Chapter 141: TRAINING TOGETHER

The Fang smelled the same. That was the first detail Georgia cataloged, registering the cold mineral bite of the ice, the faint rubber-and-steel stench off the boards, and the dead stillness of a rink before skates carve into it. She had stepped inside dozens of times while keeping her distance, but stepping through beside Puck pulled the tension straight into her ribs, sharp and direct.

He held the door. Georgia walked right past without waiting.

They sat on the same bench to lace up, a proximity they had spent months avoiding. Before this, some careful geometry had always separated them, whether a stray chair between them or an easy excuse to explain why they occupied the same patch of concrete. Now only bare wood sat beneath them, his shoulder resting close enough that heat radiated straight through her jacket.

"You’re doing the left one wrong," Puck said.

"I’ve been lacing skates since I was four - "

"You’re still doing it wrong?"

She looked down at her fingers. He was right. She yanked the lace loose to reset the crossover, and he went quiet, offering none of the usual hollow reassurances.

When they stepped onto the ice together, the sheet struck back instantly. Georgia felt the vibration before any sound registered, a low, hard hum traveling through steel blades and directly into the bones of her feet. It was the familiar pulse she had tracked a hundred times before, only heavier now, vibrating with an unyielding density across the entire rink floor.

They cut into warm-up drills without exchanging a word. Crossovers came first, followed by edge work along the perimeter boards, basic foundational work her body executed on pure instinct. Puck matched her stride along the curve, settling into an identical rhythm while the silence stretched out between them. No performance lingered in it, and no sudden weight pressed against her chest.

Georgia let the relief take hold, shedding the constant, exhausting vigilance of wondering what words he swallowed, what movements she failed to catch, and what the ice reported beneath them.

Then, midway through the fourth lap, she tracked his posture.

His deceleration entering the far turn was far too smooth. The extension on his crossover looked completely measured, his stride length trimmed down to align with her speed, rather than flowing from any natural pace between them. She had watched him skate before; she knew how his frame moved when he stopped holding back.

This posture was deliberate control.

The low hum under her steel runners persisted, steady and unnervingly warm. Georgia cut hard into the next corner, watching him check his power at the exact boundary mark, and realized the hidden danger had never actually left the ice.

It had simply changed its shape.She stopped.

Blades bit hard into the ice, the scrape cutting across the low hum beneath her feet. Puck completed the turn without her, realized she was no longer tracking beside him, and circled back with that same deliberate ease that had been grating on her for the last twenty minutes.

She waited until he coasted close enough that she could keep her volume low.

"You’ve been holding back with me. Why?"

He offered nothing, so she pushed again: "I’ve seen you as a wolf, Puck... you don’t need to pretend to be weak."

Her voice sounded steadier than expected, landing flat and direct in the empty space between them. The stillness pressed in from the boards, from the rafters, and from the ice itself, which had settled into an absolute quiet under her skates while the subsonic hum died down to almost nothing. Puck stood motionless; every controlled line of his posture went rigid, stripped clean of any casual athletic posture.

Georgia held her ground.

She had cataloged the deliberate architecture of his movement beat by beat, recognizing it plainly for what it was: a performance, colder than simple arrogance and far harder to accept.

He looked directly at her.

It was an open, unguarded stare, his full attention landing against her sternum with a tactile weight that made her ribs ache. Something flickered across his face, breaking the calm mask he had worn since they laced up their skates; it reminded her of an edge blowing out at takeoff, the split-second tilt just before a jumper commits to an unavoidable fall.

Georgia refused to glance away.

Whatever calculations ran behind his forehead, she let him finish them without softening her posture or offering him an easy exit. The cold surface beneath their blades stayed dead quiet; the empty arena offered no distraction, pinning them both in the center of the ice.

Then Puck gave a single nod. It was brief and contained, requiring no spoken explanation.

A subtle looseness entered the heavy line of his neck and shoulders, and a sharp, sudden heat settled low in her ribs, confirming he had finally set the act aside. The mechanical hum surged back through the ice floor, deeper than before, and Puck turned cleanly toward the open sheet.Puck turned toward the clear ice, and then he cut loose entirely.

The change hit immediately. There was no wind-up, no visible gathering of effort, just a single push off the surface that sent him across the rink at a speed that forced Georgia’s gaze to strain to track him. For months, she had studied every drill; she had cataloged his edges, his crossovers, and the precise angle he carried through a turn, but none of that data prepared her for the raw reality of this speed. He shifted his weight with absolute mechanical precision, burning through space as if gravity had ceased to apply to his frame.

His steel bit the rink with a brutal force she felt from center ice, the vibration climbing straight through her blades, rattling her arches, her shins, and her sternum. The sound altered as well, dropping the clean hiss of a controlled edge for a percussive strike, as if the frozen floor were cracking open under a hammer. He took the far corner without checking his velocity, sinking low and fluid, and the entire structure shuddered around his path.

Then the hum shifted pitch.

Georgia registered the change before she understood it. The subsonic tremor she had recorded since her first day at The Fang had always moved in a single steady register, low and rhythmic, synced to something like a resting pulse. Now it plunged into a heavier frequency, splitting into two distinct waves that ran parallel before braiding together - his presence and hers, no longer separate. The resonance rising through the floor was total. She stood rigid and let it travel through her muscle and bone, filling the rink from boards to rafters, until the vibration locked into place like a circuit snapping shut.

Puck circled back to her on an extended gliding arc, edges barely whispering, and halted three feet away. His breathing stayed completely even.

He stared down at her with a steady gaze. The amber in that look was unmasked, devoid of calculation or restraint, offering that blunt, unblinking focus that hit her ribs with physical weight.

"Why hide it from me?" she said, her voice coming out level, without accusation. "I saw what ran in the woods. You don’t have to play harmless here..."

He said nothing for several seconds; the quiet between them hardened with leverage checkpoints, pinning them both to the spot while the silence settled into an unspoken verdict.

Georgia held his attention, feeling the precise weight of what she had pulled to the surface. She had stripped away his practiced performance, but the trade cost her just as much; it left her standing without the shield of a clinical ledger, completely unable to conceal the thing she had spent months cataloging instead of confronting. She had forced the truth out into the open, and now the ice vibrated beneath their boots, unfiltered, leaving nowhere left to step back.

Puck stayed fixed on her face. Georgia held his stare, the ice humming beneath them, waiting.