“You hit me like you wanted to make an example out of me,” Alexei continued, jaw tightening. “Like I wasn’t a guy with a career and a family and a brain inside that helmet. You hit me like I was a lesson.”
Nate swallowed. He could see it now the way he hadn’t allowed himself to then. The angle. The speed. The split second where he could have eased off and chose not to.
“I was angry,” Nate said.
“At me?”
“No.”
“Then what the hell did I do to deserve that?”
The word burned in Nate’s throat, but he forced it out anyway. “Nothing.”
Alexei’s eyes sharpened at that. The anger didn’t disappear, but it shifted from defense to assessment.
“You had your head down,” Nate added, because honesty didn’t mean erasing context. “But I still had time to pull up. I saw you. I decided to drive through.”
The hallway between them felt narrower.
“You know what it’s like,” Alexei continued, voice lower now but more dangerous for it, “to wake up in a hospital and not remember the hit? To have someone show you the replay on a phone and realize your body just folded like that? To heardoctors talk about long-term cognitive risk before you’ve even signed your second contract?”
Nate didn’t interrupt.
“My mother flew in from fuckingMoscow,”Alexei said. “She thought I was dying.”
There was the human cost. It couldn't be measured in highlight reels or suspension announcements.
Mothers.
Nate’s chest tightened in a way no check ever had. “I’m sorry,” he said, and it was stripped of ego. “Not for the suspension. Not for the headlines. For doing what I did, and for how it’s affected you.”
Alexei searched Nate’s face like he was trying to locate the PR motive.
“You trying to get back in the League?” he asked.
“I’m trying to figure out if I deserve to.”
That wasn’t the answer Alexei expected. It flickered across his expression before he masked it. “You think showing up here fixes it?”
“I know it doesn’t,” Nate admitted. “But I think not showing up makes it worse.”
That hung between them. Nate exhaled slowly, hands loose at his sides instead of clenched. He didn’t step forward but he didn’t back off, either.
“I built a reputation on being the guy nobody wanted to skate against,” he said. “I told myself that was toughness. But there’sa difference between finishing a check and trying to end a shift with a body on a stretcher.”
Alexei’s jaw flexed. “You deliberately hurt me.”
“Yes.” The admission landed like a puck against glass. “I wasn’t thinking about you,” Nate continued. “I was thinking about making a statement. About not being the guy people pushed around. About everything except the fact that you’re a rookie who deserved a clean shot.”
The silence thickened.
“I don’t want to be that guy,” Nate finished. “The one people survive.”
The hallway clock ticked faintly from somewhere inside the apartment. Alexei leaned back against the doorframe, studying him longer this time.
“You always play on that edge?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
