Chapter two #3
I’d started questioning the info I’d been given somewhere around week four.
By week six, I was questioning the source.
By the time the regular season ended and the playoff bracket had been set and I’d looked at Russo standing at his stall in full gear for the first time in sixty days, I’d made a decision.
Max hadn’t hurt, either.
Renaud had come to my office four days before the end of the regular season—knocked once, waited to be invited in, sat down across from my desk with the patient, unhurried quality of a man who had already decided what he was going to say and was simply waiting for the appropriate moment to say it.
He hadn’t dressed it up. Max never dressed things up.
“The Russo situation,” he’d said.
“What about it.”
“I’ve been watching him for two months.” He’d let that sit for a moment. “I’ve been watching him the way you asked me to, at the start. Quietly.”
I hadn’t asked him to. But I hadn’t needed to, which was why Max Renaud was still my captain at thirty-four with a contract year staring him down. He read a room the way he read the ice—ahead of what was visible, already at the destination before you’d finished drawing the map.
“And?” I’d said.
“Whatever you were told about him,” Max had said, “I’d look again at who told you.”
He hadn’t pushed it further. Hadn’t advocated, hadn’t argued, hadn’t given me the speech about fair chances and wasted talent that a different captain might have delivered.
He’d simply put the observation on the table and left it there, the same way he put a puck on a stick in traffic—clean, precise, without ceremony—and trusted the other person to know what to do with it.
I’d sat with it for four days.
The possibility that Russo was simply very good at this—that the performance of a wounded, careful young man keeping his distance was itself the manipulation—hadn’t left me.
I’d have been a fool to let it leave me.
I’d survived long enough, in this life and others, to know that the most effective deception was always the one that looked least like deception.
The trembling fawn who turned out to have teeth.
I’d been fooled before. That was the other thing I didn’t say out loud, not to Max, not to Michael, not to anyone in this building or outside it.
I’d been fooled before in a way that had cost something I could never recover, and the scar tissue from it had become so much a part of my body that I no longer always recognized it as damage.
It had become structure. The thing that held me upright.
Her name had been Clara. I didn’t let myself say it often, even internally.
It had been a long time, more than a lifetime by human reckoning—long enough that the world she’d existed in was unrecognizable now, the city she’d walked through paved over and renamed and paved over again.
But grief, I’d learned, had no relationship with time.
She had known what I was. And she had loved me. I had never doubted that part. The love had been real.
What I hadn’t understood—what I had willfully, catastrophically refused to understand—was that the people who wanted to use her against me hadn’t needed her cooperation.
They’d only needed her proximity. Her existence as the thing I valued most had made her the most efficient tool available, and the people who’d come for her hadn’t even had to lie to me to do it.
They’d simply waited until I was looking the other way.
It had been ruled an accident, a fire. One of those senseless, arbitrary domestic tragedies that happened to ordinary people and were mourned for a week and forgotten by the world in a month.
I had never forgotten.
And I had never again allowed anyone close enough to become a tool.
So yes. I was aware that my caution about Russo might’ve been less about him specifically and more about the accumulated weight of every reason I’d developed over two centuries to keep people at arm’s length.
I was aware that a man who’d been burned badly enough would eventually start seeing fire in things that were only warm.
I watched him now, completing his warm-up circuit with that contained, economic movement that was nothing like the loose, performative energy of a player who needed to be seen.
He wasn’t playing to the crowd that was beginning to fill the lower bowl.
He wasn’t playing to his teammates. He was just skating, with the focused, almost private quality of someone who was doing the thing they were made to do and didn’t require an audience for it.
I’d been told he was a performer. A manipulator. Someone who understood exactly how to present himself in order to get what he wanted from the people around him. I knew the GM had done a deal. A favor.
I had spent thirty years studying hockey players, and before that, considerably longer studying things that made people look simple by comparison.
I was not infallible. I had proven that in the most irreversible possible way.
But I was not easily fooled twice by the same shape of thing, and what I was watching on that ice did not have the texture of performance.
What it had was the result of someone who had been told, repeatedly and by people with authority over his life, that he was something other than what he knew himself to be—and who had responded by going very quiet and very still and waiting for the ground to stop moving.
That recognition was its own kind of danger, and I knew it.
Empathy was not evidence. The fact that something in Russo’s stillness resonated with something in my own history was not a reliable diagnostic tool.
It was, in fact, exactly the kind of resonance that a skilled manipulator would engineer if they had enough information about the person they were trying to move.
I had everyone in this building to protect.
Not just the dragons—though they were the weight that sat heaviest, the responsibility that didn’t sleep.
The human players who had no idea what they shared a locker room with and who deserved to be insulated from the consequences of that ignorance.
The staff. The families. The entire fragile, painstakingly reconstructed culture of this franchise, which had come apart once already and which I had spent two years putting back together piece by careful piece.
Russo could be exactly what we’d been told.
He could be the best actor I’d encountered in a long career that had given me more chances than most to evaluate that particular talent.
He could be running a longer game than the one described, something more patient, more sophisticated, aimed at something I hadn’t identified yet.
I couldn’t rule it out. That was the honest accounting of it.
What I could do—what tonight represented—was a closer look. Not a verdict. Not an absolution. A test with parameters, conducted in an environment I managed, with my eyes open and my conclusions held loosely.
He’d earned that much. Two months of evidence had earned him that much.