Chapter Seven: Face to Face

Rory Jarvis ambushed me in the rink lobby the next morning with all the subtlety of a man who has never once in his life had to be subtle about anything. "There he is." He clapped a hand on my shoulder and steered me bodily toward the exit before I'd even finished unlacing my skates in my head. "Come on, before he changes his mind and decides being social is beneath him." "Who, exactly, am I being delivered to like a pizza?" "My brother. I told you about him." He said it like I hadn't spent the entire previous night having a slow-motion crisis about it. "Don't overthink it. He's not scary. He's just — a lot, in a very quiet way." "That's not reassuring, Jarvis. That's the setup to a horror movie." "You'll live." He grinned, and the dimple showed, and I hated, deeply and specifically, how much that still worked on me even mid-panic. "Probably." We found Dray leaning against a car in the parking lot that cost more than my entire studio apartment building, arms crossed, watching us approach with an expression that gave away exactly nothing. Up close, in daylight, without a helmet or twenty feet of ice between us, the resemblance to his brother was almost unfair — same jaw, same build, same unfairly good bone structure — except every single thing that made Jarvis warm had been replaced in Dray with something colder and infinitely more unnerving. "This is him," Jarvis announced, like he was unveiling a prize. "Rory. The one I told you about." "I remember." Dray's eyes moved over me slow and deliberate, head to foot, the exact opposite of a casual glance. "You skate like you've been doing it longer than a club league would teach you." It wasn't a compliment. It landed like a diagnosis. "Started young," I said, keeping my voice in its careful lower register, keeping my spine straight, keeping every single nerve in my body from doing what it wanted to do, which was bolt for the nearest exit. "Guess it stuck." "Guess it did." He didn't blink. Didn't smile. Just kept looking at me with the specific patience of a man who's used to waiting for things to reveal themselves on their own timeline. "You nervous, Rory?" "Why would I be nervous?" "No reason." A pause, deliberate, the kind that does more damage than a full sentence would. "Most people aren't, meeting a teammate's brother." Jarvis, oblivious, was already checking his phone, missing the entire silent war happening four feet in front of him. I forced a laugh that came out only slightly strangled. "Guess I'm just naturally a little wound up. New school, new team, mysterious brothers cornering me in parking lots." Something flickered at the corner of Dray's mouth — not quite a smile, more like the ghost of one passing through on its way somewhere else. "Fair," he said. "I'll try to be less mysterious." "Please don't change on my account." That actually got something out of him — a short exhale that might, in a more generous universe, have qualified as a laugh — and for one disorienting second I thought maybe I'd imagined the whole unnerving vibe, that maybe he was just naturally intense the way some people are naturally left-handed, no deeper meaning attached. Then he stepped a half pace closer, close enough that Jarvis's phone-induced obliviousness stopped being useful cover, and said, quiet enough that his brother wouldn't catch it over the parking lot noise, "I read people for a living, more or less. Comes with the family business." His eyes didn't leave mine. "You're hiding something. I don't know what yet. But I will." My pulse did something violent and unhelpful. "Bold thing to say to someone you just met," I managed, proud of how steady it came out given that my entire nervous system was currently staging a small riot. "I'm not wrong very often." He straightened, the moment closing as fast as it opened, and raised his voice back to a normal register just as Jarvis looked up from his phone. "Nice to finally meet you, Rory." "Yeah," Jarvis said, delighted, utterly unaware he'd just missed the single most important conversation of the morning. "See? Not scary." "Terrifying," I said, meaning it in a way Jarvis clearly heard as a joke. Dray was already turning back toward his car, unreadable again, twin masks reset. But right before he climbed in, he looked back over his shoulder — not at Jarvis, at me — and said, almost gently, almost like a warning wrapped in something softer, "I already feel like I know you." He shut the car door before I could ask what that was supposed to mean, and pulled out of the lot without a backward glance, leaving me standing there with Jarvis chattering happily about lunch plans and my whole plan quietly, catastrophically unraveling somewhere behind my ribs. I already feel like I know you. Four words. No context. No explanation. And somehow more terrifying than anything shouted across a locker room could ever be, because Dray Sterling didn't strike me as a man who said things by accident, and I had absolutely no idea yet whether that sentence was a threat, a warning, or something else entirely — something I wasn't ready to have a name for.