Chapter 12 Nazar
The apartment is quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and the distant sound of traffic thirteen floors below.
Nazar sits on his couch—a secondhand thing he bought off Craigslist when he first moved to Vancouver—with a beer in his hand. He doesn’t particularly like beer. Never has. It’s too bitter, sits wrong in his stomach, makes him feel bloated and sluggish.
But Derek loved it.
Derek introduced him to beer when Nazar was twelve, stealing a can from their stepfather’s garage fridge and sneaking out to the backyard.
Nazar had taken one sip and made a face so disgusted that Derek had laughed until he couldn’t breathe, doubled over with his hands on his knees, tears streaming down his face.
“You’ll grow into it,” Derek had promised, still laughing. “Everyone hates it at first.”
Nazar never did grow into it. But he drinks it anyway on days like this.
Today marks ten years since Derek died.
A decade. An entire lifetime. Nazar has now lived more years without his brother than he lived with him, which feels impossible and wrong.
For the first time since Derek’s death, the anniversary falls on a day with no game. No practice. No travel. Just empty hours that Nazar has to fill somehow, and he’s doing a terrible job of it.
He’d never noticed the pattern before. How he was always conveniently in another city on this day, always able to bury the grief under the mechanical routine of hockey. Game day rituals. Pre-game skate. Team dinner. The physical exhaustion that made sleep possible.
This year, the schedule gave him nothing to hide behind.
He and Derek had different surnames—Rykov and Morrison—because they shared a mother but different fathers.
Nazar never knew his biological father. The man disappeared before Nazar’s first birthday, and his mother refused to talk about him.
Derek’s father, Frank Morrison, eventually became like a stepfather to Nazar, raising him alongside Derek without making distinctions between biological and step.
Frank died years ago. Heart attack. He hadn’t cried at the funeral, but he’d stood at the grave thinking about how Frank had taught him to tie his skates, had driven him to 6 a.m. practices, had never once made him feel like less than Derek’s brother.
Derek was a better hockey player than Nazar could ever be.
He knows this with absolute certainty, the way you know facts about physics or math.
Derek had natural talent—the kind scouts notice immediately.
Intelligence that made him read plays three steps ahead.
Vision that turned chaos into opportunity.
He could’ve been extraordinary.
The memory surfaces unbidden, clear as if it happened yesterday instead of many years ago.
Nazar was five years old. Derek took him to the outdoor rink at Davidson Park for the first time. It was winter, early morning, the sun barely up. Derek held his small hand as they walked across the frozen surface, their breath visible in the cold air.
“Why does Dad say you don’t play anymore?” little Nazar had asked. He’d overheard Frank on the phone the night before, his voice tight with anger, saying something about Derek being “out of the game.”
Derek’s smile had been immediate, but his eyes were sad in a way Nazar was too young to understand. “That’s just how life turned out, little man. But I’m still close to the ice. I work here now, taking care of it.”
“Why is taking care of ice important?” he had asked, genuinely confused. Ice was just ice. It was there, like air or water.
Derek crouched down beside him, his skates scraping against the surface.
“The thickness and smoothness of the ice, that’s everything in hockey.
See this?” He pointed to the ice at their feet, solid and opaque.
“In professional hockey, the ice needs to be three-quarters of an inch or an inch thick. Not more, not less.”
Little Nazar’s eyes had widened. “Only a few inches?”
Derek laughed— a real laugh, lighter than before—and ruffled Nazar’s hair.
“One inch or less than an inch. Three-quarters. You see, in hockey like in life, sometimes one small detail makes all the difference. If the ice is two inches thick instead of an inch, the players stumble. Their blades don’t grip right.
One inch can be decisive. Can change everything. ”
“What if it’s too thin?” he had asked, suddenly worried about the ice beneath their feet. “You could fall through. You could die.”
“You could,” Derek agreed seriously. “But that’s why people like me make sure it’s never too thin. We measure it. We monitor it. We make sure the ice is perfect for the players who deserve it.”
Derek had laughed again then and ruffled Nazar’s hair with more force, messing it up completely. “All you little boys are the same. I know another boy who often comes to the hockey club, and he said the exact same thing. Worried about falling through.”
“Who?” Nazar had asked.
“Just a kid.” Derek’s expression had shifted—gone distant and sad again. “His father doesn’t want him here. Doesn’t want him playing hockey at all. But the kid keeps coming back anyway.”
Nazar hadn’t understood then. But now, at twenty-three, with Derek dead for many years, he understands what his brother had been trying to tell him. That small details mattered a lot. That one wrong decision— one miscalculation—could change everything. Could end careers. Could end lives.
Then Doyle Callahan destroyed Derek’s career. Made an example of him for having “attitude problems” and “insubordination.” The details were always vague, but the results were clear: Derek went from being a promising player to being unhirable in any capacity except manual labor.
And Derek’s life fell apart piece by piece.
The drinking started slow, then accelerated.
The debt accumulated—medical bills, legal fees from a DUI, rent he couldn’t pay.
The job driving the Zamboni at Arena in Toronto—the same rink where he used to play, where scouts used to watch him, where his future used to exist.
In the year before he died, Derek stopped visiting.
Stopped calling. Frank would curse Doyle Callahan’s name at the dinner table, his face red with impotent rage, talking about how that bastard had destroyed his son for his “independent nature.” How Derek had tried to protect some younger player from Doyle’s manipulation and had fallen out of favor for it.
“He tried to save that boy,” Frank had said once, drunk and grieving even before Derek died. “Tried to stand up for him. And Doyle crushed him for it. Made sure no one would hire him. Made an example.”
Nazar never found out which younger player his brother had tried to save. Never got the chance to ask.
And now Nazar is playing on the same team as Callahan’s son.
And he can’t stop thinking about Kai. About Kai’s hands on him, rough and desperate. About the way Kai looked at him that night at the club—defiant and vulnerable simultaneously. About the storage room, the hotel, every stolen moment that ended in chaos.
About Kai telling him it was over. That there would be no “every time.”
He should be grateful. Should be relieved that Kai ended it before they both imploded publicly.
Instead, he’s sitting here alone on the anniversary of his brother’s death, drinking beer he hates, angry in a way that feels dangerous and uncontrolled.
His phone is in his hand before he consciously decides to pick it up.
He pulls up Kai’s contact. His thumb hovers over the call button.
One ring. That’s all he allows himself. One ring, and if Kai doesn’t answer— when Kai doesn’t answer—Nazar will hang up and accept that this is done.
The phone rings once.
Nazar hangs up.
“Fuck,” he says aloud to his empty apartment.
What the fuck is he doing? Calling Kai on the anniversary of Derek’s death like some kind of emotional catastrophe in progress? Like Kai is the solution to anything instead of just another problem he can’t solve?
He calls Miller instead, purely out of panic and habit. To give himself an excuse for why Kai’s number is in his recent calls.
“Hey, what’s up?” Miller answers after three rings. There’s noise in the background—multiple voices talking over each other, music playing, the distinct sound of people having a good time.
“You doing anything tonight?” Nazar asks, trying to sound casual and probably failing.
“Yeah, man. We’re at Callahan’s place actually. Me, Sam, Vyachovsky. Some of the guys wanted to hang out, and Kai said he had space.”
Nazar’s grip tightens on the phone hard enough that the case creaks.
“Send me the address.”
There’s a pause. “Wait, what? You want to come?”
“Yeah. Send me the address.”
“Uh… okay.” Miller sounds confused but not suspicious. “Yeah, sure. Sending it now.”
The line goes dead.
Nazar stares at the address on his screen.
He knows he shouldn’t go. Knows that showing up at Kai’s apartment— semi-drunk or close to it, emotionally compromised, after the way things ended—is not the behavior of a man who has his life under control.
He grabs his keys anyway.
* * *
The building is one of those new luxury developments—that aggressively modern aesthetic that screams “tech money” and “gentrification.” The kind of place with a doorman and a lobby that looks like a hotel.
Exactly what he’d expect from someone who grew up as a Callahan.
The doorman barely glances at him before waving him through.
Either because Nazar looks like he belongs or because he’s already been told to expect team guests.
The elevator is one of those glass-walled ones that shows you ascending through the building, and Nazar focuses on his reflection instead of the dropping view.
He looks terrible. Hair disheveled. Eyes tired. Still wearing the same clothes he put on this morning, jeans and a hoodie that’s seen better days.
The elevator reaches the fourteenth floor with a soft ding.
Nazar stands outside apartment 1401 for longer than is reasonable. Long enough that his finger hovers over the doorbell three separate times before he actually presses it.
He can hear voices inside. Miller’s unmistakable laugh—too loud, always performing. Sam’s quieter chuckle in response.
The door opens.
Sam stands there, beer in hand, his expression cycling rapidly from surprise to confusion to something like concern.
“Rykov? Didn’t know you were coming.”
“Last-minute thing,” Nazar says, already moving past him into the apartment before Sam can ask follow-up questions.
Miller is sprawled on the couch, Vyachovsky is by the windows examining the view, Armstrong is in the open kitchen area doing something with his phone.
And in the corner, a plush cat bed with a black cat that immediately locks eyes with Nazar and hisses like he’s personally offended by his existence.
Bonifazio.
Kai is standing frozen in the middle of the room, a wine glass in his hand, his expression shifting from surprise to something harder and more guarded in the span of a heartbeat.
Their eyes meet across the room.
For a moment, neither of them moves.