Chapter 24 Nazar
Nazar walks out of the meeting with his agent, his head buzzing like he’s just taken a hit to the boards without his helmet.
The conversation wasn’t about contract negotiations or endorsement opportunities. It was about damage control.
He can’t believe he let Kai get under his skin like that. Can’t believe he took the bait so easily, responding with coded language in a press conference watched by hundreds of thousands of people. It was reckless. Stupid. The kind of impulsive decision he’s spent his entire career avoiding.
And he can’t stop thinking about it.
He’s obsessed. He’s replayed the clip of Kai’s press conference maybe fifty times in the past week, analyzing it like game footage. Dissecting every word. Every smug, condescending syllable. The lazy drawl. The cold smile. The way Kai knew exactly what he was doing and did it anyway.
Nazar hates him.
And he wants him with a desperation that is messy and consuming, like drowning in dark water.
He hates Kai for changing the course of his life.
For forcing him down this strange, confusing path simply by existing.
Before Kai, Nazar’s life made sense. He had a plan: become the best player he could be, get to Toronto, make Doyle Callahan pay for what he did to Derek. Simple. Linear. Achievable.
Now everything is complicated. Now there’s this other thing—this want, this need, this connection he doesn’t have words for—that’s hijacked his entire operating system.
And Callahan, that fucking coward, just runs from him. Switches teams. Cuts off all contact. Throws insults from the safety of press conferences and social media where Nazar can’t reach him, can’t touch him, can’t make him stay in one place long enough to finish a conversation.
It fills Nazar with a dark rage that he recognizes as unhealthy but can’t seem to stop feeling.
He will have him.
That’s the thought that loops in his head during games, during practice, during the empty hours late at night when he should be sleeping.
He will bring back that moment—the awards ceremony, the bathroom, Kai on his knees and desperate and offering everything Nazar was too scared to take.
He will recreate it somehow. And this time, he won’t say no. This time, he will take what was offered. Will give Kai what he was begging for.
What happens after that, Nazar doesn’t know. Can’t think that far ahead. Doesn’t particularly care.
The inability to act—to take what he wants, to close the distance between wanting and having—is a special kind of torture for a man like him, someone whose entire identity is built on decisive action.
* * *
He needs a reset. Needs something real and solid to anchor him in the swirling chaos of his own head.
The drive to his grandmother’s house in the south suburbs takes forty minutes in light traffic. Nazar makes it in thirty-five, his mind on autopilot, his hands tight on the steering wheel.
Her house is exactly as it’s always been. The front lawn needs mowing. The paint could use a refresh.
But the lights are on in the windows, warm and yellow against the gray afternoon, and the sight of it makes something in Nazar’s chest loosen slightly.
He can smell borscht before he even gets out of the car.
He’s halfway up the front path, already planning what he’ll say to convince her to let him pay for someone to fix the loose railing on the porch, when the front door opens.
And Kai Callahan steps out.
Nazar’s brain short-circuits. Completely flatlines for approximately three full seconds.
Kai is laughing—not his usual sardonic chuckle or sarcastic snort, but a genuine, easy laugh. His head is thrown back, his face open and unguarded in a way Nazar has only seen a handful of times.
He’s wearing dark jeans and one of those absolutely ridiculous sweaters. God, Nazar fucking hates those soft sweaters. And Kai looks so fundamentally at ease that it creates cognitive dissonance with every assumption Nazar has ever made about him.
“You make sure to come back soon, you hear?” Halina says, her accent thick with emotion. She’s patting his arm with the kind of familiar, grandmotherly affection she usually reserves for Nazar. “And bring that sweet cat next time. We’ll make him proper holubtsi, see if he likes Ukrainian food.”
Kai smiles down at her. “I will, Halina Mykolaivna. I promise.”
The use of the formal address, the respectful tone—it twists something sharp and painful in Nazar’s gut.
Kai turns then, still smiling, and the expression vanishes the instant he sees Nazar.
His face goes completely blank. Not angry. Not mocking. Just… empty. His posture stiffens, his shoulders coming up slightly in that defensive way Nazar recognizes from across locker rooms and press conferences.
For a moment, neither of them moves. The world seems to tilt on its axis, gravity pulling in the wrong direction.
Kaisyn Callahan. In his grandmother’s house. Laughing with her. Making promises to come back. Knowing about Bonifazio. Using the proper Ukrainian form of address.
The image is so deeply unsettling, that Nazar’s mind can’t process it. It feels like an invasion. Like Kai has deliberately sought out the one pure, untouched corner of Nazar’s life — the one place that has nothing to do with hockey or their complicated mess — and tainted it.
The rage is a flash flood. Hot and blinding, sweeping away all reason and self-control.
The words are out of his mouth before his brain can engage any kind of filter.
“Isn’t it enough that you stole my fucking teammates? The team I wanted?” His voice is harsh, ugly. “Now you’re trying to steal my grandmother too?”
Kai flinches like Nazar has physically struck him.
The color drains from his face, leaving the faint red scar on his cheekbone standing out in stark relief against pale skin. He looks at Nazar with an expression Nazar has never seen before—not mockery, not that careful blankness he uses as armor.
Just pain.
Kai opens his mouth like he might say something. Then closes it. Swallows visibly.
He gives a tight, formal nod to Halina—a gesture of respect and apology that somehow makes everything worse—then turns and walks away.
His back is ramrod straight. His stride is measured, controlled. He doesn’t look back.
Nazar stands frozen on the front path, his heart hammering against his ribs like it’s trying to escape his chest.
The echo of his own ugly words hangs in the cold January air like visible breath.
His grandmother is looking at him. Her smile is gone. Her expression is something Nazar has seen only a handful of times in his life—when he got suspended from school for fighting, when he came home drunk at sixteen, when he told her he was quitting university to focus on hockey.
It’s disappointment.
“Nazar Oleksandrovych,” she says quietly, using his full name in the way that means he has seriously fucked up. “Come inside.”
But Nazar is watching Kai’s retreating figure. Watching until he turns the corner and disappears from sight.
The regret that washes over him is so profound it’s physically nauseating. His stomach clenches.
He hadn’t meant it. Not really. Not the way it came out.
It was absurd. Ridiculous. The idea that Kai would be here to somehow spite him, to take something that belonged to Nazar. His rational brain knows that’s insane.
But he’s so fucking tormented by the fact that Callahan—the one person he wants to talk to more than anyone else in the world—seems perfectly happy to talk to everyone except him.
Kai has Sam’s number. Vyachovsky’s. Miller’s. Apparently his grandmother’s fucking phone number and address. He’s kept in touch with half the Wolverines roster. He’s built relationships, maintained friendships.
But not with Nazar.
Never with Nazar.
And seeing him here, in this place that should have been safe from their complicated mess, laughing and promising to come back… it broke something in Nazar’s chest and the rage came pouring out before he could stop it.
Now he’s probably guaranteed that Kai will never speak to him again. Will never look at him with anything except that wounded expression. Will never give him another chance to not fuck everything up.
The emptiness that floods through him is absolute.
“Nazar,” his grandmother says again. “Inside. Now.”
He follows her into the house, past the familiar furniture and family photos, into the kitchen where the borscht is still simmering on the stove.
She doesn’t speak for a long moment. Just busies herself with putting food into containers.
“That boy has been visiting me for two months.”
Nazar’s head snaps up. “What?”
“Two months,” she repeats, not looking at him. “Every two weeks, like clockwork. He brings groceries. Helps fix things around the house. Sits and talks to me. He asks about Ukraine. About my recipes. About your mother.”
“How did he—” Nazar’s voice cracks. “How did he even find you?”
“Said he wanted to check in on me since you’re so busy with hockey right now. Said he remembered me from when you were in the team together.”
Nazar sits down heavily in one of the kitchen chairs.
“He never mentioned you,” she continues, finally turning to look at him. “Not once. Never asked about you, never brought you up. I thought maybe you’d had some falling out and he was being polite by not bringing it up. But now…”
She shakes her head.
“Now I see you hurt that boy. Badly. And I raised you better than that.”
“Ba, you don’t understand—”
“I understand,” she interrupts, her voice firm, “enough. I don’t need to know the details. But I also understand that whatever it is, you don’t treat people like that. You don’t accuse someone of trying to steal your family when they’ve been showing that family nothing but kindness.”
Nazar has no response to that.
“He’s a good boy,” Halina says quietly. “Lonely, I think. Trying very hard to be something he’s not. Reminds me of you, actually.”
“He’s nothing like me,” Nazar says automatically.
His grandmother gives him a look that suggests she sees right through that lie.
They sit in silence for a long time, the only sound the bubbling of borscht on the stove.
Eventually, she packs him food he doesn’t want, kisses his forehead, and sends him home with instructions to “fix whatever this is.”
In his car, in the fading afternoon light, Nazar pulls out his phone. He has Kai’s new number. Has had it for eighteen months.
His thumb hovers over the contact.
He types: I’m sorry.
Then deletes it.
Types: Can we talk?
Deletes that too.
Types: I fucking didn’t mean it.
His thumb hovers over send for a full minute.
Then he deletes the message and throws his phone onto the passenger seat.
He drives home in the dark, replaying the look on Kai’s face.