Chapter 3
KIERAN
I found the bed untouched in the morning.
I'd gotten up for my usual pre-dawn routine of tea, stretching, and twenty minutes of visualization before the drive to the facility. The apartment was dark and quiet, and Varis's door was closed. I assumed he was asleep.
But when I passed the guest room on my way to the kitchen, the door was cracked open an inch. The bed was made with the tight corners of someone who'd been taught to respect borrowed things. The pillow sat centered on the mattress. The sheets hadn't been disturbed.
The blanket and a pillow from the foot of the bed were on the floor.
I stood in the hallway and stared at the arrangement. The blanket was folded neatly, not thrown. The pillow was positioned against the wall, between the bed and the window. This wasn't someone who'd gotten hot in the middle of the night and kicked off the covers. It was deliberate.
I filed it away and said nothing when Varis emerged ten minutes later, dressed in workout clothes, his face a smooth wall.
He moved through the kitchen like he'd already mapped the space, pulled a mug from the cabinet without opening the wrong door first, found the green tea on the shelf without scanning, and poured the hot water I'd left in the kettle.
"There's eggs if you want them," I said.
"I'm good. Thanks."
We drank in silence. It should have been uncomfortable, but it wasn't—not exactly.
Varis didn't try to fill the quiet, and neither did I.
Most people couldn't stand silence for more than twenty seconds.
They'd start talking just to hear themselves.
Varis sat at the counter and held his mug with both hands, watching the pale October light spread across the floor, and waited until I said it was time to go.
The Storm facility was a fifteen-minute drive, and Varis spent every second of it looking out the passenger window.
He didn't ask about the neighborhood, the route, or where anything was.
He absorbed information the way a goalie does—by watching, not asking.
His reflection in the glass was a study in controlled stillness.
Hands in his lap, shoulders squared, jaw set.
Only his eyes moved, tracking street signs, intersections, and the distance between turns.
Mapping the route the way he'd mapped the apartment.
Exit strategies for a man who expected to need them.
I parked in the players' lot. Varis had his bag on his shoulder before I'd pulled the keys from the ignition.
We walked through the facility entrance, security badges, the hallway past the administrative offices, and the corridor that smelled like every rink I'd ever known.
The smell of home, if your version of home was a place you went to work instead of rest.
Varis's stride didn't change as we turned toward the locker room, but I caught the slight hitch in his breathing. The imperceptible squaring of his shoulders, the micro-adjustment of his bag strap. A man bracing for impact.
The locker room fell quiet when we walked in.
Not silent, there was still the background noise of a professional team preparing for practice.
Skate blades against rubber mats, the rip of tape, someone's phone playing music softly.
But the conversation stopped. Every pair of eyes turned toward the door, tracked Varis for a beat, then looked away with deliberate casualness.
Varis didn't break stride. Shoulders back, chin level, expression blank. But I'd spent eleven years reading the body language of men trying to hide what they felt, and I could see the tension locked into his jaw, the rigidity in his neck, the way his hands tightened on his bag straps.
"Morning," I said to the room.
A few voices returned the greeting. Most didn't.
Luca stood near the center of the room, the C stark on his practice jersey. His dark eyes tracked Varis, professional and measured. Not hostile, but not welcoming either. The look of a captain assessing a variable he hadn't chosen and couldn't control.
"Varis." A statement, not a greeting.
"Moretti." Varis nodded once. "Captain."
"Welcome to Chicago. Your locker's there." Luca gestured to a corner spot. Isolated from the main cluster, away from the captain's row and the veteran stalls. I recognized the placement—it was the spot they'd given the last waiver pickup, the one who'd lasted six games before getting sent down.
Varis moved to the locker without comment. His nameplate was taped on, temporary, the kind of label that peeled off clean when you were done with it. His gear bag sat waiting, shipped from Minnesota. He started unpacking like he'd done this enough times to strip it of ceremony.
Around him, conversations resumed. Pitched low enough to suggest privacy, loud enough to carry.
"I heard he fixed three games in Minnesota."
"It was five. The league's still investigating."
"Can't believe management brought him here. We don't need that kind of—"
"Hey." Theo Callahan materialized beside Varis's stall, dimples on full display, hand extended. "You're Varis, right?"
Varis looked up. Something flickered across his face. Surprise, quickly suppressed. "Yeah."
"Theo Callahan. Winger." His grip was firm and unambiguous. "Don't listen to the gossip. Half these guys couldn't fix their own breakfasts, let alone a hockey game."
I watched from across the room, pretending to adjust my pads. Something loosened in Varis's posture. Not much, it was barely visible, but I'd been looking for it.
"Callahan." Bishop's voice cut across the room like a slap shot. The enforcer stood near Luca, arms folded across his chest. His expression was aimed at Theo but intended for everyone. "Coach wants you for PP1 planning."
Translation: stay away from the new guy.
Theo's smile tightened at the corners. He held it anyway. "Catch you on the ice, Varis."
He walked away. Varis sat in the corner stall and finished lacing his skates in the silence of a man who'd been told, very clearly, where he stood.
On the ice, I settled into my crease and watched Varis try to outskate his own reputation.
He threw himself into warm-up laps with an intensity that bordered on desperate, legs churning, lungs screaming, corners taken tight enough to spray ice across the boards.
Every pass he made was crisp. Every positioning choice was textbook.
He anticipated plays before they developed, reading the flow of the drills.
But he was too much. Too aggressive, too sharp. During a three-on-two drill, he stripped the puck from Jamie Hayes, alternate captain, twelve-year veteran, with a move that was technically clean but landed like a challenge. Hayes pulled up and glared.
"Easy, Varis. It's just drills."
"My bad."
He dialed it back. Slightly.
I tracked him between my own work, blocker saves, glove-side challenges, the lateral movement patterns my goalie coach had me running to strengthen the hip that kept grinding.
From sixty feet away, I could study Varis without being obvious about it.
His edges were everything the film had promised.
His spatial awareness was exceptional; he saw the ice the way defensemen were supposed to, with a breadth of vision that most skill players never developed.
Special teams work put him on the second power-play unit.
Not a vote of confidence, not a death sentence.
He fed passes to wingers who hesitated a beat too long before accepting them, the half-second delay of men who weren't sure they wanted to be part of whatever Varis was involved in.
He tried to set up in front of the net and Bishop shoulder-checked him off the spot with more force than the drill required.
"That's my spot, Minnesota."
Varis bit back whatever he wanted to say and skated to a different position.
By the time Coach Reeves called the end of practice, Varis's legs were shaking and his jaw looked like it ached from clenching. The locker room after was the same silence in his direction, the same noise everywhere else. Teammates showered and changed around him like he was furniture.
He sat in his stall, staring at his skates. The leather was scuffed from years of use, familiar in a way nothing else here was. He'd worn these blades in Minnesota. He had scored goals, made plays, built a career in them. The only constant he had left.
I finished my cool-down and shouldered my bag. I should have walked past. I should have let him figure it out on his own. This wasn't my responsibility, his integration, his loneliness, the way his shoulders were drawing in like he was trying to fold himself into something small enough to ignore.
I stopped anyway.
"You don't have to do this alone," I said.
His head came up. His eyes were dark and flat, the expression he'd worn all day, the one that dared you to see anything underneath. But for a second, I saw a crack. The smallest fracture in a wall that had been holding back a year of pressure.
"Don't I?" he said.
I was quiet for a long moment. I thought about what it would feel like to walk into a room where no one wanted you, every single day, and still lace up your skates and do your job.
"No," I said. "You don't."
He held my gaze for another beat. Something moved behind the wall, something raw and tired that he wasn't fast enough to hide. Then he looked away, back at his skates, back at the only safe place in the room.
"Okay," he said quietly. "Okay."
I walked to the parking lot and sat in my car for a long time before starting the engine. I replayed the conversation, all three sentences of it, and tried to figure out why those two small words had settled behind my ribs like something I needed to handle carefully.
That night, I passed the guest room on my way to bed. The door was cracked an inch. The bed was pristine, corners tucked tight, the sheets pulled drum-flat across the mattress. Military precision, or the precision of a man who wanted the room to look like no one lived in it.
The blanket and pillow were on the floor, arranged against the wall. The same configuration as the night before. The Kalevala sat on the nightstand, its cracked spine catching the hallway light.
What bothered me wasn't the arrangement itself. It was the neatness, the care taken with borrowed things by a man who expected to lose them. That kind of care wasn't a habit. It was a scar.