Epilogue
Aleks
People think getting drafted changes your life overnight. They don’t realize the grind stays the same. The ghosts stay the same. The hunger stays the same. The only thing that changes is the amount of money people are willing to throw at your destruction.
Faulker ended up beside me on the roster. Same locker room. Same ice. Same infuriatingly earnest attempts to “help me communicate my feelings,” which I shut down every time. He pretends he’s not my friend. I pretend I don’t need one. We’re both liars.
And Costello— Yeah. He’s not on a rival team anymore, like back in college. He owns the Bears. The entire organization. The building. The media rights. The ridiculous luxury gym our team trains in.
He was rich in college. He’s something else now.
I didn’t know he’d end up owning the team when we were twenty and stupid.
Hell, back in college, when adrenaline, vodka, and bad decisions ended with me, him, and Drew in a bed we definitely weren’t supposed to be in.
No swords crossing. No romance. Just bodies.
Pressure release. Something we never repeated, never spoke of again unless it was to mock each other.
He and Drew became something real. Later, they added Cody Warren. Now the three of them run around living a lifestyle only trust funds and emotional intelligence can buy. Good for them. I don’t want what they have. I don’t want anything that can be ruined by loss.
I have hockey. And I have my brother.
He’s still in Russia, still technically serving because nobody gets out of a six-year war cleanly. Still stuck in the institution he joined at eighteen to save us from our father. But Costello helped. Not the player version. The owner version.
People with money that old, with networks that wide, can move mountains the rest of us just bleed on.
He used a chain of favors and influence to get my brother reassigned into a “training and logistics support role.” Safer.
Cleaner. Off the front. Off the border. The kind of position you only get when someone with obscene power decides you should live.
My brother sends updates now. A call every week. A photo sometimes. He started taking distance-learning courses—English, communications, international media—because Costello told him, “When you’re ready to leave, you have a job waiting. No interviews. No bullshit. I take care of my people.”
That’s Costello’s way of saying he sees me as one of his. He’d deny it, of course. He’s as emotionally evasive as I am.
My job is simple. Skate. Hit. Win. Protect. Send money home. Stay alive.
Everything else is noise.
Until the elevator.
The day before Thanksgiving. Bridgeview Hotel. I’m sore from a bar fight I shouldn’t have been in, stepping into an elevator that smells too clean, but with just a spritz of perfume that costs hundreds if not thousands.
Sofie Fairfax.
All polish, poise, precision. The kind of woman who carries money like oxygen. The kind who should annoy me on principle.
She glances at my bruises and doesn’t look impressed. Or intimidated. Or interested. Just observant. “Rough night, Killer?”
I give her something filthy back because I want to see her flinch.
She doesn’t. She fires right back, voice sharp enough to slice between my ribs. Zero fear. Zero hesitation. Zero indulgence.
Thirty seconds. A few insults. A spark I don’t have the bandwidth to examine.
She exits into a sleek black car without looking at me again.
Good.
I don’t do complications. I don’t do interest. I don’t do people who get under my skin.
Except— I replay her voice. “As if.”
And something shifts inside me. Not attraction. Not curiosity. Recognition. She’s the kind of woman who can disrupt the things I keep nailed down.
This story is told because of her, but before the impact, before the collision, before I realize she’s the first person in years who doesn’t treat me like a weapon or a warning.
Just a man she refuses to be impressed by. I told myself I’d forget her.
I won’t. The ice is steady. My purpose is fixed. My world is small by design. But Sofie Fairfax? She’s going to be the one to breach the perimeter. Whether either of us wants it or not.