Page 13 of Love Worth Gold

She exploded forward.

The first pitch felt clean. Her skis bit perfectly through the glide section as the wind sliced past her helmet. At the first split, her time flashed green. Her dad’s voice echoed in her head:Manage the compression, don’t chase it.

But the snow changed halfway down the hill. It went from hard packed snow to ice to a thin layer of soft granular that grabbed unpredictably. The light went flat exactly where he’d warned her, shadows erased by cloud cover that turned the entire slope into one undifferentiated blur.

She hit the turn at full speed, trusting memory more than vision.

Her weight shifted a fraction too far forward.

The ski edge caught wrong—not a massive mistake, just a microsecond of imbalance that turned into a skid, then a violent sideways jerk. Her body torqued. She fought to pull it back, but momentum had already made its choice.

She went down hard.

The world became a spinning carousel of sky, snow, fence netting, and pain. Her shoulder slammed into something solid. Her helmet cracked against her own knee. The noise of her body tumbling through safety barriers sounded like thunder inside her skull.

Then she stopped.

Silence pressed down. There was no crowd noise and no radio chatter. Just the high-pitched whine in her ears and the taste of blood where she’d bitten her tongue.

Move. You have to move.

She forced her fingers to flex. Toes next. Arms. Legs. Everything answered. Slowly, she pushed herself upright as snow fell from her suit in clumps. Her ribs screamed. Her shoulder throbbed. But nothing felt broken.

Still seated, she raised one arm to signal to the officials that she was okay.

The ski patrol reached her within seconds. They crouched beside her with steady hands and calm voices. They checked her pupils, her neck, her range of motion. She answered their questions on autopilot while her brain replayed the crash frame by frame, searching for the exact moment she’d lost it.

“Can you stand?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want the sled?”

“No.”

She stood, collected the ski that had released, and clamped it back in. She skied the rest of the course at a crawl while the entire mountain held its breath.

By the time she reached the finish, Matthias and Reto were already there. Matthias’s face was carved from stone. Reto’s jaw worked like he was chewing through steel.

“I’m fine,” she said before either of them could ask.

“Medical tent,” Matthias said. It was not a question.

“I’m fine.”

Reto stepped closer, and his voice dropped. “You just sprawled through three panels of B-net at one hundred kilometers an hour. You’re going to medical, or I’m carrying you there myself.”

She wanted to argue, but the words died in her throat when she saw the fear buried beneath his sarcasm.

In the medical tent, the team doctor poked, prodded, and declared her miraculously intact. Bruised ribs. Strainedshoulder. Nothing that required imaging or pulling her from competition. The relief should have been total.

Instead, all she felt was the cold weight of how close she’d come to losing everything again.

When she stepped back outside with her helmet tucked under her arm, the crowd noise had returned. Other racers were finishing their training runs. Coaches huddled near monitors. Life moved forward like her crash had been a momentary interruption instead of what was nearly the end of her world.

Then she saw Blaire.

The American stood near the mixed zone fence, still in her team jacket, eyes locked on Isaline with an intensity that had nothing to do with start lists or rivalry. For one unguarded second, Blaire’s face showed exactly what she’d been trying to bury since St. Moritz: care and worry. Real, unfiltered worry that stripped every careful boundary down to emotional nakedness.