one
brody
SIX MONTHS AGO – BARCELONA
There areabout a hundred reasons why I shouldn’t be here now, and most of them are stuffed in my backpack.
To start, my hockey team’s PR department would have a collective aneurysm if they knew where I was—or what I was about to do. Secondly, I’m carrying enough cash to buy a luxury car or fund a small criminal enterprise. And thirdly, I hate crowds. But here I am, drowning in a sea of tourists on La Rambla in Barcelona, and I’ve got nobody to blame but myself.
Well, myself and my father, but we’ll get to that disaster in a minute.
The late-afternoon sun beats down on the tree-lined promenade, turning everything gold and hazy—very picturesque, veryInsta-worthy, and very much wasted on me right now. Palm trees tower overhead, their fronds rustling in the Mediterranean breeze that carries the smell of salt water mixed with roasting chestnuts and something sweet—likely from those sugar-dusted pastries the vendors are hawking from carts. And if I were here for anything close to resembling a vacation, I’d be soaking it in. As it is?—
My phone buzzes in my pocket for what has to be the thirtieth time in the last hour. At this point, I don’t need to check it to know who it is.
Dad.
Again.
I pull the brim of my baseball cap lower and keep my head down as I weave through the chaos, shouldering past flower stalls exploding with roses the size of my fist—reds, yellows, pinks so bright they hurt to look at. A guitarist sits on a folding chair near a café, his fingers moving over the strings with the kind of easy confidence that says he’s never had to bail his father out of a gambling debt.
Must be nice.
I break through the crowd and keep walking, leaving the square behind me.
Me, on the other hand, I’m here because my father gambled away fifty thousand dollars he doesn’t have—again—and now he owes it to people who don’t exactly accept IOUs or sad stories about “next time, I swear.” I’m here to bail him out with cash I can’t afford to give, cash that’s currently sitting in my backpack like a ticking time bomb. To clean up his mess, make sure no one finds out, and get him on a plane home before the press catches wind of any of this.
Because if they do? If one single journalist gets a whiff that Brody Kane’s father is a gambling addict who just went on a three-day losing streak at an underground poker game in Spain?
Career over. Image shattered. Contract renewal? Might as well frame it and hang it on the wall next to my childhood participation trophies.
So yeah. No stopping to smell the roses.
My phone buzzes again—because apparently the obvious thing to do when you’re waiting to be bailed out from a potentialknee-capping is to send thirty-seven text messages back-to-back—and this time I yank it out just to make it stop.
Dad
Where are you? The guy’s getting impatient. Brody, PLEASE. I need you.
The screen is too bright in the sunlight, making me squint, a bead of sweat trickling down my back in the Barcelona sun.
You always need me, Dad. That’s kind of your brand.
I swipe back to my map. Almost there. The meeting point is ten minutes away—some shady back-alley casino tucked into the Gothic Quarter, where my father’s been hemorrhaging money like it’s an Olympic sport and he’s going for gold. I just need to get there, pay off whoever needs paying, pour my father into a taxi, and vanish before anyone recognizes me.
I set out to do just that, taking one last glance at the picturesque square before starting down the next street. So far, so good.
Stay invisible. Keep your head down. Don’t let anyone see you.
It’s basically been my mantra since I turned pro. On the ice? I’m untouchable. Calculated. Controlled. Perfect. My teammates call me—and I’m not kidding, this is actually a thing—“Candy” Kane, because apparently I’m sosweetand polished and media-friendly that I might as well be made of sugar.
I hate that nickname. Every time someone calls me Candy, I die a little inside. At this rate, I’ll be completely dead by playoffs.
But off the ice? I’m a ghost. No scandals. No mess. No cracks in the armor. Because if people see therealme—the guy with the train-wreck father and the hidden dyslexia and the fear that no matter how hard I work, it’ll never be enough—they’ll know the truth.
I’m not made of candy.
I’m just a guy pretending to have it all together while everything falls apart in slow motion.
