Chapter 23 Kai
Two weeks later
The post-game press conference is a ritual humiliation that Kai has learned to endure with the same enthusiasm most people reserve for root canals.
Another loss.
And another series of predictable questions from reporters whose expressions range from performative sympathy to barely concealed glee at watching the Wardens’ slow-motion collapse. The media room at Arena is packed, cameras lined up along the back wall.
Kai sits at the podium, a team-branded microphone positioned precisely in front of him, and delivers the usual meaningless platitudes with the conviction of a hostage reading a prepared statement.
“We didn’t execute our game plan.” “They wanted it more than we did tonight.” “We have to be better, more disciplined.”
The words taste like cardboard in his mouth.
He’s said variations of these exact sentences approximately ten times this season.
The reporters type them dutifully into their phones and laptops anyway, because they need quotes for their articles even if the quotes say absolutely nothing.
Then Rob Matthews from TSN — a reporter who’s never met a controversy he didn’t want to manufacture — leans into his microphone with the expression of a man who’s just drawn the perfect card.
“Kaisyn, your individual numbers are solid — you’re second on the team in points — but the Wardens are really struggling to find any consistency as a collective unit.
Some critics, and I’m thinking specifically of the piece that ran in The Athletic yesterday, have pointed to a lack of vocal leadership in the locker room.
They’ve suggested that’s something that was never a problem for your former linemate, Nazar Rykov, especially during his Cup run with Comets last year.
Do you think the team is missing that kind of stabilizing presence? ”
The question lands like a grenade rolled across the floor.
The comparison is provocation wrapped in the thinnest veneer of legitimate sports journalism. Rykov and the Comets aren’t even in their conference. His name has absolutely no business being in this room, in this conversation about the Wardens’ failures.
Kai should let it go. Should give a professional, deflective answer about how every team has different dynamics and you can’t compare situations directly.
He doesn’t.
A slow smile spreads across his face—the one he reserves for moments when he’s about to do something he’ll probably regret but will enjoy immensely in the moment.
“Well, you know,” he says, his voice a lazy, carrying drawl that he knows will play well on television, “it’s remarkably easy to look like a visionary leader when your entire offensive strategy is built on one beautifully simple principle.
” He pauses just long enough for the reporters to lean forward.
“It’s incredibly difficult to miss the net when the net is literally all you can see.
Tunnel vision can be very effective. Until it isn’t. ”
The room goes silent for exactly two seconds.
Then the phones come out. Someone in the back actually gasps.
The comment is just vague enough to be plausibly about general hockey philosophy — about teams that rely too heavily on shooting volume instead of strategic playmaking. But everyone in the room knows exactly who it’s about.
It’s a direct shot at Rykov’s single-minded, brutally effective style of play. An insinuation that he’s a one-dimensional player who gets results through sheer force rather than strategic brilliance.
Basically, he just implied that Rykov’s hockey IQ is close to zero.
It feels satisfyingly cruel.
Kai finishes the press conference with professional efficiency, deflects three more attempts to get him to elaborate on the Rykov comment, and leaves through the back exit before anyone can corner him for follow-up questions.
In the Uber back to his condo he pulls out his phone and sees he already has texts.
Liam: What the hell was that press conference? Dad’s going to lose his mind.
Sam: Dude. Did you just publicly trash Rykov on live television?
Vyachovsky: lol kind of true. but you know that he is still THAT good
Kai doesn’t respond to any of them. He opens Twitter instead and watches in real-time as the clip starts circulating. Within an hour, it’s everywhere — sports blogs, highlight accounts, fans making memes.
He should feel guilty. Should recognize this as the self-destructive impulse it obviously is.
Instead, he feels alive for the first time in weeks.
* * *
Two days later, the other shoe drops.
Kai is in his condo, meal-prepping for the week but actually just scrolling through social media in a masochistic exercise in doomscrolling. Fan complaints. Media hot takes about his attitude problem. Speculation about whether the Wardens will trade him at the deadline.
That’s when he sees the clip.
It’s from Rykov’s post-game press conference. The Comets just beat the Bruins 4-1, and Rykov is doing his usual stoic routine at the podium. A reporter asks him about the upcoming road trip—a brutal stretch against Tampa, Florida, and Carolina.
Rykov, looking characteristically grim in his team-issued hoodie that somehow makes him look even more intimidating, answers the question with his typical economy of language.
“We’re confident. We’ve prepared well. It’s about execution.”
Standard hockey-speak. Nothing remotely interesting.
Then he pauses. Shifts slightly in his seat. Looks directly at the camera.
“But we’re not worried,” he says, his voice dropping to that low, deliberate rumble that Kai can feel in his chest even through his phone screen.
“We just have to focus on our own game. Play our system. It’s not about flashy plays or getting cute with it.
It’s about being hard to play against, every single shift. ”
Another pause. His dark eyes boring into the camera.
“Some guys are satisfied with just being hard. We prefer to be hard to beat and to be hard to replace.”
The press room laughs — that stupid automatic laugh reporters give to standard hockey clichés. Someone asks a follow-up question about defensive zone coverage.
But Kai just sits there on his designer couch, his meal prep forgotten, his phone clutched in his hand.
A hot flush creeps up his neck, spreading across his face.
A double-entendre so blatant it’s almost obscene, hidden in plain sight behind the veneer of acceptable sports jargon.
And it’s a risk. A small one, yes—ninety-nine percent of people watching wouldn’t look twice at the comment. It’s standard “hard-nosed hockey” rhetoric that every coach and player has used since the invention of the sport.
But the subtext is there. The slight emphasis on the word “hard.” The way he looked directly at the camera like he knew exactly who’d be watching.
The sheer audacity of Rykov responding in kind, of playing this game in front of millions of viewers, sends a jolt of something dangerous straight through Kai’s system.
He watches the clip three more times, analyzing Rykov’s expression, the tone of his voice, the deliberate cadence.
Then he throws his phone across the room where it bounces off a throw pillow and lands safely on the carpet.
“Fuck,” he says to his empty apartment.
Bonifazio, who’s been sleeping on the cat tree by the window, opens one eye to give him a look of supreme judgment before going back to sleep.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Kai tells the cat. “This is a perfectly normal reaction to psychological warfare.”
Bonifazio’s tail twitches.
* * *
The next few weeks are miserable in ways that make Kai nostalgic for the regular, manageable misery of earlier in the season.
The team keeps losing. Not spectacularly—they’re not being blown out—but in those soul-crushing, close games where they’re good enough to stay competitive but not good enough to actually win. Overtime losses. Shootout defeats. Games where they’re up by two in the third period and then collapse.
The media, which had been genuinely excited when Kai signed with Toronto — the prodigal son going to his father’s team, the narrative practically writing itself — has turned on him again with the enthusiasm of a mob that’s found a convenient scapegoat.
The narrative is taking shape across every sports platform: Kaisyn Callahan, the flashy, inconsistent winger with the famous last name, is a toxic presence in the locker room.
A pretty distraction who can’t win when it matters.
All style, no substance.
The kind of player who puts up points in meaningless games but disappears when the pressure is on.
Kai suspects his father’s PR machine might even be feeding the narrative.
It’s exactly the kind of controllable way Doyle Callahan would keep his disappointing son in line — let the media do the work of humiliation so he doesn’t have to get his hands dirty.
And afterward, he’ll still accuse Kai of tarnishing the family name.
He can feel his carefully constructed influence with the fanbase starting to slip.
The fans who’d been excited to have him are now starting to wonder if maybe the rumors were right, if maybe Kai really is more trouble than he’s worth.
He leans into the irony in interviews, delivers sarcastic quips that get turned into headlines, but his armor feels thin. Brittle. Like one more solid hit will shatter it completely.
One evening, after a particularly brutal 5-2 loss to the Islanders where Kai was on the ice for three goals against, he makes a pact with himself.
No hockey tonight. No checking scores from around the league. Definitely no looking up how Rykov’s team played.
He puts on some mindless reality television, where people trying to survive on an island with no resources except perfect makeup and designer swimwear. Opens a bottle of wine. And calls the one person in the world he trusts.
“Hey,” his older brother Liam’s voice is warm and steady on the other end of the line. “To what do I owe the honor of an actual phone call? Did you finally decide to give up this ridiculous puck-chasing hobby and join the family business where you belong?”
“Tempting,” Kai says, swirling the wine in his glass and watching the legs form on the sides. “But I don’t think I have the appropriate level of sociopathy required to be a successful CEO.”
“You’d be surprised how quickly it develops,” Marcus says with a dry chuckle. “I didn’t think I had it either, and now I fire people before my morning coffee without feeling a thing. It’s very freeing.”
They talk for an hour about nothing and everything. Liam’s upcoming business trip to Tokyo where he’ll be negotiating some acquisition Kai doesn’t pretend to understand.
They share a memory of their mother — something about a disastrous family vacation to Cape Cod where it rained for six straight days and she’d insisted on making the best of it by teaching them to play poker for M&Ms.
Liam never pushes. Never pries into why Kai actually called. But he has a way of seeing past his carefully constructed defenses that’s both comforting and terrifying.
“You sound tired,” he says quietly after a lull in the conversation, after Kai has finished a story about Bonifazio knocking over a lamp.
“It’s been a long season,” Kai replies. The response is automatic, rehearsed. The same thing he’s said to everyone who asks.
“Yeah,” Liam says. “I know.”
He doesn’t say more. Doesn’t offer advice or platitudes or tell Kai what he should do differently. The simple acknowledgment — the quiet understanding in his voice that says I see you, I know this is hard, and I’m here — is enough.
“Thanks for picking up,” Kai says after another comfortable silence.
“Always,” Liam replies. “That’s what big brothers are for. Well, that and teaching you how to pick locks when you were seven, which I maintain was excellent life skills education that Mom overreacted to.”
Kai laughs.
After they hang up, he sits on his couch with his wine and his ridiculous reality show and Bonifazio purring on his lap, and feels fractionally less alone.
It doesn’t fix anything. Doesn’t change the losing streak or the media narrative or the fact that he’s apparently engaged in some kind of psychosexual warfare via press conference with a grumpy man he hasn’t spoken to in eighteen months.
But it helps.