Chapter 18
NICO
I was in the locker room before morning skate, lacing my skates with the methodical focus that had become my pre-practice meditation.
The TV mounted in the corner was tuned to SportsCenter.
It was always tuned to SportsCenter; someone had lost the remote years ago and nobody had cared enough to find it.
I heard his name before I looked up.
"...joined today by Jake Petrov, the former NHL forward at the center of the league's gambling investigation. Jake, thanks for being here."
My fingers stopped on the laces.
Petrov's face filled the screen. He looked good—rested and tanned, composed in the way that came from professional media coaching.
His hair was shorter than the last time I'd seen him.
He was wearing a suit. The last time I'd seen him in person, he'd been in a Minnesota polo, holding his daughter on his hip, telling me about a restaurant he wanted to try downtown.
"Thanks for having me, Mike. It's been a difficult period, and I appreciate the chance to tell my side."
The interviewer leaned forward. "Let's start with the investigation. What can you tell us about what happened?"
Petrov's expression shifted into something I recognized—the concerned frown, the slight head shake, the performance of a man burdened by unfortunate circumstances. He'd practiced this. He'd stood in front of a mirror and rehearsed the angle of his eyebrows.
"Look, I made mistakes. I take responsibility for that.
But the situation has been mischaracterized.
The scope of my involvement has been exaggerated, and some of the people who've been implicated, particularly my former teammate Nico Varis, have been unfairly caught up in something they had nothing to do with. "
My vision tunneled. The locker room dissolved around me, the clatter of sticks, the murmur of voices, the smell of equipment and sweat. All of it gone. Just the screen and Petrov's face. And the words coming out of his mouth like perfectly shaped pieces of a puzzle designed to look like the truth.
"You're saying Varis wasn't involved?" the interviewer pressed.
"I'm saying Nico is a good kid who got caught in the crossfire.
" Petrov looked directly at the camera. His eyes were sincere.
His jaw was firm. He was the picture of a man wrestling with his conscience.
"I feel terrible about what happened to him.
He was my linemate, my friend. I never intended for any of this to affect his career. "
Friend. The word detonated behind my sternum.
He'd used my betting accounts as camouflage for his operation.
He'd designed the timing of his transactions to mirror mine, embedding his illegal activity into my legal activity the way a parasite burrows into a host. He'd done this while carpooling with me to the rink, while sitting beside me at team dinners, while showing me videos of his daughter's first steps, the same daughter whose college fund was probably financed by the money he'd made off the scheme that destroyed my career.
And now he was on national television calling me a good kid and acting concerned like a man in a one-act play, while thirty million viewers watched him do it and believed every word.
"Nico?" Theo's voice came from somewhere beside me.
I didn't answer. I was staring at the screen, watching Petrov describe his "deep regret" over the "collateral damage," watching him shake his head sadly when the interviewer asked about the human cost. He was good—very, very good.
The kind of deception that came from understanding exactly how to arrange your face so that people saw what you wanted them to see.
I'd been arranged, too. A prop in his performance. First on the ice, then in the investigation.
Now on national television.
"Turn it off," I said. My voice came out low and flat.
Nobody moved. The locker room had gone quiet, guys standing by their stalls, eyes on the screen then glancing at me.
Theo reached up and pressed the power button. The screen went dark. Petrov's face disappeared.
I finished lacing my skates and stood up. I grabbed my stick and my gloves and walked toward the tunnel. The team's attention pressed against my back, twenty-two men watching the man who'd just been discussed on national television as "collateral damage" walk away without a word.
I made it to the tunnel. I made it to the bench. I sat down in the empty arena, the ice stretching out before me, smooth and untouched, and put my face in my gloves and screamed.
It wasn't loud. The padding absorbed most of the sound. But the vibration of it went through my jaw, my teeth, my skull—the rage of a man who'd spent fourteen months being quiet and had just watched his betrayer rewrite the story on television with a sympathetic frown and a well-rehearsed apology.
Kieran found me in the apartment that evening.
I'd left the facility after morning skate without telling anyone. I drove Kieran's car home. He could get a ride with Abbott.
I went to the kitchen and stood at the counter with my hands flat on the marble, my eyes closed, trying to reassemble the parts of myself that Petrov's interview had disassembled.
I heard the key in the lock at 4:30. Kieran's footsteps paused in the entryway before he redirected his stride toward the kitchen instead of the bedroom.
He appeared in the doorway. He took in the scene—me at the counter, coat still on, hands still flat, eyes open now but focused on nothing.
He didn't ask what happened. He'd seen the interview.
Everyone had seen the interview. By now, the hockey world was divided into people who believed Petrov's performance and people who saw through it.
Kieran crossed the kitchen and put his arms around me from behind.
Goalies don't usually hug. The equipment makes it impractical.
You spend your career in thirty pounds of padding that turns you into an armored turtle, and even out of gear, the muscle memory of that shell persists.
Kieran's embraces were rare and deliberate, each one a decision rather than a reflex.
This wasn't a hug. It was containment. His arms locked around my chest, his chin settled on my shoulder, and his body pressed against my back, solid and immovable. The goalie stance translated into human contact. Nothing gets through.
"I'm so tired," I said. The words came out as a whisper. "I'm so tired of this."
"I know."
"He sat in that chair and lied to thirty million people and called me his friend and pretended he didn't—" My voice broke.
Not tears. Rage. The white-hot kind that burns clean and leaves ash.
"He talked about his daughter. On national television, he mentioned his daughter, and every person watching thought what a devoted father, what a good man, and none of them know that he funded his gambling operation while showing me videos of her first steps in the parking lot after practice. "
Kieran's arms tightened. His breath was warm against my neck. He didn't speak. He held me the way he held his crease, patient and absolute, the stillness of a man whose entire career was built on absorbing impact.
I stood in the containment of his body and let the rage burn.
It was different from the wall-punching—that had been despair, the thrashing of a man drowning.
This was focused. This was the anger of a man who finally had something to protect, and the strength to protect it.
And the understanding that the person who'd tried to destroy him was losing.
"The testimony is next week," I said. "I'm going to New York, and I'm going to sit in a room with the investigators, and I'm going to tell them every single thing I know about Jake Petrov.
Every carpool. Every dinner. Every conversation where he mentioned his operation in language I was too trusting to decode.
And when I'm done, they're going to have enough to end this. "
"Yes," Kieran said. "They are."
"And then I'm going to come home."
His arms tightened one more time. "Home," he repeated.
I turned in his arms and buried my face in his neck. He smelled like ice and clean sweat and the cedar-scented laundry detergent he'd used since before I arrived. The smell had become, without either of us choosing it, the smell of safety.
The testimony took two days.
Sarah flew with me. We stayed in a hotel near the league offices in Midtown, and I spent eight hours in a conference room with four investigators, a court reporter, and a stack of documents three inches thick.
I told them everything. The carpools. The dinners.
The daughter's first steps in the parking lot.
The timing of Petrov's transactions mapped against my legal bets.
The language he'd used, casual and offhand, the vocabulary of a man who was always building something and letting you believe it was friendship.
The investigators listened. They asked questions. They showed me documents I hadn't seen, communications between Petrov and his handler that referenced me by my jersey number instead of my name, as if reducing me to a digit made the betrayal less personal.
On the second day, the lead investigator, a woman named Zhou with reading glasses and the demeanor of someone who'd heard every lie in the world and had developed an allergy to all of them, looked at me across the table.
"Mr. Varis, based on the evidence we've reviewed and your testimony today, we plan to recommend that the investigation be resolved in your favor. "
I stared at her. The conference room was very quiet. The court reporter's fingers hovered over her keyboard.
"Resolved," I repeated.
"Full clearance. Formal exoneration. We'll be recommending the league issue a public statement confirming that you were not involved in any gambling activity, legal or otherwise, beyond the permitted recreational wagers documented in your records."
Sarah's hand found my knee under the table and squeezed.
I said, "Thank you." The words were steady. My hands were not.
Kieran picked me up at O'Hare on Friday evening. He was standing outside the arrivals terminal, leaning against his car, his coat collar turned up against the December wind. He looked like a man waiting for someone important.
I walked through the automatic doors and he straightened. His eyes found me immediately, the goalie's tracking, the locked-on focus that had been aimed at me since the first night I stood in his doorway with a duffel bag.
I crossed the sidewalk and stood in front of him. The airport noise swirled around us, taxis honking and announcements echoing.
"They believed me," I said.
The words came out as a whisper. Not because I was trying to be quiet, but because the emotion behind them was too large for volume.
Kieran pulled me against his chest. Right there on the sidewalk, in front of the taxis and the travelers and anyone who might be watching. He held me the way he'd held me in the kitchen, full containment, and I pressed my face into his coat and breathed.
"They believed me," I said again, muffled.
"Yeah," he said. His voice was rough. "They did."
We stood on the curb at O'Hare for a long time, holding each other, while the December wind cut through our coats and the world went on around us—and, for the first time in fourteen months, the weight on my chest lifted enough to let me breathe.