26. April 3, Sunday #3
Yesterday at the clinic, he’d watched Zoey with the kids, with Jayden, and felt something he didn’t have words for.
The way she’d crouched to fix a loose shin pad and made the kid laugh through her nerves.
The way Jayden’s face lit up after his sloppy little goal and immediately looked for them both—her first, then him—to see if they’d seen it too.
Before they left, she’d threaded her fingers through his and said, “I need to talk to you later,” eyes bright in that way that meant big, scary, good things.
He’d been pretty sure he knew.
Her MAPP classes were done. Her foster-parent license was moving from soon to very soon. Maybe she wanted to talk about what any placement would mean for them. Maybe she wanted to wrap that into a conversation about what the hell they even were.
Cowardly, he hadn’t pushed.
He knew it would shift what they had, and he didn’t have the bandwidth for another curveball.
He hadn’t even considered that her timeline might be moving faster than he’d realized.
Then, Mitch called and dragged him into a four-hour spiral about Zoey and the mess he’d made of his life.
What if she was seeing someone? What if he’d blown it? What if she’d realized she could do better?
Ilya spent the evening on Mitch’s worn leather couch, listening to him lament his own bad decisions, monitoring his alcohol intake the night before a game, staring at a wedding photo from a decade ago, and calling himself every insult he knew in English, Ukrainian, and Russian.
He hadn’t told Mitch the truth. He couldn’t. Not without talking to Zoey first.
And he hadn’t been able to touch base with Zoey this morning either, so not only had she not gotten her talk, she also didn’t know to expect Mitch to do something jarring; some impulsive, public gesture dressed up as romance.
Now Christian was on his way to a hospital, and the ugly math Ilya’s brain spit out was simple and savage.
While he’d been sneaking around playing house with his best friend’s ex, cracks had been forming in places he was supposed to be watching. Guarding. Protecting.
As captain, it wasn’t enough to show up on game nights and block shots. It meant being the guy who saw it coming. The one who noticed when a teammate’s eyes weren’t tracking, when a sister’s texts sounded different, when a dog stopped eating.
He’d told Christian to go in. Had given him Mitch’s words in his own voice and watched determination flash in the kid like Ilya’s approval was oxygen.
Any locked-in player should have seen that hit coming and braced. Christian hadn’t. That wasn’t just bad luck or one hard check. That was a brain someplace else.
And Ilya had seen it. In warmups. On the bench. In the hallway before the third period. He clocked it and done too little.
The ref’s whistle trilled, too loud. Linesmen skated to center. The next line was already on the ice.
Down the bench, guys turned toward him the way they always did when shit went sideways. Expectant. Trusting. Waiting for their center of gravity to dictate the spin.
Ilya stood, leaving his gloves on the bench, and pinched the webbing between his thumb and hand so hard it hurt. His chest ached with more than exertion.
He knew, somewhere in the rational part of his brain, that one smile from Zoey hadn’t sent Christian into the boards.
He knew Christian’s life was complicated and hockey was violent and sometimes horrible things happened at full speed no matter how many men tried to control the angles.
He knew all of that.
It didn’t matter. Because being the glue meant you didn’t get to look away. Not for a shift. Not for a game. Not even for a love so bright it made the rest of the world blur at the edges.
Especially not for that.
If loving people meant missing the thing that could break them, then maybe he didn’t deserve that luxury.
Not with the C stitched above his heart.
Not when one moment of incomplete attention had ended with a stretcher on the ice.
He’d let himself believe he could be captain and still build something secret and soft on the side.
That he could hold the room together, manage Mitch, protect Zoey’s future, watch out for Kira in between, rescue the damn dog, and somehow become the kind of man who deserved to stand in the doorway of a life with her and any future kids.
Nights like this made one thing painfully clear. He couldn’t. Something had to go. And every sign pointed to the same unbearable answer.
Zoey.
The exquisite, brown-eyed woman who made his heart sing. The woman walking toward a family now, not in some safe, distant someday. The woman who had already proven once that she was done waiting around for a man to decide whether he could meet her there.
She deserved someone present. Someone steady. Someone who didn’t miss the warning signs because he was too busy pretending he could have everything. Someone who didn’t put her goals of children and family in jeopardy.
The puck dropped on the ice.
Ilya blinked and tried to force his attention back to the game, the roar of the crowd swelling back into something like sound.
And for the first time in his career, he wasn’t sure he trusted himself to lead anyone anywhere.