Chapter 29 Kai
Months pass and life shrinks down to something manageable. Something he can control. A series of tightly contained, repetitive actions: wake up, skate, practice, protein shake that tastes like chalk, game, hotel room, cat, sleep. Repeat.
The crushing weight of grief is constant—a dull, heavy ache lodged somewhere behind his sternum that some days makes it hard to breathe properly. Like there’s a hand pressed against his chest, not quite crushing him but never letting him forget it’s there.
He moves through the world like he’s underwater. Everything is muffled, distant.
The Wardens are having a decent season. Not great, but decent.
Kai’s putting up points. Not as many as he should be, but enough that management isn’t breathing down his neck. His teammates have learned to give him space. To not ask how he’s doing. To accept his silence as the new normal.
He hasn’t spoken to his father since the funeral.
The funeral was less a mourning and more a corporate-level strategic management exercise. Doyle Callahan treated his eldest son’s death like a PR crisis to be contained and controlled. The right people were invited. The right image projected.
Kai had stood there in his black suit and felt nothing. Numbness so complete it was almost peaceful.
Bonifazio is the only thing that feels real anymore.
The cat demands food at precise intervals, knocks things off counters when he’s feeling neglected, purrs like a small engine when Kai finally drags himself to bed at night.
It’s grounding. The mundane animal needs that don’t care about his grief or his famous last name or the fact that he’s barely holding himself together.
One night — Chicago or Dallas or somewhere, they all blur together — he’s flipping through channels in another hotel room. He’s not really watching, just needs the noise.
Then he sees him.
It’s TSN’s post-game coverage. The Comets just beat Montreal 4-2. And there’s Rykov, still in his team-issued hoodie, hair damp from the shower, looking serious and grim under the harsh television lights.
A reporter asks him something about the playoff race, about the Wardens’ chances in their division.
“They’ve got the talent,” Rykov says, his voice that low, steady rumble that Kai can feel in his chest even through the TV speakers. “Especially Callahan. When he’s on his game, there’s no one in the league who can read a play faster. He sees things three steps ahead. He’s a generational talent.”
Kai feels the words slam into him.
Generational talent.
It’s the kind of over-the-top platitude commentators use, the kind of hyperbole that means nothing.
But coming from Rykov—from a guy who once blamed Kai for ruining his draft position, who spent years treating him like a nepotism case with a pretty face — it’s something else.
Oh yeah.
It’s a fucking pity.
Kai knows with sickening certainty what this is.
Rykov, after that night in the shower, after seeing him shattered and broken and begging him to leave, has decided that what Kai needs is a public relations boost. A pat on the head from the league’s new golden boy.
A charitable act disguised as sports commentary.
The fragile shell cracks.
All the grief, the anger, the bone-deep exhaustion of the last few months—it comes rushing in like a tidal wave. Pure rage that feels stronger than anything he’s felt since Liam died.
He pulls out his phone before he can talk himself out of it. Types out a message to a number he’s never deleted despite every rational reason to do so.
Kai: Next time you’re in Toronto, we need to talk.
The message sits there for a long moment, delivered but not read.
Then three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.
Nazar: when?
Kai: Whenever you’re here next. I don’t care when.
Nazar: tuesday next week? or I could fly in tonight
Kai: Fine. Tuesday. Next week.
He throws the phone across the room where it bounces off the hotel armchair and lands safely on carpet. His hands are shaking. He doesn’t know if it’s from anger or something else.
The week passes in the same blur. Games and practices and mandatory media appearances where he gives the same meaningless quotes about “taking it one game at a time” and “focusing on team success.”
Tuesday arrives too quickly.
They meet on a street corner in the Annex, near the university.
Rykov is already there when Kai arrives. He always looks bigger in person than on TV. His hands are shoved in his pockets, his shoulders hunched slightly.
When he sees Kai, something shifts in his expression. Softens. It makes Kai even angrier.
“If you say one more good word about me in the press,” Kai says without preamble, his voice shaking with barely controlled rage, “I will fucking kill you.”
Rykov just looks at him. Those dark, unreadable eyes taking him in. Then he shrugs — a slow movement that somehow manages to be both dismissive and accepting at once.
“Then you’ll have to kill me,” he replies simply. “Because I’m not going to stop.”
The calm certainty throws Kai completely off balance. All the arguments he’d prepared, the speeches about pity and condescension and not needing Rykov’s charity, die in his throat.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Rykov says. “There’s a park near here.”
The domestic absurdity of the suggestion is a shock to Kai’s system. A walk. In the park. Like they’re normal people having a normal conversation instead of whatever twisted thing they actually are.
“No.” A different impulse takes over. Reckless, self-destructive, but at least it feels like choosing something instead of being carried along by everyone else’s decisions. “Invite me to your place.”
Rykov’s expression doesn’t change, but something flickers in his eyes. “You sure about that?”
“I’ve never been sure about anything involving you. But I’m asking anyway.”
A pause.
“Okay.”
Rykov’s apartment is in a newer building near the waterfront. Expensive but not showy.
“You want something to drink?” Rykov asks, shrugging off his jacket. “I have water. Beer. I think there’s juice—”
“No.” Kai moves closer. “I don’t want a drink.”
“Kai—”
“You climbed a building that day.” The words come out accusatory rather than grateful. “You could have died.”
“I know.”
“That was insane. You realize that was completely insane?”
“Yes.”
“And then you left. Because I asked you to.” Kai’s voice breaks slightly. “No one ever just leaves when I ask them to. People always push. They always think they know better than me. But you actually left.”
Rykov’s jaw tightens. “It killed me to leave.”
“Good.” Kai doesn’t know why he says it. “Good. You should have—”
He doesn’t finish the sentence because Rykov is desperately kissing him, and for once Kai doesn’t have the energy to analyze it or deflect it or turn it into something else. He just kisses back.
“Nazar,” he whispers in his mouth.
“When I got your text, fucking dropped the weight on my leg… then thought I’m dreaming again,” Rykov rasps, cupping his face the same way he had held Kai in the shower.
The sex is different this time.
It’s not the frantic, desperate grappling of stolen moments in storage closets and hotel bathrooms. Not the angry collision of bodies in LA where they couldn’t get close enough fast enough.
Kai finds himself on his knees without consciously deciding to move, his hands reaching for Rykov’s belt, falling into the familiar pattern. This he knows how to do. This he can control.
But strong hands are on his shoulders, pulling him up before he can even start.
“No,” Rykov says, his voice rough. “Not like that. Not today.”
“I want to—”
“I know what you want.” Rykov cups his face, thumbs brushing his cheekbones. “But I’m not letting you hide right now.”
The words should make Kai angry. Should make him defensive. Instead they just make him tired.
Rykov pushes him onto the bed — gently, carefully, like Kai might break.
Maybe he will. He stretches him with slow, painstaking patience that borders on torture.
His fingers are sure and strong, and he talks to Kai the entire time.
Low, quiet reassurances that Kai barely processes but feels in his bones.
“That’s it. You’re doing so good. Just breathe. I’ve got you.”
Kai comes from his fingers alone, a shuddering orgasm that leaves him boneless and gasping and somehow more vulnerable than anything that’s happened before.
And then Rykov is inside him.
The feeling is overwhelming. Not just physical. Though it is that, the stretch and fullness and the way his body has to adjust to accommodate him. But something else. The weight of him. The solid presence.
He’s everywhere. His hands braced on either side of Kai’s head. His mouth on Kai’s neck, his jaw, his lips. His cock moving in brutal thrusts that make Kai’s entire nervous system light up.
He fucks Kai for what feels like hours. With a focused, reverent intensity that Kai has never experienced. Certainly not from Rykov, who’s always been all rough edges and barely controlled aggression.
This is different. Care hidden in physical act. And it terrifies Kai more than anything else ever has.
At some point—time has lost all meaning—Rykov leans down and whispers in his ear. “Always wanted to fuck you in my bed.”
Kai’s brain, still capable of sarcasm even when his body is completely overwhelmed, latches onto the statement.
“You’ve only had this apartment for like a year and a half,” he points out.
Rykov chuckles. “I transported the bed,” he says, completely serious. “From Vancouver. When I moved.”
“You transported your bed.” Kai can’t help it. A laugh bubbles up, an actual giggle that sounds foreign in his own ears. “You’re telling me you shipped a bed across the country because— And what? Hotel beds weren’t good enough for your dreams of fucking me?”
“Something like that.” Rykov kisses him, swallowing the laughter. “Worked, didn’t it?”
It did.
Towards morning, as gray light starts filtering through the windows and Kai’s body is sore in ways that feel almost good, familiar panic sets in.
This is too much. Too close. Too real.
They’ve crossed some line he can’t uncross. Changed the fundamental nature of whatever they are to each other. And Kai doesn’t know how to exist in this new territory.
“I have to go.” He tries to untangle himself from Rykov’s heavy limbs and from the sheets that smell like them both.
Rykov just holds him tighter. Not forceful, just firm. Inevitable.
He lifts his head, dark eyes serious in the morning light. “Vancouver,” he says. Not a question. A statement of fact. “Next Friday. We have a game there. You’ll be there too. I checked the schedule. And then Chicago.”
The implication is staggering. This is the start of something. An acknowledgment that there will be a next time. And a time after that.
A plan. A future.
Kai’s throat goes dry. He swallows hard, a nervous, jerky movement. The smart thing— the safe thing—would be to make a joke. To deflect. To say something cutting that pushes Rykov away and reestablishes the safe distance between them.
He doesn’t.
“Okay,” he whispers.
“Okay,” Rykov repeats, like he’s confirming he heard right. Like he can’t quite believe Kai agreed.
They lie there in the morning light, Kai’s head on Rykov’s chest, listening to his heartbeat. Steady. Reliable.
For the first time since Liam died, Kai thinks maybe he can survive this. Maybe the grief won’t destroy him. Maybe he’s not completely alone.
Maybe—and this is the most terrifying thought of all—maybe he doesn’t have to be.