The flight to New York is long and quiet. I sleep only in fragments. When I wake, I expect to see snow out the window. Instead, I see ocean. I press my forehead against the cold glass. Mikhail would’ve made some sarcastic comment about airplane food. He would’ve laughed at how stiff the seats are. He would’ve stolen my dessert just to see me threaten murder.
I close my eyes. Don’t think. Just breathe.
The plane lands. JFK smells like coffee, sweat, and too many people trying to get somewhere. I step into the terminal and feel the first real breath of freedom in my chest. Not peace. Not hope. Just possibility.
I take a shuttle to campus. Yale rises like something out of a movie. Stone buildings. Arched windows. Lawns that look like they’ve never experienced winter. Students walk around wearing backpacks that cost more than my rent back home. My throat tightens. Not with fear. With calculation.
This is another world. Another cage. Except this one is mine to break.
The hockey facility is beautiful. Too beautiful. I push the door open and breathe in the familiar sting of cold air. Everything else might be foreign. But the rink? The rink understands me.
The coach meets me outside his office. “Kilovac?”
“Yes.”
He shakes my hand. “We’re glad you’re here. We saw your tape. You hit like you’re trying to break the ice.”
I shrug. “Sometimes I am.”
He laughs. “We’ll channel that.”
I nod, but my mind is drifting. Back to Moscow. Back to the boards. Back to the rink where someone finally hit back.
That first practice at Yale is brutal. College boys skate differently—faster, harder, angrier. But anger does not intimidate me. I grew up with it. I hold my own. Then I dominate.
I skate until the world narrows to cold and breath and pain.
I check a senior forward so hard his helmet pops up. He laughs as he gets back up. “You’re a monster.”
Good. Let them think that. Let them think I’m all muscle and bone and fury. It’s better than the truth. Better than the ache under my ribs when I finish drills and glance toward the boards like I expect someone else to be watching.
Someone who isn’t here. Someone who will never be again.
That night, I lie in my dorm room staring at the ceiling.
No, Mikhail, dragging me to late-night skates. No Moscow cold biting through the windows. No girls whispering secrets at me. No father pounding on the door. No brother pacing the apartment, worried sick. Just quiet. And it is awful.
Freedom isn’t the release people think it is. It is space wide enough for ghosts to stretch out.
I reach for my headphones because silence is too loud. I put on music—something heavy, something with a beat that feels like an engine in my chest—and let it drown out the things I don’t want to remember.
Mikhail saying, “Hit me harder.” Mikhail saying, “I envy you.” Mikhail turning away the last time. I close my eyes and force myself not to think.
Don’t feel. Don’t break. Just move forward.
That becomes my mantra. Forward is survival. Backward is quicksand. Tomorrow, I skate. Tomorrow, I fight for a spot. Tomorrow, I keep moving.
Tonight, I lie awake in a foreign room with a foreign ceiling and tell myself something I don’t believe yet: You got out. You are free.
But freedom without the people who made you is just another kind of loneliness. And I’ve never been good at loneliness. I’m just good at pretending it doesn’t hurt
Chapter Eleven
The Message
The first friendI make at Yale is German. I don’t mean in a casual way. I mean he’s literally fresh off a plane from Düsseldorf and looks like he’s been personally wronged by American air quality.
I’m sitting on the steps outside the athletic building when he stomps across the quad, muttering angrily in German at a map that clearly offended him.
