Chapter 21
KIERAN
Sarah called on a Wednesday morning, two days after we clinched.
I was in the kitchen making tea. Nico was in the shower. The water ran in the shower, the faint sound of him humming. He hummed in the shower now.
My phone buzzed. I glanced at the screen expecting Luca or Park or even Brue, who'd been leaving messages I hadn't returned.
The name was Sarah Kessler. Nico's lawyer.
"Kieran," she said. "Is Nico there?"
"He's in the shower. Is everything—"
"It's over." Her voice was controlled but I could hear the tremor beneath it, the vibration of a woman who'd spent fourteen months fighting a war and had just received word of victory.
"The league is issuing a formal statement this afternoon.
Full clearance. Complete exoneration. Nico Varis was not involved in any illegal gambling activity. The investigation is closed."
I set the mug down on the counter. The ceramic clicked against the marble, a small sound that seemed enormous in the quiet kitchen.
"The statement will go public at 4 PM Eastern," Sarah continued. "I wanted Nico to hear it from me first. Can you—"
"I'll tell him." I ended the call. I stood at the counter and listened to Nico humming in the shower and felt Sarah's words land in my chest.
The water turned off. I heard his footsteps in the hallway, then he appeared in the kitchen doorway, toweling his hair, wearing my sweatpants—the grey ones, which were too long for him, the cuffs pooling around his ankles. He'd stopped wearing his own clothes at home weeks ago.
He saw my face and stopped.
"What?" he said. The towel went still. His body language shifted instantaneously, the hypervigilance kicking in, survival instinct activating, every defense snapping to attention. "What happened?"
"Sarah called."
His face went white.
"It's over," I said. "You'll be officially cleared this afternoon. Full exoneration."
He stared at me. The towel dropped from his hands and hit the floor.
For a long moment, nothing happened. He stood in the doorway, barefoot, wearing my sweatpants, his hair dripping water onto his shoulders, and stared at me with an expression I'd never seen, not in the guest room, not in Detroit, not in the training room after the fight.
Relief, but more than that. It contained relief the way an ocean contains a wave, as a fraction of something much, much larger.
Then the anger came.
"Fourteen months." His voice was low. Quiet. The kind of quiet that precedes an explosion. "Fourteen months of being a criminal. Fourteen months of people deciding I was guilty because someone told them to. Fourteen months of losing my team, my agent, my father, my apartment, my reputation, my—"
His voice cracked. He turned away from me, both hands gripping the doorframe, his knuckles white. His shoulders were shaking. Not tears—rage. The focused, white-hot fury of a man who'd been too busy surviving to grieve what had been stolen from him.
"I cooperated," he said, his voice raw. "I did everything they asked. Every document, every interview, every fucking thing, and it took fourteen months for someone to look at the evidence and say he didn't do it. Fourteen months of being the Snake."
I crossed the kitchen and put my hands on his shoulders. He was vibrating under my palms, the contained energy of a man whose anger had nowhere safe to go.
"You're allowed to be angry," I said.
"I'm so fucking angry, Kieran." He turned.
His eyes were bright and fierce and his jaw was locked and his hands were shaking and he looked like the most beautiful, dangerous thing I'd ever seen.
"I'm angry that Petrov did this. I'm angry that the league let him.
I'm angry at every person who read Brue's articles and decided I was guilty without, without—"
He couldn't finish. I pulled him against me. He resisted for half a second, the instinct to push away, to handle it alone, to maintain the armor that had kept him alive through all this. Then his hands fisted in my shirt and he pressed his face into my shoulder and let himself feel it.
Not the relief. That would come later, in the quiet moments, in the gradual easing of a tension he'd carried so long he'd forgotten it wasn't part of his body.
Right now, what he needed to feel was the rage.
The grief. The fourteen months of his life that Petrov had taken and the league had enabled and the world had watched, and the fury of a man who'd been vindicated and was just now realizing how much the vindication had cost.
I held him in the kitchen, our kitchen, with the mugs in their row and the kettle cooling and the morning light on the counter, and let him shake.
The whole team watched the four-o’clock presser in the room after practice.
Theo reached Nico first, which surprised no one.
The hug was bone-crushing and accompanied by a stream of words that were mostly incoherent, something about justice and karma and "I told you so" repeated with escalating volume.
Hayes was next, extending a handshake that turned into a one-armed embrace that he pretended was accidental.
Volkov kissed both of Nico's cheeks and then crossed himself.
Bishop approached last. He stood in front of Nico, arms crossed, expression evaluating.
"Glad you're not dirty," he said.
Nico's mouth twitched. "Thanks, Bishop."
"Don't thank me. Thank your lawyer." He uncrossed his arms. "And thank your boyfriend for having the worst fighting technique I've ever seen from a professional athlete. Thompson's still telling people he got jumped by a six-four accountant."
The locker room erupted. Even Nico laughed, real and unguarded.
Park called me to his office an hour later. He sat behind his desk with his hands folded, the courtroom voice in full effect.
"The monitoring arrangement is officially terminated," he said. "Varis is cleared. The league has confirmed it. There's no further need for oversight."
"Understood."
"The personal relationship." Park's eyes were steady. "I'm told it predates the clearance."
"It does."
"And your reports throughout that period were accurate?"
"Every word."
Park studied me for a long moment. The GM's assessment, the same calculating patience he brought to trades and contract negotiations. "I should be angry," he said. "You compromised the arrangement."
"I reported accurately. Nico's behavior was exemplary. The relationship didn't change that."
"No," Park said. "It didn't." He leaned back. "Varis is an adult. He can live where he chooses. And as for the personal relationship—"
"That's my business."
Park's mouth twitched. "It became everyone's business when you fought Ryan Thompson on national television."
"Fair point."
"Don't make me regret trusting you, Walsh."
"You won't."
He dismissed me. I walked out of his office and down the corridor toward the locker room.
The weight I'd been carrying since the night Park first called me on a Tuesday evening, the weight of obligation, of monitoring, of the professional distance that had defined and then constrained everything between Nico and me, lifted.
That night, we stood in our kitchen. The monitoring was over. The investigation was over. The hiding was over.
"So this is just... us now," Nico said.
"Just us."
"No reports. No arrangement. No obligation."
"Just two men who choose to be here." I looked at him. "When did this start for you? The real thing. Not the monitoring."
He considered the question with the seriousness it deserved. "The mugs," he said. "Week one. You looked at me rearranging your kitchen at four in the morning and said by size works, and I knew."
"That was the first week."
"I know. I'm Finnish. We're efficient about these things."
I laughed, the sound filling the kitchen.
"Come with me," he said.
The words were quiet. His eyes were dark and certain. He took my hand and led me down the hallway into our room.
What followed was different from every time before. The first time had been a revelation, desperate and graceless, two men discovering each other. The second time had been healing, tender and slow. This time was a claiming.
For the first time, he led. He took his time and he took control and he took me apart with the intensity he brought to everything—reading the ice, sorting the mugs, memorizing Finnish epics.
He knew my body now, the way he knew the passing lanes and the shooting angles, and he used that knowledge with a deliberateness that left me speechless and shaking.
This was a man claiming something. Not accepting what was offered, but reaching out and taking it. Choosing rather than being chosen. The agency he'd lost fourteen months ago, reclaimed in the most intimate way possible.