Prologue
Russia never really leaves you.
People think it is the language. The snow. The way vodka burns clean on the way down. But that is not it. Russia stays in the bones. In the reflexes. In the part of you that learns early to take a hit and never show pain.
Five thousand miles from Moscow, sitting in an Ivy League dining hall with eggs that taste like cardboard, and I still feel the cold of that rink under my skin. The first one. The real one. The one where everything I became started.
There isn't an exact moment I recall when I fell in love with the ice.
I just know it was the only place I ever felt steady.
At home, things cracked. Broke. Shattered.
On the ice, nothing did. Out there, rules made sense.
You fall, you get up. You get hit, you hit back harder.
You push until the pain turns into strength and the strength becomes the only thing you trust.
Once, I thought I got lucky. That someone like me did not belong in those elite halls with their marble floors and children of diplomats and oligarchs strolling around like they owned God. I thought I was the anomaly. The mistake. The stray dog who wandered into the wrong house.
But the truth is, I earned every inch of that ice. Every bruise. Every rivalry. Every secret. Every friend I should not have had. Every girl who pretended not to know my name at school and whispered it into my shoulder hours later.
And the one boy who turned into a brother. The one who did not make it out.
Everyone has a moment that defines them.
They do not always know it when it happens.
Mine came at fourteen, on a morning when I skated onto a frozen sheet long before the sun rose.
I remember the cold. The sound of my blades.
The ache in my legs. And him. Always him.
Mikhail Volkov. Perfect hair. Perfect family. Perfect cage he was born into.
We collided hard enough to shake the boards. Then everything after that collided with me. His world. My world. All the world's adults hide from kids until it is too late.
Sometimes people ask me why I play the way I do.
Why I hit like something inside me is starving.
Why I skate like I am racing against ghosts.
I do not answer them. I just think of that message on my phone in the Yale dining hall.
Four words that knocked the air out of my lungs in a way no check ever did.
Mikhail is gone. Training accident.
I stared at the screen until the letters blurred. Then I finished breakfast, because grief does not stop hunger, and habit does not break just because a part of you does.
I do not tell anyone about him. Not because I am afraid, but because some stories are not meant to be shared. Some scars are not meant to be explained.
But if I am going to tell any story, it starts where we collided. On the ice. In the cold. In the place where boys become something harder than boys should ever have to be.
So here it is. The beginning. Before America. Before Yale. Before the draft, the Bears, and the nights I drank until I forgot which country I was in.
This is the part of me no one knows. The part I built out of blood and ice. The part I finally stop running from.