somewhere deep in the forest that bordered the arena, a chorus of voices that were not human and not animal but something caught between the two, and Easton's heart hammered against her ear while his lips brushed her temple and he whispered a single word into the darkness: run, and she understood that he was not telling her to run from him but to run with him, because the hunters had found them and the night was about to become a battlefield, and the ice king's secret was no longer a secret at all.