He held my gaze for another beat. Something moved between us—not the charge of the 3 AM conversations or him draping a blanket over my shoulders. Something quieter.
"Good," he said, going back to his tea.
I stared at the article on my phone. Brue had called the Storm's decision to trade for me a "calculated risk." He wasn't wrong. But the calculation had changed. I wasn't just a risk to the organization anymore.
I was a risk to Kieran.
And that terrified me more than any investigation ever had.
11
KIERAN
The road trip was a four-game swing through the Eastern Conference. Detroit, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia. Four cities in eight days, team buses and hotel rooms and the exhaustion that comes from playing hockey in a different time zone every other night. Management held firm on the rooming arrangement—Walsh and Varis, same room, every hotel.
Neither of us pretended to mind anymore.
Detroit was first. The game was physical from the opening faceoff. They played a grinding, old-school style that made every shift feel like running through sand. I stopped thirty-one shots, including a breakaway in the third that required a pad stack I'd feel in my hip for a week. The puck hit my left pad at the exact angle where the joint had been grinding all season, and I felt the impact radiate through my pelvis like a tuning fork.
Nico played well. He made two assists, both to Theo, both requiring the kind of spatial vision that scouts called "elite anticipation" and I called "seeing the future." But late in thethird, a Detroit defenseman caught him along the boards with a hit that drove his shoulder into the glass. The contact was clean but the angle was wrong. Nico's arm was trapped between his body and the dasher, and the force compressed the joint in a direction shoulders weren't designed to go.
He stayed on the ice. He finished the shift. He played two more after that.
But walking back to the hotel room, I saw the micro-adjustment, the way he held his left arm close to his ribs, the guard in his posture that he thought he was hiding. A subtle thing. A thing most people wouldn't notice.
I wasn't most people. I'd spent eleven years reading bodies for the smallest tells.
The hotel room was a standard box, two queen beds, a desk, a view of the Renaissance Center and the black expanse of the Detroit River. The radiator ticked. Down the hall, someone's music thumped through the walls, the guys who'd gone out to celebrate the win.
Nico sat on the edge of his bed, strapping an ice pack to his shoulder with the compression wrap Declan had sent along for exactly this purpose. His T-shirt was pulled down over one shoulder, exposing the deltoid. The bruise was already blooming, a deep, angry purple spreading across the muscle.
"How bad?" I asked from the desk, where I was reviewing my save footage on my phone. Or pretending to.
"Fine."
"Nico."
He looked up. The way I used his name still changed the space between us somehow. I'd noticed it first in the kitchen, and the effect hadn't faded. If anything, it had gotten stronger.
"It's a bruise," he said. "The ice will handle it."
"Let me see."
He hesitated. Not modesty—hockey players lost that in the first year of juniors, changing in rooms with forty guys and communal showers. This was something else. The proximity between us. Somewhere between the tea and sitting on the floor together and the blanket I'd draped over his sleeping body, the space between us had become charged. Every accidental brush of elbows at the counter, every moment of eye contact held a beat too long, it all lived in that space now. We both felt the weight of that shrinking further now.
He pulled the compress away and shifted the collar of his shirt. The bruise was worse than I'd expected, spreading from his deltoid down toward his bicep, the center almost black.
I crossed the room and sat on the edge of his bed. Close enough to see the texture of the bruise, the heat rising from the swollen skin.
"That's more than a bruise," I said. My voice had dropped without my permission.
"It's not separated. I know what a separation feels like."
"You've had one?"
"Juniors. Saginaw. A kid didn't like that I scored on him, so he put me into the boards from behind." The corner of Nico's mouth twitched. "I came back two weeks later and scored on him again."
"Petty."
