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“That was the hottest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

I closed my eyes. “Lex.”

“I mean it. You hit me and I almost lost my mind.”

“I hit you with one-fortieth of—”

“I know. I felt it.” A pause. “That’s what got me. You were so careful. All that power, and you were so careful with me.”

I sat with my hands in my lap and the sweat, real or imagined, drying on my skin. I have been called cold. I have been called the ice prince, and worse. I have never been told I was tender in a public place by a bleeding man in a box.

“I love you,” I said, to the ice between my skates.

The heartbeat on the other side of the glass stopped.

I did not look up. I could not have borne it. I heard it start again a moment later, very fast, very loud, and a long shaky breath.

“You can’t just say that,” he whispered. “In the box. “

“It seemed the time.”

“There’s nine thousand people.”

“They are watching the puck.”

“I’m gonna cry, and it’s gonna look like I got punched.”

“You did get punched.”

“Shut up, “ said Lex, and he was laughing and crying at the same time, and the Plexiglas between us was warm where he put his hand against it.

I put mine on the other side.

It was a foolish, brief, impossible thing: a gloveless hand, pale and cold, against glass, and his, tan and scarred and shaking, against mine, with one inch of clear plastic between us. On either side of it sat nine thousand people who were not looking.

Except one.

I felt it before I saw it.

A prickle at the base of the skull. The small cold tightening of a body that has been hunted before. I lifted my head, slowly, and let my gaze drift up over the glass, over the rows of faces, the flags, the foam fingers, until it reached the upper deck.

There, in the third row of the northeast corner, in a seat that faced the penalty boxes at a perfect angle, sat a man in a gray coat.

He was not cheering. He was not eating. He was sitting very still with his hands folded in his lap, and a camera in his hands, low, like a bird held gently. A camera with a long, black, familiar lens.

He was looking directly at me.

He did not look away. He did not lift the camera. He simply looked, across a hundred feet of smoky air, out of a thin, weary, extraordinarily handsome face. It was the face in Tamsin’s photograph. I had never seen it in the flesh. It was a face I recognized from a hundred other nights, on a hundred other men: the face of someone who has lost the person he loved and cannot forgive the world for going on.

Gideon Roake inclined his head to me, a courtesy, like a fencer’s salute.

Then he raised the camera, and the shutter clicked, and I felt, across the entire length of the arena, the cold silver whisper of a lens taking my picture with my hand pressed flat against the glass.

I did not move. I did not take my hand away.

He has seen it, I thought. He has seen exactly what I am to him.

On the far side of the Plexiglas, Lex had gone quiet.