Page 44 of Cross Check
The name was Sarah Kessler. Nico's lawyer.
"Kieran," she said. "Is Nico there?"
"He's in the shower. Is everything—"
"It's over." Her voice was controlled but I could hear the tremor beneath it, the vibration of a woman who'd spent fourteen months fighting a war and had just received word of victory. "The league is issuing a formal statement this afternoon. Full clearance. Complete exoneration. Nico Varis wasnot involved in any illegal gambling activity. The investigation is closed."
I set the mug down on the counter. The ceramic clicked against the marble, a small sound that seemed enormous in the quiet kitchen.
"The statement will go public at 4 PM Eastern," Sarah continued. "I wanted Nico to hear it from me first. Can you—"
"I'll tell him." I ended the call. I stood at the counter and listened to Nico humming in the shower and felt Sarah's words land in my chest.
The water turned off. I heard his footsteps in the hallway, then he appeared in the kitchen doorway, toweling his hair, wearing my sweatpants—the grey ones, which were too long for him, the cuffs pooling around his ankles. He'd stopped wearing his own clothes at home weeks ago.
He saw my face and stopped.
"What?" he said. The towel went still. His body language shifted instantaneously, the hypervigilance kicking in, survival instinct activating, every defense snapping to attention. "What happened?"
"Sarah called."
His face went white.
"It's over," I said. "You'll be officially cleared this afternoon. Full exoneration."
He stared at me. The towel dropped from his hands and hit the floor.
For a long moment, nothing happened. He stood in the doorway, barefoot, wearing my sweatpants, his hair dripping water onto his shoulders, and stared at me with an expression I'd never seen, not in the guest room, not in Detroit, not in the training room after the fight. Relief, but more than that. It contained relief the way an ocean contains a wave, as a fraction of something much, much larger.
Then the anger came.
"Fourteen months." His voice was low. Quiet. The kind of quiet that precedes an explosion. "Fourteen months of being a criminal. Fourteen months of people deciding I was guilty because someone told them to. Fourteen months of losing my team, my agent, my father, my apartment, my reputation, my—"
His voice cracked. He turned away from me, both hands gripping the doorframe, his knuckles white. His shoulders were shaking. Not tears—rage. The focused, white-hot fury of a man who'd been too busy surviving to grieve what had been stolen from him.
"I cooperated," he said, his voice raw. "I did everything they asked. Every document, every interview, every fucking thing, and it took fourteen months for someone to look at the evidence and sayhe didn't do it.Fourteen months of being the Snake."
I crossed the kitchen and put my hands on his shoulders. He was vibrating under my palms, the contained energy of a man whose anger had nowhere safe to go.
"You're allowed to be angry," I said.
"I'm so fucking angry, Kieran." He turned. His eyes were bright and fierce and his jaw was locked and his hands were shaking and he looked like the most beautiful, dangerous thing I'd ever seen. "I'm angry that Petrov did this. I'm angry that the league let him. I'm angry at every person who read Brue's articles and decided I was guilty without, without—"
He couldn't finish. I pulled him against me. He resisted for half a second, the instinct to push away, to handle it alone, to maintain the armor that had kept him alive through all this. Then his hands fisted in my shirt and he pressed his face into my shoulder and let himself feel it.
Not the relief. That would come later, in the quiet moments, in the gradual easing of a tension he'd carried so long he'd forgotten it wasn't part of his body. Right now, what he neededto feel was the rage. The grief. The fourteen months of his life that Petrov had taken and the league had enabled and the world had watched, and the fury of a man who'd been vindicated and was just now realizing how much the vindication had cost.
I held him in the kitchen, our kitchen, with the mugs in their row and the kettle cooling and the morning light on the counter, and let him shake.
The whole team watched the four-o’clock presser in the room after practice.
Theo reached Nico first, which surprised no one. The hug was bone-crushing and accompanied by a stream of words that were mostly incoherent, something about justice and karma and "I told you so" repeated with escalating volume. Hayes was next, extending a handshake that turned into a one-armed embrace that he pretended was accidental. Volkov kissed both of Nico's cheeks and then crossed himself.
Bishop approached last. He stood in front of Nico, arms crossed, expression evaluating.
"Glad you're not dirty," he said.
Nico's mouth twitched. "Thanks, Bishop."
