Chapter 10
NICO
Sarah called on a Tuesday.
I was sitting on the guest room floor with the blanket in my lap, my fingers working the hem back and forth, the rhythmic, self-soothing motion that kept my heart rate from spiking into the red.
The Kalevala lay open beside me. I'd been reading the passage about V?in?moinen's journey to Tuonela, the land of the dead, how the hero descended into darkness not because he wanted to, but because the knowledge he needed could only be found there.
"The league wants your testimony," Sarah said. "Next week in New York. In person. They've recovered communications between Jake Petrov and a known gambling operation. Your name appears in several of them."
The room contracted. I pressed my thumb into the hem of the blanket until the nail went white.
"What kind of communications?"
"Text messages between Petrov and his handler.
Multiple references to your legal betting accounts as cover for the operation.
" Her voice was careful, the tone she used when the news was significant enough to require framing.
"Nico, the investigators believe you were framed.
They've identified the pattern Petrov used to embed your activity into his own.
This is the first real movement in your favor. "
Good news. A year of my life reduced to a false accusation. Eleven months of exile and silence and sleeping on floors. Evidence of my innocence should feel like a victory.
"They need you to confirm the timeline," Sarah continued. "Walk them through your betting history, your relationship with Petrov, the events leading up to the trade. If your testimony aligns with their forensic analysis, and I have no doubt it will, the investigation could resolve within weeks."
Weeks. After eleven months, the word sounded less like a timeline and more like a trapdoor.
"What if it doesn't?" I asked.
"It will."
"Sarah."
She paused. "If it doesn't, we escalate. We file a formal complaint. We go to the players' association. But that's a contingency, not a plan. The evidence is on your side now. Trust the process."
I'd been trusting the process for eleven months. The process had gotten me a corner locker in a city that didn't want me and a duffel bag I still hadn't fully unpacked.
"I'll be there," I said.
I found Kieran in the kitchen.
He was preparing salmon, a Tuesday ritual that had developed without either of us trying. The fish lay skin-down on a cedar plank, glazed with lemon and brown sugar. Asparagus lined a baking sheet in parallel rows, each stalk trimmed to the same length.
His sleeves were pushed up. His forearms worked as he julienned ginger into translucent slivers. The light from the stove hood caught the fine hair on his arms.
"I have to testify," I said from the doorway.
He set the knife down and turned to face me. Full attention, no rush, no alarm. The goalie's stillness, the patience that lets the play come to you.
I told him everything. The texts they'd recovered.
Petrov's handler. The pattern of embedded cover.
The timeline that would prove I'd been making legal, permitted bets while Petrov used those transactions as camouflage for his operation.
I told him more than Sarah would have liked, probably more than was wise.
But the 3 AM version of Kieran Walsh had earned a trust that the daylight version hadn't even asked for. And I was tired of carrying this alone.
He listened without interruption. His hands rested on the counter, still. When I finished, the kitchen was quiet except for the oven ticking through its preheat cycle.
Then he asked, "Did you do it?"
The question landed differently than it had before.
In the guest room, after the wall punch, he'd said I believe you as a response to my confession.
This was different. This was direct. A yes-or-no question asked by a man who wanted to hear me say the answer one more time, not because he doubted it but because he wanted me to hear myself say it in daylight, standing up, in the kitchen that had become ours.
"No," I said.
"Okay."
I stared at him. "That's it?"
"I asked. You answered. I believe you." He picked up the knife and went back to the ginger. "Sit down. Dinner's in twenty minutes."
I sat down. The kitchen smelled like lemon and brown sugar, and Kieran was standing three feet away cutting vegetables with the concentration of a man performing art, and for the first time in eleven months, someone had asked me directly if I was guilty and when I said no, they'd believed me.
Not reluctantly. Not with caveats. Not with the careful hedge of well, the evidence suggests. Just: I asked. You answered. I believe you.
I pressed my palms flat against the counter and breathed.
Brue's next article dropped the following morning.
STORM'S GAMBLE: Inside the Decision to Trade for Nico Varis
This one was different. Not a hit piece, but measured and thorough, the kind of long-form journalism that built credibility by appearing balanced.
Brue laid out the facts of the trade, the organizational risk, and the league's ongoing investigation.
He quoted unnamed front-office sources who described the acquisition as "a calculated risk with significant upside.
" He referenced the team's playoff trajectory and the salary cap implications, plus the precedent of other teams trading for players under investigation.
Then, buried in the seventh paragraph like a land mine, my "reported living arrangement with a teammate whose identity has not been confirmed but who multiple sources describe as a veteran player with longstanding ties to the organization.
" He didn't name Kieran. He didn't need to.
The implication of special treatment, of monitoring dressed up as housing, was embedded in the phrasing the way Petrov had embedded my betting records into his operation.
Invisible unless you knew where to look. Devastating once you did.
I read it on my phone at the kitchen counter. Kieran read it on his iPad across from me. We were close enough that our elbows nearly touched. The morning light was sharp between us, casting shadows from the mugs, still arranged by size, tallest in the center.
"He's thorough," Kieran said, scrolling.
"He's dangerous."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive."
He locked his iPad and looked at me. The morning light caught the angle of his jaw, and the line of his neck, the grey-blue of his eyes that shifted depending on the hour and the mood and—I was starting to suspect—whatever he was feeling about me at any given moment.
Right now they were the grey of lake ice, clear and focused.
"You need to be careful in New York," he said. "The testimony is good. The article is noise. Don't let the noise make you reckless."
"I'm never reckless."
"You punched a wall two weeks ago."
"That was controlled demolition."
His mouth twitched. The tectonic shift. "Nico."
"I'll be careful."
He held my gaze for another beat. Something moved between us—not the charge of the 3 AM conversations or him draping a blanket over my shoulders. Something quieter.
"Good," he said, going back to his tea.
I stared at the article on my phone. Brue had called the Storm's decision to trade for me a "calculated risk." He wasn't wrong. But the calculation had changed. I wasn't just a risk to the organization anymore.
I was a risk to Kieran.
And that terrified me more than any investigation ever had.