Tracy Wolff - Shredded

“We could do it now.” Luc holds up his phone. “See where he’s at.”

“No!” The last thing I want is to pour the whole fucking story out. Not to my agent, not to anybody. Not ever again. “I just want to ride, man. Okay?”

He looks uncertain, but then he nods and shoves the phone back into his pocket. “Yeah, sure. Let’s do it.”

“I’ve got your phone,” Ash says, pressing the cold device into my hand. “The screen is cracked, but other than that it seems to be working okay.”

“Thanks.” I don’t even bother to look at it. I’m so over this.

So over the past.

So over the shit with my dad.

So over being the one my friends have to tiptoe around.

So over worrying what Ophelia will think when she finally learns the truth.

And I’m damn sure over having to worry about fucking up or freaking out or messing with anything, everything.

I’m just done.

I manage to hold it together until it’s my turn. I’m going seventh, so there aren’t that many people in front of me. The pow should still be good when I get up there, and it should all work out. The course isn’t that big. Only room for four big air tricks on the slopestyle course, and I need to hit them just right.

I watch as number six, Brian Mitchell out of Calgary, tears up the course. Hits the rails hard, then lands a pair of doubles and one triple. It’s a good run, no doubt, but I can beat it with my eyes closed.

Then it’s my turn and I’m pushing off. I glide over the rails like they aren’t even there, even take two backward just to show that I can. The first jump comes up pretty quick once I’m out of the rails, and I nail it with a triple cab. I land smooth, hit the second ramp, and pull out the inverted 1440. The crowd is screaming now—I can hear them—and for a second I think about how easily this could go a different way. How easily it could just—

I hit the third ramp wrong. I can feel it going up, but I try to salvage it. I pull another triple cab out, but I’m going too fast and I’m not in the right position. Adrenaline starts pumping. I’m overrotated, coming down too fast …

I hit hard, slam into the ground at the worst possible angle, end up tumbling ass over teakettle down half the fucking mountain. I feel something pop in my shoulder, then blinding pain shoots through my arm and down my back. I’m rolling hard, so there’s more pain everywhere, my ribs, my left hip, my wrist …

I roll and roll and roll, until I finally get to the bottom of the hill. I’m facedown in the snow and I know I should roll over, show everyone that I’m all right. But the pain is overwhelming now, coming in waves that keep growing bigger and bigger until they’re all I can feel, all I can think about.

Grateful, I give myself over to them and let them pull me under.

At first I don’t understand what’s going on. I mean, I saw him do the trick, saw him overrotate and come down wrong, slamming into the ground shoulder first. But there’s a part of me that still doesn’t get it. That still doesn’t understand what’s happening. It was an easy trick for him—a triple cab that I’ve seen him land literally a hundred times in the last ten days. He can do it in his sleep. So why is he rolling down a mountain right now, going head over heels as fast as all that momentum can carry him?

Beside me, Gemma gasps, has her hands over her mouth as she starts praying out loud. On my other side Cam is sitting still as a statue, just waiting for it to be over. Just waiting for his poor, abused body to finally come to a stop.

And me, I’m in the middle with no real understanding of what’s happening except to know that, whatever it is, it isn’t good. Please, not his head. Not his neck. Please, please, please. I’ll take any other injury, deal with anything else. But please, please, please, don’t let it be a head or neck injury.

I reach out for Cam, end up clawing her arm as Z finally comes to a stop. “Is he okay?”

She shakes her head grimly. “With the way he landed, I doubt it. He probably tore his rotator cuff again, maybe broke his wrist. It’s not going to be pretty, that’s for sure.”

That’s all I need to hear. I have no conscious memory of moving, but I must have because I’m on my feet and shoving my way through the crowd in an effort to get out of the stands. In an effort to get to Z. There’s a part of me that’s aware of Ash’s family and Cam following along behind me, but I’m not paying attention to them. I’m totally focused on Z’s body lying prone at the bottom of the mountain, and the paramedics who are even now rushing out to him.

“He’s not moving. Why isn’t he moving?”

“Because he broke his fucking shoulder,” Cam tells me tersely. “It hurts like a bitch.”

“His shoulder?” I hang on to the words like a lifeline as I push my way out of the stands and start trying to weave through the crowd of reporters and fans at the bottom of the hill. “You’re sure it’s just his shoulder?”

“I’m not sure of anything,” she snaps at me, as stressed by the situation as I am. “That’s just my guess from seeing falls like that before.”

“How do we get to him?”

“We don’t,” she says as we finally make it to the front of the barricade. “You wait here while I go check what’s going on.”

“But—”

“Wait here.” She points to a spot right at the front of the barricade. “I’m a competitor. You’re not. There’s no way you’re getting past the rope line.”

She’s right. I know she is, and yet it’s killing me to be standing here merely watching when Z has just had an accident.

No, not an accident, a voice deep inside my head says. He knows how to land that trick, can do it in his sleep. If he fell on it here, it’s because he wanted to.

I shove the voice back down, refusing to believe it. He’s been doing so well lately, trying so hard. Why would he have me come in for the competition if he was just going to fuck it all up on purpose? It makes no sense.

And yet even as I’m thinking that, I’m seeing all those competitions I watched. All those videos of him nailing a run and then fucking it up at the end, again and again and again. Almost like he doesn’t even know he’s going to do it until it’s already done.

Which is why it’s an accident, I tell myself viciously.

“It’s okay, Ophelia. He’s going to be all right.” Logan’s there now, taking Cam’s place beside me as Z’s friend flashes her credentials to the guards working the line.

“How do you know?”

He manages to grin at me, though his eyes are wide and nervous. “ ’Cuz he’s Z. He has to be okay.”

I’m close enough now that I can see Z is talking to the paramedics, which means he’s alive and hopefully lucid. But he’s still not moving and I’m terrified Cam is wrong. Terrified he’s hurt much worse than she thinks he is.

Gemma rubs my other arm soothingly. “He’ll be fine, darling. God’s been watching out for that boy for as long as I’ve known him.”

Neither are the answers I’m looking for, not by a long shot, but they’re all I’ve got right now, so I decide to take comfort where I can.

Seconds later, my cell phone rings. It’s Ash, so I pick it up as soon as his name flashes across the screen.

“What’s going on?” we both ask at the same time.

Shit. I thought maybe he’d heard something, since he’s at the top of the mountain with a bunch of officials around him.

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “Cam thinks he tore his rotator cuff—”

“So do I,” he says grimly, “Just based on what we saw before they blanked the TV screen. Is he moving around yet? Sitting up?”

The panic gets worse. “No! He’s just lying there.”

I must sound as unhinged as I’m feeling, because Ash suddenly switches to comfort mode. “He’s going to be fine, Ophelia. I promise.”

“Why does everyone keep telling me that? How do you know?”

“Because he’s Z.” He tells me the same thing his brother did.

“What the hell does that even mean?” I demand, so close to hysterical that I no longer care about being polite. “And what the hell happened? I saw him this morning. He seemed totally ready for this competition.”

“It’s a long story,” Ash mutters. “Some reporter got in his head and …” His voice trails off, and that’s when I know, I know, that those ugly suspicions I had were correct. Z did this on purpose. He fucking nearly killed himself deliberately.

He could be lying there paralyzed right now because something set him off. Because he couldn’t deal.

Rage explodes through me, exacerbated by the terror that is still coursing through me. “He did this on purpose. He fucking did this on purpose.”

“It’s not that easy,” Ash tells me. “Calm down and we’ll talk once we know he’s okay.”

“Right. Sure. We’ll talk then.” My head’s so messed up right now that I barely know what I’m saying. “You might call Cam. She got through the barricade and was going to see if she could find out anything more.”

A sudden roar from the crowd has me turning around in time to see Z sitting up with the help of the paramedics. Even from here his shoulder looks messed up, like it’s out of whack, but he’s smiling. Even manages a wave for the crowd with his other arm.

The bastard. The fucking bastard. He promised me he wouldn’t do this again. I told him about Remi, told him about what I saw on those snowboarding videos of him, and he swore to me he wouldn’t deliberately do this again. And yet here we are, the last major competition before the Olympic trials and he goes and makes sure that the whole thing is over for him before it even begins.