Chapter 14. The Light That Never Turns Off

Wren POV

Being Silas Calder's fake girlfriend turned out to involve a lot of sitting in the cold.

His practices ran from four to six, every day except Sunday. Term five meant I didn't walk home alone after dark, and in late September, dark came early. So I did my reading in the empty stands of the Corvane ice rink, wrapped in a borrowed team blanket that smelled like woodsmoke and frost, and listened.

I liked it more than I'd ever admit.

The rink was the quietest loud place I'd ever been. Blades cutting ice. Pucks cracking off the boards. Coaches yelling. But no voices crawling over each other, no music, no hundred heartbeats in a small room. Just a clean, cold echo that my ears could actually rest in.

And him.

He skated like the ice belonged to him. Fast and hard and completely silent, like he wasn't thinking at all, like for two hours a day all the anger he carried around had somewhere to go. When he scored, he ne