Chapter 8
NICO
The article rewired the locker room.
Not immediately. The shift took two days.
The first day after Brue's piece, the team carried on with the same cool distance they'd maintained since my arrival.
But the story had injected something new into the air.
The whispers weren't just he's a cheater anymore.
Now they included and Walsh is protecting him.
The dynamics had changed, and the guys who'd been content to ignore me were now forced to have an opinion.
Practice on the second day was where it surfaced.
Reeves ran a full-contact scrimmage, first team versus second, helmets on, game intensity. I was skating with Theo and Volkov on the second unit. The drill should have been competitive but controlled.
It wasn't.
Morrison caught me with an elbow during a board battle in the first shift. Not flagrant, subtle enough that it could pass as incidental—a shoulder that slid up into my jaw. My teeth clicked together hard enough to taste copper.
"Stay in the lane, Varis," he said, skating away.
Two shifts later, Garrett drove me into the boards from behind during a puck-retrieval drill. The hit was late by a full second, the puck was already gone, and the force of it compressed my ribs against the dasher. I felt something grind between my ribs.
"Keep your head up, kid," Garrett called, already turning away.
Bishop was last. During a neutral-zone transition drill, he lined me up with the patience of a man setting a trap.
I saw it coming. I always saw it coming, but the drill required me to carry the puck through the center lane, and Bishop occupied the center lane the way a glacier occupies a valley. Immovable and inevitable.
The hit drove the air from my lungs. I went down on one knee, my stick clattering. My vision white-edged for a second before it cleared.
"That's hockey," Bishop said, standing over me. "Welcome to Chicago."
Reeves blew the whistle for the next drill. Nobody said a word.
I finished practice. I showered. I sat in my stall and stared at the tile floor while the locker room emptied around me.
Kieran found me there. He'd seen all of it from the crease. I knew because I'd caught his expression after Bishop's hit, the way his blocker had tightened on his stick. He didn't say anything now. He just waited by the door until I stood up, and we walked to the car in silence.
The apartment was quiet in the wrong way.
The familiar kind of quiet—the tea kettle, the hum of the fridge, the sound of Kieran reading in the other room—had been replaced by a silence that pressed against my eardrums. Everything in me was vibrating at a frequency I couldn't control.
I went to the guest room and closed the door.
The bed was pristine. The blanket was on the floor. My duffel sat in the corner, still half-packed. Why bother unpacking when this was temporary? Everything in my life was temporary. Every team, every city, every person who said I believe you before the cost of believing me became too high.
I sank onto the floor, back against the wall.
My hands were shaking. My ribs ached from Garrett's hit.
My jaw throbbed from Morrison's elbow. The physical pain was simple.
I understood it, could map it, could tell you exactly which nerve was firing and why.
It was the other pain that I couldn't manage.
The one that lived behind my ribs and had been building since I opened my phone at 6:47 AM two days ago and watched Jerry Brue try to end me with a keyboard.
I'd done everything right. I'd cooperated. I'd kept my head down. I'd played my ass off for a team that didn't want me, in a city that hadn't asked for me, under the gaze of a man I was starting to fall for, who would eventually realize that standing next to the fire only got you burned.
No one had even asked if I did it. Not my teammates in Minnesota, not my agent, not the league investigators with their subpoenas and their careful language. They'd looked at the evidence Petrov had planted and decided that proximity to guilt was the same thing as guilt itself.
My fist hit the wall before I'd decided to swing.
The drywall cracked. Pain exploded up my arm, a bright, clean shock that cut through the noise in my head. I hit it again. The crack widened, plaster dust drifting. Again. My knuckles split. Blood welled hot across the skin.
The door flew open.
Kieran stood in the doorway. His eyes tracked the scene in the order a goalie processes a play, threat assessment first, then details. Me on the floor. Fist bleeding. Dent in the wall. Breathing ragged.
"Get out," I managed.
He didn't move.
"Let me see your hand."
"I'm fine."
"You're bleeding on my guest room carpet."
Something in his voice, the dryness of it, the refusal to treat this as a crisis, cut through the static. I looked down at my hand. The knuckles were split across all four fingers, the skin peeled back, blood dripping onto the beige carpet.
"Stay here," Kieran said, then disappeared.
I leaned my head against the wall and closed my eyes. The plaster dust was settling on my shoulders like snow. I should feel embarrassed. Ashamed. Instead I just felt empty, that specific, echoing emptiness that comes after the pressure finally breaks through the container.
Footsteps returned. Kieran settled beside me, not too close, but close enough, and set a first aid kit on the floor between us.
"This is going to sting," he warned.
He pressed an alcohol wipe to the torn skin.
I hissed through my teeth but didn't pull away.
His fingers were careful and methodical, cleaning the blood and examining the damage, pressing gently along each knuckle to check for fractures.
His hands were warm. The overhead light caught the fine hair on his forearms.
"You should get this x-rayed," he said, wrapping gauze around my knuckles.
"It's fine."
"It's not fine." He tore the medical tape with his teeth and secured the wrap. "Nothing about today was fine."
I opened my eyes. He was sitting beside me on the floor of the guest room with a first aid kit in his lap and blood on his fingers. His expression made something crack wider in my chest.
"I didn't do it," I heard myself say.
The words came out rough, scraped raw. Like they'd been lodged behind a wall for eleven months and the force of my fist through drywall had finally shaken them loose.
"The gambling thing. I didn't fix matches. I didn't throw games. I didn't take money from anyone. Petrov used me—my legal bets, my accounts, my name—and nobody asked me whether any of it was true. They just assumed. Minnesota assumed, the league assumed, the reporters assumed, and everyone here—"
My voice broke. The sentence didn't finish. It didn't need to.
Kieran was quiet for a long moment. He was still holding my bandaged hand. I could feel his pulse through his fingertips, steady and slow, the resting heart rate of an elite athlete. Fifty beats per minute, maybe less. A body trained to stay calm when everything was moving fast.
"I believe you," he said again.
I stared at him. I searched for the lie, the pity, the eventual pivot to but you understand how this looks. I found nothing. Just steady eyes and a set jaw and the simple, disarming sincerity of a man who meant what he said.
"You don't even know me," I whispered.
"I'm starting to."
The dam broke. Not tears. I was too far past that. Just words. Everything I'd held for a year, pouring out in a flood I couldn't stop, didn't bother to try.
I told him about Petrov's scheme. The legal bets used as cover.
The way the investigation had metastasized from inquiry to assumption to conviction-without-trial.
The teammates who stopped texting. The agent who dropped me.
My father calling once, a week into the scandal, to say I always knew you'd find a way to embarrass this family, and then silence. Eleven months of silence.
Kieran listened. He didn't interrupt, didn't redirect or offer solutions. He sat on the floor of his guest room and gave me the one thing no one had given me since the day Petrov's operation collapsed.
Witness. Not judgment. Not advice. Just the steady, unblinking attention of a man who was choosing to hear me.
When I ran out of words, the room was very quiet. The light from the window had shifted, we'd been sitting here longer than I'd realized. My hand throbbed under the gauze. The wall had a fist-sized dent in it.
Kieran's shoulder settled against mine. Not a deliberate lean. The gradual relaxation of a body that had stopped maintaining a perimeter.
"You don't have to talk," he said. "I'm just going to sit here for a while."
So we sat. The light turned from afternoon to evening, the pale grey square of the window darkening by degrees.
Below us, I heard the muted sounds of the building, a door closing, the elevator humming, the distant pulse of someone's music through the floor.
We occupied a pocket of the world that belonged to no one, required nothing, and asked for nothing in return.
Nobody had sat with me in over a year. Nobody had looked at the evidence of my brokenness, the blood on the carpet, the dent in the wall, the man on the floor who couldn't make himself sleep in a bed, and responded by lowering themselves to it. Literally. Physically.
Without asking me to rise.
Eventually, Kieran's knee cracked as he unfolded his legs. He stood slowly, wincing at the stiffness, and looked down at me.
"Goodnight, Varis," he said.
"Nico." The correction came out before I could stop it. "If we're going to sit on the floor together, you should probably call me Nico."
His mouth did that thing, the tectonic shift, the geological precursor to a smile.
"Goodnight, Nico."