Chapter 21 Kai
Eighteen months is a long time in hockey.
The photo shoot unfolds in a downtown Toronto studio.
Stylists armed with dyson airwraps and those terrifyingly precise Japanese scissors swarm around like well-dressed hornets, while a photographer named Antoine—who insists he’s just Antoine, no last name, like Cher—orbits Kai.
“Kaisyn, darling, the camera adores you,” Antoine announces, peering at him through his viewfinder like he’s discovered a new species. “This is not subjective. This is physics. You refract light differently.”
“Just try to capture my inner turmoil,” Kai says, adjusting the collar of the shirt they’ve buttoned him into. “Very on-brand for fall. Ennui with a hint of vanilla.”
“You mock, but you understand,” Antoine says approvingly. “This is why we work.”
Across the studio, Kai spots them before they spot him.
Sam Kowalski has filled out over the past year and a half, less lost golden retriever puppy, more handsome and slightly confused golden retriever adult. And Vyachovsky, whose collection of watches has apparently evolved from “flashy” to “visible from space.”
“Kai, my dude!” Sam’s face breaks into one of those smiles that makes you remember why people still believe in basic human goodness. “Man, you look—”
“Expensive?” Kai supplies. “Emotionally unavailable? Like I’m one bad quarter away from a cologne ad?”
“I was going to say good,” Sam laughs, pulling him into a hug that lifts Kai slightly off his feet. “Really good. How’s Toronto treating you?”
“Like a beautiful prison with excellent public transit,” Kai says. “But come on, we saw each other just two months ago. Don’t make it sound like it’s been ages.”
Vyachovsky joins them, and they fall into the easy rhythm of people who’ve shared locker rooms and losses. They catch up — Sam’s got a girlfriend now, a marine biologist who thinks hockey is “vaguely homoerotic performance art” but supports him anyway. Vyachovsky is investing in cryptocurrency.
It’s one of the few silver linings of the past eighteen months.
His old teammates—the ones who initially treated him like an annoying rash—had somehow become actual friends. They text. They send each other increasingly unhinged memes. They meet up in the off-season and don’t make him feel like a headline with legs.
It’s a quiet, steady thing that Kai grips like a life raft in a storm he can’t admit he’s drowning in.
He’s also grateful that at their various meetups, one name is conspicuously absent from every guest list.
He doesn’t have to look to know. He can feel Nazar’s stare from across the studio—a familiar, heavy pressure between his shoulder blades, like someone pressing their thumb into a bruise just to watch him flinch.
Kai refuses to acknowledge it. Refuses to turn his head. Ignores the way the fine hairs on his arms stand up.
Eighteen months of this silent war.
Encounters on the ice are brutal. Public events are exhausting.
Nazar Rykov is a legitimate star now. Not just rising talent, but certified, grade-A hockey royalty. He has the mega-contract—eight years, obscene money. He has the Cup ring. He has statistics that make analysts run out of superlatives.
He’s everything the hockey world values: disciplined, relentless, brutally effective, and utterly devoid of scandal.
The righteous grumbler totally won in this life.
“Kai, you’re zoning,” Sam says gently, waving a hand in front of his face. “You okay?”
“Spectacular,” he lies. “Just contemplating whether Antoine’s artistic vision includes me looking dead inside or if that’s just my natural state.”
Later, as Kai is leaving— jacket slung over one shoulder, sunglasses firmly in place despite the overcast Toronto sky—he sees him again.
Nazar is leaning against a black Escalade, arms crossed over his chest, just watching.
He’s dressed simply: dark jeans, a henley that does absolutely unfair things to his shoulders, that stupid baseball cap pulled low. He looks like he’s waiting.
Kai’s heart does something complicated and unwelcome in his chest.
But then Vyachovsky and Sam burst through the door behind him, laughing and shoving each other like oversized children, and the spell breaks.
They’re talking about dinner plans, arguing about whether to get sushi or barbecue, and their presence creates a buffer.
Nazar doesn’t move. Of course he doesn’t. He’s far too disciplined, too aware of optics, to make a scene with an audience.
But his eyes track Kai’s movement across the parking lot with the same intensity he brings to tracking a puck.
Kai slides into his own car—a Taycan he bought mostly to annoy his father—and doesn’t look back.
The memory hits him on the drive home, sharp and humiliating, a phantom limb that still aches eighteen months later.
That night. The awards ceremony.
His own voice, small and desperate, something he didn’t even recognize as coming from himself: “Nazar, please. Take me. Now.”
A part of Kai still replays it on loop with a cruel internal narrator that revels in his moments of weakness. You just had to lose control, didn’t you? You just had to beg like you were dying for it. You just had to show him exactly how much power he has.
He’d known what he really wanted from Nazar. Not just the physical—though God knows he wanted that too, wanted it with an intensity that scared him. But he’d wanted the impossible thing. The thing Nazar would never, could never give him.
He’d wanted Nazar to look at him like he mattered. Like he was more than Doyle Callahan’s disappointing son, more than a scandal with a pretty face, more than convenient.
All he’d had to do was hold on a little longer. Keep the mask in place. Play it cool.
Instead, he’d cracked, shown his hand, and lost the game.
He will not speak to Nazar Rykov ever again. This is the one promise Kai intends to keep.
* * *
The Callahan mansion was always all gleaming Carrara marble and cavernous rooms that echo.
Like a place where hope goes to die quietly and without fuss.
His father’s assistant, Evelyn— a woman in her fifties with steel-gray hair and eyes that have seen too much Callahan family drama—meets Kai in the grand foyer. She’s severe but not unkind.
She once smuggled him cookies when he was ten and locked in his room for “disrespecting the family name” by losing a youth tournament.
“Kaisyn,” she says, her tone crisp and businesslike. " Your father asked me to meet you.”
“Evelyn, light of my life,” Kai says, flashing the smile he uses for cameras and people he doesn’t trust. “Let me guess. He’s prepared a PowerPoint about my media presence? Perhaps a detailed breakdown of my Instagram engagement rates?”
A flicker of something—sympathy or pity—crosses her face. “He requested a personal meeting this time. Face-to-face.”
That’s new. Doyle usually sent her to deliver orders, not to invite him to the office.
“How civilized. Lead me to the execution chamber.”
The conservatory is a glass-walled monstrosity overlooking acres of gardens so perfectly manicured they look computer-generated. His father stands with his back to the room, hands clasped behind him.
“You wanted to see me?”
Doyle turns slowly. There is no warmth in his eyes. There never is—Kai stopped looking for it sometime around age twelve.
“The season begins in two weeks,” Doyle says. No greeting. No pleasantries. “I trust your… distractions are under control.”
“My distractions are what make me a compelling media narrative, Dad,” Kai says, leaning against the doorframe with casualness. “And compelling narratives sell tickets. Isn’t that what you taught me? Everything is a product.”
“Don’t be glib.”
“I’m not being glib. I’m being accurate, right?”
His father’s jaw tightens—the only sign of irritation he ever shows. “I’m pleased you’re playing for the Wardens now. It makes things… tidier.”
Tidier. A tidy little euphemism for easier to control, easier to ensure you don’t embarrass me.
A hot flare of anger licks up Kai’s spine, but he shoves it down with practiced efficiency.
“All for the family name, Dad,” he says, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Wouldn’t want to tarnish the Callahan legacy with something as pedestrian as personal happiness.”
His father moves then, crossing the conservatory with that slow stride that’s designed to intimidate. It works on board members and business rivals. It still, humiliatingly, works on Kai.
Doyle looms over him. Despite Kai being six feet tall, his father still manages to make him feel small. Kai has to physically resist the urge to step back, to give ground. He hates himself for the flicker of fear that runs through him, ancient and automatic.
He’s bigger than that boy now. Stronger. He could fight back.
He never does.
Doyle leans in, his voice dropping to that chilling whisper that makes Kai’s skin crawl. “Don’t forget the deal we made, Kaisyn.”
The deal, the one that let him sign with Toronto, offered by his father with a smile that never touched his eyes, felt less like a negotiation and more like surrendering pieces of himself he’d never get back.
“I doubt,” Kai says, his voice perfectly steady — a performance he’s perfected over twenty-four years — “that you will ever let me forget.”
His father straightens, satisfied. “Good. Dinner is at seven on Thursday. Don’t be late.”
After he leaves, Kai stands alone in the vast, cold conservatory for a long time, staring out at gardens he’s never been allowed to play in.
His phone buzzes. A text from Sam: Sushi won. You should’ve been there to break the tie. Vyachovsky is being soooo weird about wasabi.
Kai types back: Give him my regards and moderate amounts of wasabi.
He doesn’t mention where he is. Doesn’t mention the conversation. Some things are too complicated to text, too exhausting to explain.
Instead, he gets in his car and drives back to his downtown condo and tries not to think about Nazar’s eyes tracking him across a parking lot.
Tries not to think about the fact that in two weeks, when the season starts, they’ll be in the same city.
Playing for rival teams.
Close enough to hurt each other all over again.