29. April 4, Early Monday
Chapter twenty-nine
Ilya
Every sound in the underground garage slammed against the low ceiling and came back an echo.
The distant hum of the ventilation system. The soft tick of cooling engines. The hollow clack of footsteps between rows. The scrape of someone dragging a flashlight beam under another car and finding nothing but slush, oil stains, and one rogue puck wedged behind a tire.
Ilya had been down here since he’d left the emergency vet.
He’d tried to sit still after Zoey disappeared into the back with Bobby, but the waiting room started closing in around him. Too many eyes. Too many unsaid things. Mitch’s absence sitting there like another body in the room. Zoey walking through the double doors without him.
He’d needed movement. A task. Something useful to do with his hands before he tore himself open from the inside out.
So, he came back to the garage.
At first, the search had been loud. Frantic.
Half the team scattered across three levels with phone flashlights and actual flashlights borrowed from arena security.
Tommy crawled so far into a narrow maintenance gap that only his feet stuck out.
Ty climbed into a dumpster and immediately demanded hazard pay.
Jason sweet-talked security into letting him review every camera angle from the entire night.
Kira had shown up twenty minutes after Ilya, hair shoved under a knit hat, cheeks pink from the cold, a flashlight in one hand and a tote bag full of towels in the other.
She’d looked at him for half a second too long when she arrived. Then she’d simply said, “Tell me where to look.” No lecture. No questions. Just there.
He hadn’t let himself think about how much that meant. Or how long it had been since he’d asked what she needed. How long since he offered to show up for one of her chaotic new projects instead of worrying about her from a distance and calling that love.
Hours later, the garage had gone thin and quiet.
One by one, the guys faded. Not because they didn’t care.
Because there were only so many shadowed corners a person could search before exhaustion turned useful into useless.
Ilya ordered a few of them home. Bobby walked Tommy out by the hood of his sweatshirt after Tommy insisted he could, “Smell puppies emotionally.” Ty had taken two rookies to check the loading docks one last time, then texted that they’d found nothing but a possum with strong opinions.
Now it was nearly empty.
Just Ilya, a few lingering security lights, and the concrete.
He checked under another collection of cars, breath ghosting in thin white streaks. Nothing but an abandoned water bottle and a flattened fast-food bag.
The cold bled up through the soles of his dress shoes, settling in his bones.
He moved to the next row.
He’d started in the obvious places: near the dumpster where Fido had scavenged before, by the back stairwell where the guys occasionally left meat scraps on the sly despite every reasonable argument against feeding a stray in an NHL arena parking garage.
The first hour, he still had adrenaline.
Now it was gone, replaced by a hollow, grinding persistence.
Three hours.
Four.
He lost track.
His phone buzzed again in his pocket. He ignored it for two steps, then stopped, jaw tight, and pulled it out anyway.
The screen lit with old and new messages.
Duke: For what it’s worth, we’ve got your back. Don’t make it weird by ghosting everyone.
Jason: Let me know if Mitch comes by and bothers you.
Coach, in the team chat: Christian’s awake. Alert and talking. More tests tomorrow, but things are looking good.
Ilya’s breath left him in one hard rush.
Awake.
Alert.
Talking.
For one second, his knees almost gave.
Then guilt surged up behind the relief, sharp as a blade. Christian being alive and talking did not erase the hit. Did not erase the way his eyes had stared past everything. Did not erase Ilya’s voice in his head.
Full commit. No fear.
His thumb moved down.
Bobby: I told Tommy not to hover. Said you needed space. Let me know if that changes. It’ll all be okay.
Tommy: Bobby said I was bothering you by trying to search for the dogs in the same area as you. I am up a level now. Text me if you need me.
Ty: Possum has been caged and is being relocated. Wildlife rehabilitator said Mama Possum probably wouldn’t have hurt any stray puppies. Still do not trust her vibe.
Kira: I’m checking the east stairwell again. Don’t leave without telling me or I will make your life unpleasant.
Mitch: We need to talk.
His thumb stopped on Zoey’s last text. She had texted him independent of the group chat.
Zoey: At the vet with Fido. He’s in rough shape, but they think it’s fixable. Found him with your glove. I know you’re…wherever you are. But I thought you would want to know.
Something twisted under his sternum.
It still felt foreign that Fido was a girl.
Fido had been a she all along. A mother. Hurt, starving, dragging herself through a cold garage with his glove in her mouth while her puppies hid somewhere in the dark.
He’d sat on his tailgate for weeks, talking to that dog like she understood him, and somehow missed the most important thing about her.
He put the phone away before he could talk himself into typing another useless—and unsent—apology to Zoey.
Puppies.
One thing he could still do.
He reached the odd corner where the lower ramp met an angled support wall, forming a dark little pocket beside a row of old sand barrels and utility pipes. He’d checked it twice already. So had Ian. So had one of the security guys.
Still, if he were a stray dog hiding something important, he would pick a spot like that.
Low. Warm-ish. Out of the path of tires. Hard to see unless someone got on their stomach and looked behind the bins.
Ilya crouched, bracing one hand on the cold concrete, and aimed his flashlight into the gloom. “Hey, puppies,” he called softly. “Ps-ps-ps. Come on, little guys.” His voice bounced back at him, ridiculous and small.
Nothing moved.
He stayed there until his knees started to ache. Then he straightened and dragged a hand through his hair.
Behind him, footsteps approached. Not heavy enough for one of the guys. He didn’t turn.
“Find anything?” Kira asked.
“No.”
She stopped beside him, shining her flashlight toward the same pocket. The beam caught dust, pipe joints, a wad of old insulation, nothing alive.
“East stairwell’s clear,” she said. “South loading dock too. Security is going to keep checking cameras, but if she carried them somewhere off-camera…”
She didn’t finish. She didn’t have to.
Ilya’s jaw clenched.
Kira lowered her flashlight. “Everyone else is gone.”
“Good.”
“Bobby said he’ll keep his phone on if you want him.”
“I don’t.”
“Yeah, that’s what I told him you’d say.”
He looked down at her then.
She looked exhausted. Purple smudges under her eyes, hair escaping her hat, shoulders hunched against the cold. Not backsliding. Not disappearing into some old destructive spiral the way his panic had been trying to tell him. Just tired. Overworked. Human.
Another thing he converted into catastrophe because he hadn’t known what to do with worry except sharpen it.
“You should go home,” he said.
“So should you.”
“I’m going to check one more row.”
“You’ve checked all the rows.”
“Then I’ll check them again.”
Kira studied him for a long beat. Then she nodded toward his truck, parked near the far wall beside a square concrete pillar. Her own little hatchback sat one space over, crooked in a way that suggested she’d pulled in fast and cared about nothing except starting the search.
“Sit for five minutes,” she bossed.
“I’m fine.”
“You are very much not fine. Sit down before you fall down and crack your skull, because I am not explaining to Zoey that the puppies remained missing because you tried to martyr yourself into concrete.”
His whole body flinched at Zoey’s name.
Kira’s face softened, but she didn’t apologize.
Good. He didn’t deserve that either.
He crossed to his truck because arguing with Kira required energy he no longer had. Instead of climbing in, he sank down against the wall beside the front bumper, knees bent, forearms braced loosely on them.
Designer dress pants were not made for parking garage floors, but he barely felt the cold anymore.
Kira sat on the curb stop in front of her car, close enough to talk, not close enough to crowd him.
For a minute, neither of them said anything.
The garage hummed around them.
Finally, she said, “Okay. Now that you’re stationary and less likely to get distracted, talk.”
He let his head fall back against the wall. “About what?”
“Pick a disaster. From what Tommy told me, we have options.”
A humorless sound scraped out of him.
She rested her elbows on her knees. “Christian’s awake.”
“I saw.”
“That’s good.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t sound like a man processing good news.”
His fingers curled loosely. “Because he is awake after I put him in the hospital.”
“No,” she snapped immediately. “We are not starting there like that. Bobby said you would try this.”
His head turned.
Kira held his gaze without flinching. “You made a bad call. Maybe. You added pressure when maybe he needed care. That’s worth looking at.
That’s worth apologizing for when he’s ready.
But you did not hit him. You did not injure him.
Hockey did what hockey does sometimes, which is become a nightmare at high speed. ”
“I saw he was off,” Ilya said, voice rough. “In warmups. On the bench. In the tunnel. I saw it, Kira. His eyes were somewhere else. His hands were late. I knew something was wrong.”
“And?”
“And I listened to Mitch.” His mouth twisted around the name. “He said Christian was playing scared. Said I had to push him. So, I told the kid to go in harder. Full commit. No fear. He listened.”
Kira was quiet for a second. “That sounds like a bad captain moment,” she said carefully. “Not a murder confession.”
His laugh was sharp and ugly. “You always were good at minimizing.”