Page 39 of Cross Check
Kieran's arms tightened. His breath was warm against my neck. He didn't speak. He held me the way he held his crease, patient and absolute, the stillness of a man whose entire career was built on absorbing impact.
I stood in the containment of his body and let the rage burn. It was different from the wall-punching—that had been despair, the thrashing of a man drowning. This was focused. This was the anger of a man who finally had something to protect, and the strength to protect it. And the understanding that the person who'd tried to destroy him was losing.
"The testimony is next week," I said. "I'm going to New York, and I'm going to sit in a room with the investigators, and I'm going to tell them every single thing I know about Jake Petrov. Every carpool. Every dinner. Every conversation where he mentioned hisoperationin language I was too trusting to decode. And when I'm done, they're going to have enough to end this."
"Yes," Kieran said. "They are."
"And then I'm going to come home."
His arms tightened one more time. "Home," he repeated.
I turned in his arms and buried my face in his neck. He smelled like ice and clean sweat and the cedar-scented laundry detergent he'd used since before I arrived. The smell had become, without either of us choosing it, the smell of safety.
The testimony took two days.
Sarah flew with me. We stayed in a hotel near the league offices in Midtown, and I spent eight hours in a conference room with four investigators, a court reporter, and a stack of documents three inches thick. I told them everything. The carpools. The dinners. The daughter's first steps in the parking lot. The timing of Petrov's transactions mapped against my legal bets. The language he'd used, casual and offhand, the vocabulary of a man who was always building something and letting you believe it was friendship.
The investigators listened. They asked questions. They showed me documents I hadn't seen, communications between Petrov and his handler that referenced me by my jersey number instead of my name, as if reducing me to a digit made the betrayal less personal.
On the second day, the lead investigator, a woman named Zhou with reading glasses and the demeanor of someone who'd heard every lie in the world and had developed an allergy to all of them, looked at me across the table. "Mr. Varis, based on the evidence we've reviewed and your testimony today, we plan to recommend that the investigation be resolved in your favor."
I stared at her. The conference room was very quiet. The court reporter's fingers hovered over her keyboard.
"Resolved," I repeated.
"Full clearance. Formal exoneration. We'll be recommending the league issue a public statement confirming that you were not involved in any gambling activity, legal or otherwise, beyond the permitted recreational wagers documented in your records."
Sarah's hand found my knee under the table and squeezed.
I said, "Thank you." The words were steady. My hands were not.
Kieran picked me up at O'Hare on Friday evening. He was standing outside the arrivals terminal, leaning against his car, his coat collar turned up against the December wind. He looked like a man waiting for someone important.
I walked through the automatic doors and he straightened. His eyes found me immediately, the goalie's tracking, the locked-on focus that had been aimed at me since the first night I stood in his doorway with a duffel bag.
I crossed the sidewalk and stood in front of him. The airport noise swirled around us, taxis honking and announcements echoing.
"They believed me," I said.
The words came out as a whisper. Not because I was trying to be quiet, but because the emotion behind them was too large for volume.
Kieran pulled me against his chest. Right there on the sidewalk, in front of the taxis and the travelers and anyone who might be watching. He held me the way he'd held me in the kitchen, full containment, and I pressed my face into his coat and breathed.
"They believed me," I said again, muffled.
"Yeah," he said. His voice was rough. "They did."
We stood on the curb at O'Hare for a long time, holding each other, while the December wind cut through our coats and the world went on around us—and, for the first time in fourteen months, the weight on my chest lifted enough to let me breathe.
19
KIERAN
The playoff-clinching game was against St. Louis, three months after Nico's testimony. The league still hadn't officially made the announcement. Their enforcer, Ryan Thompson, had decided that Nico Varis was his personal project for the evening.
I noticed it during warm-ups. Thompson was skating lazy circles in the neutral zone, but his eyes kept tracking to our end, specifically, to number forty-seven taking shots on Abbott's empty net. The way Thompson watched Nico wasn't the analytical assessment of a player studying an opponent. It was the locked-on attention of a man who'd come to the rink with a plan.
The puck dropped and the game started. St. Louis came out physical, as expected. They were fighting for their playoff lives, and desperation made teams dangerous. I settled into my crease and focused on what I could control—angles, positioning, the sixty-by-forty rectangle of ice that was mine to defend.
