Page 17 of Cross Check
Before either of us could say more, footsteps echoed down the corridor. Luca rounded the corner, gym bag slung over one shoulder, his expression showing me he was filing everything away.
His gaze swept over us, the proximity, the charged silence, the way neither of us had moved apart.
"Saw the circus outside," he said. "Everyone good?"
"Fine," I said.
Luca looked at Nico. Then back at me. The look lasted half a second too long, the captain's assessment, the one that absorbed everything and stored it for future use.
I walked toward the locker room and tried not to think about the fact that I'd just publicly declared Nico Varis my teammate on camera, in front of a dozen reporters. The look on Nico's face when I'd done it was going to live behind my ribs for a very long time.
8
NICO
The article rewired the locker room.
Not immediately. The shift took two days. The first day after Brue's piece, the team carried on with the same cool distance they'd maintained since my arrival. But the story had injected something new into the air. The whispers weren't justhe's a cheateranymore. Now they includedand Walsh is protecting him.The dynamics had changed, and the guys who'd been content to ignore me were now forced to have an opinion.
Practice on the second day was where it surfaced.
Reeves ran a full-contact scrimmage, first team versus second, helmets on, game intensity. I was skating with Theo and Volkov on the second unit. The drill should have been competitive but controlled.
It wasn't.
Morrison caught me with an elbow during a board battle in the first shift. Not flagrant, subtle enough that it could pass asincidental—a shoulder that slid up into my jaw. My teeth clicked together hard enough to taste copper.
"Stay in the lane, Varis," he said, skating away.
Two shifts later, Garrett drove me into the boards from behind during a puck-retrieval drill. The hit was late by a full second, the puck was already gone, and the force of it compressed my ribs against the dasher. I felt something grind between my ribs.
"Keep your head up, kid," Garrett called, already turning away.
Bishop was last. During a neutral-zone transition drill, he lined me up with the patience of a man setting a trap. I saw it coming. I always saw it coming, but the drill required me to carry the puck through the center lane, and Bishop occupied the center lane the way a glacier occupies a valley. Immovable and inevitable.
The hit drove the air from my lungs. I went down on one knee, my stick clattering. My vision white-edged for a second before it cleared.
"That's hockey," Bishop said, standing over me. "Welcome to Chicago."
Reeves blew the whistle for the next drill. Nobody said a word.
I finished practice. I showered. I sat in my stall and stared at the tile floor while the locker room emptied around me.
Kieran found me there. He'd seen all of it from the crease. I knew because I'd caught his expression after Bishop's hit, the way his blocker had tightened on his stick. He didn't say anything now. He just waited by the door until I stood up, and we walked to the car in silence.
The apartment was quiet in the wrong way.
The familiar kind of quiet—the tea kettle, the hum of the fridge, the sound of Kieran reading in the other room—had been replaced by a silence that pressed against my eardrums. Everything in me was vibrating at a frequency I couldn't control.
I went to the guest room and closed the door.
The bed was pristine. The blanket was on the floor. My duffel sat in the corner, still half-packed. Why bother unpacking when this was temporary? Everything in my life was temporary. Every team, every city, every person who saidI believe youbefore the cost of believing me became too high.
I sank onto the floor, back against the wall. My hands were shaking. My ribs ached from Garrett's hit. My jaw throbbed from Morrison's elbow. The physical pain was simple. I understood it, could map it, could tell you exactly which nerve was firing and why. It was the other pain that I couldn't manage. The one that lived behind my ribs and had been building since I opened my phone at 6:47 AM two days ago and watched Jerry Brue try to end me with a keyboard.
I'd done everything right. I'd cooperated. I'd kept my head down. I'd played my ass off for a team that didn't want me, in a city that hadn't asked for me, under the gaze of a man I was starting to fall for, who would eventually realize that standing next to the fire only got you burned.
No one had even asked if I did it. Not my teammates in Minnesota, not my agent, not the league investigators with their subpoenas and their careful language. They'd looked at the evidence Petrov had planted and decided that proximity to guilt was the same thing as guilt itself.
