Chapter 20
NICO
The locker room after a playoff-clinching win was a specific kind of chaos, primal and joyful, the release of months of pressure condensed into a single room.
Music was blasting from someone's speaker.
Volkov was dousing Eriksson with water. Theo was bear-hugging everyone within reach, his dimples threatening to split his face in half.
I sat in my stall and pressed an ice pack to my lower back where Thompson's cross-check had left a bruise the shape and color of a storm cloud.
Bishop dropped onto the bench beside me.
He was still in his equipment, shoulder pads, elbow pads, the full armor of a man who had just played twenty-six minutes of hard hockey.
He sat with his elbows on his knees and looked at me with an expression I'd never seen from him before.
Not hostility. Not cold assessment. It almost looked, improbably, like respect.
"Walsh doesn't do that for just anyone," he said.
I looked at him. The enforcer who'd shoulder-checked me at a line change during my third game. The man who'd told me that's my spot, Minnesota during special teams. The immovable wall of judgment who had tested me, deliberately and systematically, for weeks.
"No," I said. "He doesn't."
"You know the whole arena saw that. Every camera. The broadcast team. Twenty thousand people and a national TV audience just watched our starting goalie leave his crease and throw punches for you."
"I'm aware."
Bishop studied me for a long moment. Then he extended his fist, the massive, scarred fist of a man who'd been in more fights than he could count and had won most of them.
"Don't fuck it up," he said.
I bumped his fist with my bandaged one. The contact was light and careful, his knuckles against my gauze. But the weight of it was enormous.
"I'll do my best," I said.
Bishop stood up, clapped me on the shoulder with a force that would have knocked a smaller man sideways, and walked back to his stall.
Luca appeared beside me next. The captain was calmer than the room around him, the measured stillness of a man who'd learned to be the eye of every storm.
"Training room," he said. "Kieran's getting his hand looked at."
I stood up. My lower back screamed, but I ignored it.
The training room was empty except for Kieran and the team doctor. Kieran sat on the treatment table, shirtless, an ice pack on his ribs and his right hand being examined.
The doctor glanced at me when I walked in. He looked at Kieran. He looked back at me.
"I'll get an x-ray tray," he said, and left.
The door closed. We were alone.
Kieran looked at me. His hair was matted with sweat.
A bruise was darkening along his jawline where Thompson's punch had caught him.
His ribs were wrapped with a compression bandage.
Thompson's hook had found its mark. His right hand was the worst—swollen, the knuckles split across the first two fingers, blood dried in the creases of his palm.
The hands of a goalie, the most valuable hands in hockey, worth millions in contract value, trained for precision over seventeen years, damaged because he'd used them to defend me.
"You left your crease," I said.
"Yes."
"You fought an enforcer. You're a goalie. Goalies don't fight."
"This one does."
"You got ejected from a playoff-clinching game. You could have cost us the season."
"We won."
"That's not the—" I stopped. My voice was cracking at the seams, the words losing their shape. I crossed the room and stood in front of him. The treatment table put us at the same height. His eyes met mine.
"You left your crease," I said again, quieter now. Not an accusation—a wonder.
"He hurt you." The words were simple. The logic behind them was simpler—a closed system, a single equation.
He hurt you, so I left. No variables. No calculations.
Just the irreducible truth of a man who'd spent seventeen years in a six-by-four rectangle and had walked out of it because the person he loved was on the ice.
I took his injured hand carefully, the way he'd held mine the night I punched his guest room wall— the same tenderness, the same first aid that disguised care as medical attention.
I turned his hand over, examining the damage.
The knuckles were hot and swollen, the skin peeled back from the bone.
He'd need x-rays. He might need stitches.
These hands that caught pucks at ninety miles an hour were split open because they'd hit a man's face for me.
"This is going to need more than ice," I said.
"Nico."
I looked up. His uninjured hand cupped the back of my neck and pulled me in. My forehead pressed against his. We breathed the same air, heavy with sweat and ice and the copper taste of the night's violence.
"I'd do it again," he said. "For you. Every time."
I kissed him. In the training room of the Storm facility, with the door closed and the celebration thirty feet away and every camera in the building having already broadcast the reason across the country.
The kiss tasted like blood and salt. I was done hiding.
His hand was warm on the back of my neck.
The door opened.
We didn't spring apart. We separated at a normal speed, the unhurried pace of two men who had decided that hiding was over.
Luca stood in the doorway. Behind him, the locker room noise filtered through. Luca looked at us. His expression was the captain's expression, the one that absorbed everything and judged nothing.
"Team meeting," he said. "Both of you."
The locker room went quiet when we walked in together. Kieran's hand was wrapped in gauze. My ice pack was visible under my jersey. We sat in Kieran's stall, side by side, the proximity deliberate and undisguised.
Bishop stood up. He didn't ask for the room's attention; he simply stood, and his physical presence commanded it the way gravity commanded orbit.
"Something's been bothering me," he said. His voice carried to every corner. "For weeks, Jerry Brue's been writing articles with information that could only come from inside this room. Details about training, about personal arrangements, about things that are none of the public's goddamn business."
The silence was absolute. Twenty-two men holding their breath.
"I want to know who's been talking to him."
No one moved. No one spoke. The room was quiet.
Morrison sat in his stall, three spots from the door. His head was down. His hands were busy with his skate laces, untying, retying, a fidgeting loop that accomplished nothing. He didn't look up.
I watched him. I'd been watching him for weeks, the phone always in his hand, the easy relationship with the media, the way he was present during every crisis without ever being central to one.
I didn't have proof. I had a pattern. And patterns weren't enough to destroy a man's reputation. I knew that better than anyone.
So I said nothing. I filed it away and let Bishop's question hang.
Kieran stood up. The room's attention shifted to him, the goalie who'd just fought an enforcer, the man whose bloody knuckles were still wrapped in gauze.
"While we're clearing the air," Kieran started.
His voice was steady. The goalie's voice, calm under pressure, because calm was contagious.
"Nico and I are together. We have been for a while.
It didn't compromise my play, it didn't compromise the team, and it's not going to.
If anyone has a problem with that, say it now. "
Silence.
Then Theo stood up, walked across the room, and wrapped me in a hug so tight my bruised ribs protested. "Finally," he said into my shoulder.
Volkov was next, crossing himself in the Russian Orthodox fashion and then kissing both my cheeks with a formality that somehow felt more meaningful than any handshake. "In Russia," he said, "we don't talk about such things. But I am not in Russia. Congratulations."
Hayes extended his hand to Kieran. "Should've seen this coming when you fought a guy twice your weight."
"Thompson's not twice my weight."
"He's twice your fight experience. Close enough."
One by one, the room responded. Not every reaction was enthusiastic. Garrett's nod was stiff, Morrison's murmured congratulations were hollow, a couple of the younger guys exchanged glances that suggested they'd need time. But the overall current was clear.
Bishop was last. He hadn't moved from his standing position. He looked at Kieran, then at me, his expression unreadable.
"If either of you lets this distract from playoff hockey," he said, "I will personally end you both."
Then he sat down, and the room erupted. The music came back on, and twenty-two men returned to the business of celebrating.