Chapter 16 RAFE
RAFE
Julian’s on the ice again. It’s the first time Kai has cleared him—stitches out, thigh strong enough, blood stable, withdrawal under control, barely. There are no fresh bruises, no fever, no reason left to say no, even though every inch of me wanted to. Every inch of me still fucking does.
But I’m not down there. Not this time. I’m in my container instead, feet kicked up on the table, a cigarette burning untouched between my fingers while I watch the feed from the security monitors like it’s a ritual.
And it is. Every container, every hallway, every inch of the rink belongs to me to watch, to protect, to punish.
Right now, the cameras are locked on the ice.
On Julian. He’s wearing the black jersey—no number, still no name—and his movements are sharper than they should be.
Not because he’s fully healed, but because he’s angry, the emotion bleeding off him in waves that feel pure and hot and strangely beautiful.
Finn skates backward in front of him like a human shield, arms half out as if he’s afraid Jules might fucking shatter if someone so much as sneezes in his direction.
Julian snarls—actually bares his teeth at him but Finn just winks and says something I can’t hear, but I read lips well enough to catch it. Careful, pretty boy. You’re not certified for full-speed chaos yet.
Julian’s mouth twists before he growls back, Get the fuck out of my way, chaos rat.
Finn laughs. Of course he does. That feral bastard thinks everything is foreplay.
Across the rink, Luca circles like a shark dipped in diamonds, skating lazily while watching Julian with the kind of interest that suggests he wants to play with him—or bite him, or maybe both.
Julian doesn’t notice at first because he’s too busy proving he can carve through the drills like he wasn’t gutted on this very rink two weeks ago, moving faster and sharper than he should be, anger driving every stride.
But Luca doesn’t like being ignored, so the second Jules cuts left, Luca drifts by close enough to whisper, his mouth moving slow and deliberate, loud enough for every lip reader in hell. “So who tapes you better, pretty boy? The doctor or the goalie?”
Julian stops dead, the ice spraying under his skates like shattered glass as he turns slowly to face him, and the look on his face is so lethal that if it had teeth, Luca would already be a corpse.
Luca just grins.
Kai—ever the hovering bastard—skates over before Jules can commit a felony with his stick. I can’t hear what he says from here, but I see the reaction immediately, the way Jules’ shoulders twitch before he jerks out of Kai’s reach like the man’s palms are lava.
He’s cracking.
And it’s beautiful.
I inhale, slow and deep, eyes dragging back to the screen’s edge where the news ticker still scrolls in its little blood-red ribbon across the bottom corner.
“Nathan Grant, captain of the Toronto Vultures, officially on leave. No comment from the team or family. Missing from team housing, residence in Ontario unoccupied. Wife and children unreachable. No public statement issued. Investigation pending.”
Missing.
Not “relocated.”
Not “retired.”
Not “hospitalized.”
Missing.
I take another drag of the cigarette, hold the smoke in my lungs for a moment, and then slowly exhale through my nose.
My other hand is on the laptop beside the screen, scrolling through every bit of buried information Misha dug up this morning.
Financial inconsistencies. Burner phones.
Deleted security footage from the Vultures’ private locker room two days before Game 7.
Transfer of funds to an offshore account tied to an anonymous shell corporation.
The signature? Nathan Grant.
I grit my teeth as I stare at the grainy photo attached to the metadata.
It’s him—same smug mouth, same captain’s smile, the same man who once looked Julian in the eye and said, I’d never hurt you, baby.
Just one more game. The memory alone makes something ugly coil in my chest, and I find myself wanting to cut that smile clean off his fucking face.
He isn’t with his team, he isn’t with his wife, and he isn’t anywhere he’s supposed to be—which means he’s hiding.
And if he’s hiding, that means I go hunting.
I glance back at the feed just long enough to check the ice again.
Julian’s skating hard—fast, controlled, not high and not broken, just angry—and the sight of it settles something cold and focused inside me.
Good. He’s going to need that anger. Because when I find Nathan, I’m bringing a piece of him back in a box—just enough for Julian to burn.
The knock is quiet—for Misha—but it still makes the door rattle like someone tried to body-slam it politely.
I flick the cigarette into the tray, shut the laptop with one hand, and open the door.
He’s leaning against the frame like a six-foot-six monument to blunt-force trauma, hood down, scars out, his eyes narrowed with the kind of curiosity that never actually looks curious until it’s already too late.
“You tell me why we hunting Grant now?” Misha asks, his voice low and rough, thick with that Russian bite that makes even jokes sound like war threats.
I lean against the door, my jaw flexing once as the thought settles in.
He’s not wrong. I am hunting him—Grant, the ghost, the golden boy’s old captain who kissed Julian in the dark and then knifed him in the daylight, the man who wrecked his entire fucking life and still walked away with nothing worse than a polite handshake from the League.
The others don’t know any of it. Not about the tape, not about the blackmail, not about the things Julian whispered into my shoulder with tears in his mouth and my name caught between sobs.
As far as La Fiamma Nera is concerned, Jules is just the junkie rookie who lost the most expensive game in NHL history.
That’s it. That’s all they’re allowed to know and I plan to keep it that way. “Why does it matter to you?” I ask.
Misha grins, sharp and wolfish, the same grin he’s worn since we were kids ripping bones out of grown men’s joints for scraps of territory. “Need to know if we kill him…” he says with an easy shrug of one massive shoulder, looking almost amused, “…or recruit him.”
I stare at him for a moment. He stares right back, not blinking and not flinching, just that open curiosity sitting behind a mountain of menace.
“I’m not in the mood for jokes,” I say flatly.
“I’m not joking,” Misha replies with another careless shrug. “If a man like Grant’s off-grid, hiding from the league, maybe he’s useful. Skillset. Contacts. Clean image. Could wear a suit, shake hands, funnel money.”
I step forward once, just enough that he has to push himself off the wall and straighten. My voice drops low.
“If I ever see his hands near Julian again, I’ll take every one of his fingers and make a fucking rosary out of them.”
Misha’s grin widens, but it quiets at the edges, the mockery fading into something more thoughtful. He studies me for a second, then nods once.
“Got it. Kill list.”
“Top of it.”
“Need backup?”
“Not yet. I want to find him first.”
He tilts his head slightly. “Where?”
“Where he thinks no one’s looking.” I glance back at the laptop. “His offshore transfers pinged Montreal. He’s not with the family, not with the league. He’s hiding like a rat.”
Misha cracks his knuckles like he enjoys the sound of that. “Want me to sniff the street?”
“Yes. Low-end clubs, anywhere the Vultures used to party after games. Find out who’s seen him, who’s protecting him, and whether he’s still fucking breathing.”
“Copy that,” Misha says, and the door is barely closed behind him before I hear his boots stomping down the catwalk, already dialing someone in Russian.
I turn back to the screen where Julian is still skating—still angry, still mine—and I stay there watching long after the play itself stops mattering.
I wait until he’s off the ice, until I see Kai pull him aside and check him over, until Finn and Luca peel away in opposite directions like badly behaved wolves finally called back to heel, their chaos scattering across the rink.
Only when I’m sure Julian is upright, breathing, and not about to collapse do I reach for my phone and dial the number I hate the most.
Leonardo answers on the second ring, like he always does.
“We need to talk,” I say.
There’s a pause on the line, followed by the quiet clink of glass.
“Dinner’s ready,” he replies casually, like I’m not calling about blood.
I grab my keys.
The drive to Leonardo’s estate is short—too short, really—long enough for a cigarette but not nearly long enough for me to talk myself down from the kind of mood that ends with someone bleeding on expensive floors.
La Fiamma Nera owns a lot of things—rings, guns, shipping lines, silence—but the estate is something else entirely.
Old money. Old violence. Roman statues stare down from corners and marble floors still seem to carry the ghost of the men who bled into them decades ago.
I park in the back the way I always do, and when I step out of the car there are no guards waiting at the gate, no Damiano, no Viktor or Ezio or anyone else hovering nearby.
Just Leonardo.
Alone.
He meets me at the door with his arms open like a father welcoming home a prodigal son. That’s how he’s always been, pretending there’s blood between us just because I was born under the same black flag. You’re one of mine, he once told me.
I wanted to break his jaw for it.
Tonight, though, I let him kiss both my cheeks.
We sit in the back room—oak-paneled, low-lit, walls lined with books no one actually reads and wine bottles older than the war that built this family. Leonardo pours two glasses with the calm patience of a man who believes time bends around him, but I don’t touch mine.
“What do you know about Nathan Grant?” I ask, leaning back in the chair he always gives me—the one that creaks under my weight like it might snap if the wrong truth lands in the room.
Leonardo hums thoughtfully and takes a slow sip of red, like we’re discussing a stock market dip instead of a man I want to kill.
“The captain of the Toronto Vultures?” he asks, brows up.
“Makes pretty money. Has a wife and two children. Good media. Good scores. Loyal to the league. Does charity games in the summer. Soft, clean, profitable.” He shrugs. “What about him?”
I tilt my head slowly. “He’s the reason you lost that bet.”
The glass stops halfway to Leonardo’s mouth as he looks at me over the rim, then he laughs—short and sharp. “The reason I lost that bet,” he says, “is because Julian Reaver bet against his own fucking team and then choked on the ice to cash out.”
I smile back at him, cold and measured, the kind of smile that makes people forget I used to be nice.
Then I reach into my jacket, pull out the burner phone, and load the frame—just one frame, not the tape, not the sounds, not the heartbreak or the gasps or the soft I love yous that were never meant to be real.
Just the still. Julian in Nathan’s arms, naked and exhausted and ruined, Nathan’s mouth pressed into his hair while he looks straight at the camera—smirking.
I turn the screen toward Leonardo and let him stare, watching the way his jaw ticks and the air in the room slowly stills around us as the wine glass settles quietly onto the table.
“He never placed a bet,” I say, my voice low and steady. “He was blackmailed to throw the game—by him.”
Leonardo looks at me—really looks this time.
He doesn’t ask where I got it; he knows better than that.
He doesn’t ask who else has seen it either, because he already knows the answer is no one.
Instead, he leans back in his chair and steeples his fingers, studying the image like it’s a ledger entry he’s deciding whether to erase or invest in.
And for the first time in months—maybe years—Leonardo Bellini looks interested.
He stares at the screen for a long time, longer than necessary, the wine sitting untouched beside him while his fingers tap once against the stem like he’s calculating futures, losses, executions.
When he finally looks up, his eyes glitter with that particular kind of joy that only appears when violence and profit happen to share the same room.
“So you mean to tell me I have the wrong star in my flock?” he asks, his voice rich with amusement, like I’ve just handed him a better lottery ticket than the one he’s been polishing.
I don’t smile. I simply lean back, calm and coiled, and meet his gaze as I answer, “Mmm. He’d never win you as much as Julian does.”
Leonardo hums, clearly pleased.
I let the moment stretch just long enough to settle before adding, smooth as sin, “But you won’t have Nathan in your flock anyway, dad.”
His eyes flick upward at the word—that false endearment, that fake thread of blood we both pretend to believe in whenever it serves us.
It works.
It always does.
He laughs, not loudly, just a single deep exhale that tells me everything I need to hear.
He’s mine to hunt.
“So dramatic,” he muses, finally lifting the glass and taking a slow sip of wine. “But yes, fine. If the good captain has been stirring shit and costing me money…” He twirls the glass once before finishing the thought. “You may do with him as you wish. Just don’t let him die in front of a camera.”
I nod once. That’s all I need.
“One more thing,” Leonardo says, swirling his glass again, his gaze drifting back to the phone still glowing with that frozen frame. “You said he blackmailed our boy. How?”
I stare at him and say nothing.
His grin widens slowly, teeth flashing white before he lifts one hand in mock surrender. “Ah. Right. Not my business.”
I slip the phone back into my pocket and push to my feet.
“Not unless you want Julian walking out,” I say, my voice colder now. Because he would—broken, drugged, half-dead—if he thought for even a second that tape was circulating. He’d vanish into ash before he let anyone else see what he gave away for love.
Leonardo raises his glass in a lazy little salute. “Go on, then. Hunt your ghost.”
And Nathan Grant?
He’s officially on borrowed fucking time.