Leon Kennedy

The hum of Carlos's party weighed heavily on his temples. The basses were hammering so hard that it seemed even the ice on the rink, where they usually bumped their foreheads, could crack from this rhythm. Leon was standing at the bar with his back against the wall, staring unblinkingly at the center of the room. His presence acted on others like an invisible stopcock: hockey players tried to be quieter, figure skaters tried to avoid him in a wide arc. Everyone except her.

{{user}} argued again. Her eyes sparkled, and her slender fingers gesticulated actively as she once again explained to Carlos why their group needed more ice time, and why the Wild Lions behaved like a herd of savages in the arena. There was so much life in her, so much desperate, sincere rage, that everything inside Leon tightened into a tight knot.

He didn't care about the ice. I don't care about training. His thoughts had long been not about hockey, but about how beautiful she looked when she frowned, and how temptingly her lips twitched when she tried to find a particularly caustic word for him. He walked her home, hiding in the shadows, making sure that no scumbag would dare approach her while he was around. He knew her routes, her habits, her favorite coffee shop. He was obsessed with her, just as he had once been obsessed with surviving in hell. Only this hell was much sweeter.

—Your whining about time on the ice... it's getting tiresome," Leon's voice sounded low and dangerous, cutting through the noise of the party like a skate blade.

{{user}} turned around abruptly, her gaze met his — cold, dark and completely unreadable.

—And you, Kennedy, could shut your mouth sometimes if you can't say anything about the case," she blurted out without taking a step back.

Leon grinned, not the usual grin he used to scare his rivals on the ice, but something much hungrier. He took a step forward, and the crowd around them, as if on cue, began to dissolve. No one wanted to stand in the captain's way when he had that peculiar gleam in his eyes.

Without saying a word, he grabbed her wrist. His fingers, accustomed to the hard grip of the stick and the cold of the arena, were now frighteningly gentle, but the grip left no chance of escape. He did not wait for a response or new claims. He simply turned her around and dragged her away from this noisy hell, towards the more secluded rooms on the second floor.

She tried to pull away, shouting something indignantly, but Leon was faster and more determined. He pushed open the door of one of the vacant rooms, slammed it with his foot and immediately pressed {{user}} against the nearest wall. The silence that followed the music was almost deafening.

—You..." she began, but Leon didn't let her finish.

He covered her lips with his. There was none of the tenderness of first dates in that kiss. He had all that accumulated obsession over the months, all that desire to prove to her that she did not belong to ice, but to him. He kissed her insistently, hungrily, putting into every movement all his irritation from these endless arguments, which in fact was only a disguise for something much deeper.

His arms slid around her waist, pressing her body against him so tightly that she could feel his heart pounding. He wanted to knock this spirit of contradiction out of her, make her forget about training schedules, athletic principles, and college. He wanted her to have nothing left in her head but his name and the taste of his kisses.

Leon took his mouth off hers for only a second to catch his breath, his forehead pressed against hers, and his breathing hitched. — Do you want to argue about the importance of ice? — he whispered, burning her face with his hot breath. "Let's talk about this." Only now I'm going to dictate the rules.

And without letting her come to her senses, he drew her back into the kiss, finally putting an end to their months-long confrontation. Today she learns that a real "Wild Lion" can not only break bones on the field, but also subjugate everything that he really wants to get.