Icing (The Power Play #1)

Chapter 1

COLE

Ididn't like Mikhail Volkov.

I want to get that on the record right away, because everything that happened after is going to make it look like I did.

I didn't. He was six-foot-three of cold Russian granite with a scar through his eyebrow and a personality that suggested he'd been raised by glaciers.

He'd hit me from my blind side in a preseason exhibition game hard enough to put me in the quiet room for three weeks, and he'd never apologized.

Not once. Not a text, not a nod, not even a "sorry I tried to separate your spine from your body" in passing.

He just looked at me across the ice with those flat grey eyes like I was a minor inconvenience in his afternoon.

And now he was on my team. Sitting in my locker room. Wearing my jersey.

The hockey gods have a sick sense of humor.

The locker room smelled like tape and sweat and that cheap body spray Jonah kept buying in bulk from Costco, and honestly?

It smelled like home. Opening night. Sold-out barn.

Third season for the Atlanta Reapers, first season where people were actually taking us seriously.

Eighteen thousand people in downtown Atlanta who chose hockey over everything else on a Saturday night.

That still blew my mind. Hockey in the South. My dad would've laughed. My dad would've had a lot of opinions about a lot of things, but I wasn't thinking about my dad tonight.

Tonight I was thinking about Mikhail Volkov. No. Tonight I was thinking about goals.

"Briggs." Jonah slid onto the bench next to me, already taped and laced, which was annoying because I was still working on my left shin pad.

Jonah Park was the kind of guy who was always ready ten minutes early and never made you feel bad about it, which made it worse.

"You look like you're about to give a TED talk. "

"I'm visualizing."

"You're constipated."

"Those are the same face."

He grinned and knocked his knee against mine. "Big night. You ready?"

"I was born ready."

"You were born in Duluth, Minnesota. Nobody from Duluth is born ready for anything except winter."

"Duluth adjacent. And I will not tolerate slander of my hometown on opening night." I finished with the shin pad and stood, bouncing on my skates. Everything felt dialed in. The tape on my stick was fresh. My blades were sharp. My legs felt good.

The energy in the room was electric, the kind of buzzy, jumpy vibe that only happens when a team genuinely believes it has a shot.

Guys were chirping, laughing, throwing tape balls.

Coach Callahan would come in soon and kill the mood with something intense and motivational, and we'd all get serious.

But right now, in this moment, we were just a bunch of guys who loved hockey and couldn't wait to play it.

Except I couldn't stop looking at the corner of the room.

Volkov sat there like he'd been carved from a glacier.

Still. Quiet. His dark hair was pushed back, and that scar through his left eyebrow caught the fluorescent light and made him look like a Bond villain, which I'm pretty sure was the vibe he was going for.

He wasn't talking to anyone. He wasn't looking at anyone.

He was just... there. Taking up space with the kind of deliberate silence that dared you to break it.

Having him on my team, in my locker room, wearing the same jersey? That was a special kind of torture that the hockey gods had designed specifically to test me.

"Stop staring," Jonah muttered.

"I'm not staring."

"You've been glaring at Volkov for thirty seconds."

"That's not staring. That's a tactical assessment."

"It's going to get you benched if Coach sees. Leave it on the ice."

He was right. I knew he was right. I cracked my neck and looked away.

Coach Callahan walked in and the room went quiet.

Mike Callahan was built like a fire hydrant and had the temperament to match.

He'd coached in this league for twenty years and had exactly zero patience for anything that wasn't hockey.

He looked around the room, making eye contact with each of us, and I swear the temperature dropped two degrees.

"Gentlemen," he said. "This is the year."

Short speech. Callahan was like that. He didn't need to say more. We all knew what this season meant. Wild card at minimum. Prove that Atlanta belonged. Prove that we weren't just some expansion curiosity that would fold in five years.

We filed out of the locker room and into the tunnel, and the sound hit me like a wall. Eighteen thousand people screaming, the bass of the intro music vibrating through my skates, the ice glowing under the lights. I took my first stride and felt the familiar rush. Cold air. Clean ice. Possibility.

I was flying in the first period. Two shots on goal, a secondary assist on Jonah's power play tally, and the kind of puck luck that makes you feel invincible. We were up 2-1 and I was on a mission.

And then Volkov hit me.

It happened fast, the way the worst things always do. I was cutting through the neutral zone with the puck, head up, reading the play. I saw the gap and accelerated. What I didn't see was Volkov closing from my blind side at roughly the speed of a freight train.

His shoulder caught me in the chest and the world tilted. My skates left the ice. For a half second I was just floating, which sounds poetic but actually felt like being inside a car crash. Then the boards introduced themselves to my spine and I crumpled.

The whistle blew. I was on my hands and knees, trying to remember how breathing worked.

And then I was up, because screw that, and I was in his face. Volkov stood there looking at me with that same blank expression, like he'd just checked a traffic cone instead of a human being.

"The hell was that?" I shoved his chest. His chest did not move. The man was built like a Soviet-era apartment block.

He said nothing.

"You hear me, Volkov? You want to run me again? We can go right now."

Still nothing. He just looked at me, and for one insane second I thought I saw something flicker behind those eyes. Something that wasn't indifference. But it was gone before I could name it, and then the refs were between us, and Jonah was pulling me back, and the moment was over.

"Easy," Jonah said in my ear. "He's on our team, remember?"

"Tell that to my ribs."

"Your ribs are fine. Your ego took the hit."

He wasn't wrong, which I hated.

We won the game 4-2. I didn't score but I logged two assists and played nineteen minutes, which was solid.

The locker room was loud and happy. Guys were spraying water bottles, music was thumping, and somewhere in the chaos Jonah was doing his post-win tradition of eating an entire sleeve of Oreos in under three minutes.

I sat at my stall with an ice pack on my shoulder, watching the celebration happen around me. The hit had been clean, technically. I knew that. It was hard, and the timing was borderline, but this was hockey. Hits happened. That wasn't why I was sitting here grinding my teeth.

I was grinding my teeth because Volkov was across the room, quietly unlacing his skates, and he hadn't said a single word to me. Not during the game. Not after. Not a "nice game" or a "good win" or even a "sorry I rearranged your internal organs in the first period." Nothing.

He pulled his jersey off and I looked away fast, which was a reflex I didn't want to examine. The guy was my teammate now. We were going to have to figure out how to coexist, and that was going to require me to stop wanting to put my fist through his face every time he looked at me.

Or didn't look at me. That was somehow worse.

Jonah dropped into the stall next to mine, half a sleeve of Oreos still in his hand. "You okay?"

"Fine."

"You're doing that thing where you say you're fine but your jaw is doing the angry clicky thing."

"My jaw doesn't click."

"It absolutely clicks. It's clicking right now."

I exhaled and leaned my head back against the wall. "I just don't get him, man. He shows up, doesn't talk to anyone, hits like he's trying to kill somebody, and then sits in the corner like the rest of us aren't worth acknowledging."

Jonah glanced at Volkov. "He's Russian."

"That's not a personality."

"It kind of is, though."

I shook my head. Volkov was going to be a problem. I could feel it in my bones, which were currently aching from his shoulder.

I grabbed my phone and checked the time. It was barely eleven. The whole night was ahead of me and I should've been celebrating with the boys, buying rounds at The Crease, living up the season opener.

Instead I was sitting here thinking about a guy who wouldn't look at me.

That should've been my first warning sign.